Revolutionary - part 1 (Patreon)

Part 2 is available here.

White, and then the white thins, and there's supposed to be canvas over my head.

A tent. Morning through duck cloth, a camp table with the lines chalked on it, my own hand reaching for the dispatch, big and certain and mine. That's the load I picked. GENERAL, the menu said, with the little cocked hat beside it, and I put my thumb on the hat sitting on the end of my own bed with the rig snug on my head and the apartment dark around me and the dishwasher still grinding away in the kitchen, and the NovaSphere whited out behind my eyes like it always does, the floor dropping out of the world for half a second, and I waited to come up holding the war.

I come up in water.

Hot water, the kind that takes a beat to land as heat instead of pain. It's around my hips and partway up my back, and there are hands in it that aren't mine, big chapped red hands working a cloth across my shoulders, and a smell of lye and tallow and woodsmoke, and a low fire muttering off to my left, and a woman's voice up above me going on about nits.

It arrives in layers. First the water, where there shouldn't be water. Then the hands. Then my own knees out in front of me under the surface, narrow, smooth, the kneecaps small, and I look at them a while because they're easier than the rest of it. Then the weight on my chest. I feel it before I look, two soft heavy curves that shift and settle when I breathe, the water moving cool against the undersides of them, and when I finally look down there they are, pale and full and tipped with nipples drawn up hard in the heat, and a sound comes out of me that I didn't decide to make.

"Hold your head." The woman's got a fist in my hair, and there's so much of it, long, a heavy wet rope she winds once around her hand to keep her grip, and when she tugs my head forward I feel the pull all across my scalp, a hundred small roots giving at once. The water sheets off my chin. She goes on talking like I've answered her.

The cloth comes down my back in long hard strokes, her knuckles riding my spine through the rag, and where it crosses my shoulder blades the skin lights up too bright, every pass too much at once, like the nerves have been turned up past where they ought to sit. She drags the rag up under one arm and the side of a breast goes with it, pulling, and a thread of feeling runs from the nipple down into my belly and lower, unasked, and I shift in the water and the shifting presses the broad new spread of my backside flat against the staves of the tub, and that's a separate wrongness all its own, the seat of me wide and full and resting on bare wood with nothing in between, a heaviness behind me I can feel as a shape now, that follows a half-beat late when I move.

I get a hand on the rim. The arm that comes up is thin and pale, wrong, and for a second I can't connect it to my own intent. "Wait." High, soft, breaking in the middle, a stranger's voice out of my mouth. "Wait, stop, there's been a mistake, I picked the general, I'm supposed to be General Washington, I'm supposed to be in the field, I'm—"

The slap turns my whole head. Open palm, the arm behind it, heat blooming up the side of my face and into my ear, my eyes ringing and going wet. She has my chin in her fist before I've blinked clear, and when she speaks now it's pitched down under the fire, fast, for me alone.

"You don't say that name. You don't say any name in this house, not the King's and not his, do you hear, there's ears in the wall here would see us both swung for less." Her thumb digs into my cheek. There's a vessel burst in one of her eyes, a red thread laid across the white, and I fix on it because it's the one thing in the room holding still. "You've gone soft in the head at the worst hour a girl could pick to do it. You know your business. You were put in this house for it."

I try to stand anyway. A man's reflex. Put your feet down and end the thing by ending it. I get my weight up off the bottom of the tub and she sets one hand flat on my shoulder and presses me back down like she's fitting a lid onto a pot, no effort in it, no grunt, and I go, because there's nothing in this body strong enough to argue with hers. I'm used to my arms meaning something. I could have moved her across a room without trying. Now there's a slope of soft nothing where the muscle was, and a woman with a bad eye is forcing me to sit in my own bathwater with the heel of one hand.

She goes back to the cloth like none of it happened, which is worse, how she washes past my noise and around it, a kitchen girl gone simple and not worth the trouble of hearing. Neck. Back again. Both arms, lifted by the wrist and let drop. Then she works the rag down my belly, lower, and takes a bunched corner of it between my legs, brisk, the same scrub she gave my knee.

There's nothing there I know. The absence comes first, my whole hand's memory of myself reaching and coming up empty, no weight, no familiar give, just a seam of soft skin and a heat folded into itself. Then the cloth drags forward through it and catches near the top on a small hooded knot of nerves, and a jolt goes straight up the center of me, up the spine and out to the ends of my fingers, and my hips lift an inch off the floor of the tub before I can stop them, water slopping at the rim. She doesn't notice. To her it's one more fold to be cleaned. She does it again, the same place, and the second pass is duller and worse, a deep pull low in my belly, a clenching somewhere inside that I can feel and can't see, and a slickness starts that isn't the bathwater, warmer than it, heavier, and the heat of shame floods up my neck because the body is answering a stranger's hand with want, plain want, and there's not one thing I can do from in here to call it back.

Under all of it I'm still reaching for the door. There's a way out of a session, there always is, a hard pull in the back of the skull, a deliberate clench, like waking yourself out of a dream because you've decided to. I make it. Nothing. I make it again, harder, the exact shape that's dropped me out of a hundred nights in the rig and back onto my own mattress with the headset heavy on my face and the dishwasher still going. It doesn't come. The water stays hot. The hands stay on me. There's no bedroom on the far side of the pull. Just this.

The reek coming up under the lye is the York River at low tide. A town this jumpy, in a fall gone this cold, it's Yorktown in the back half of 1781, and I know who's quartered in the good houses up the hill, and what's dug in along the water, and what's standing off past the capes waiting on a wind that's about to turn against them. I've read every account of this autumn there is. None of it is worth a thing to a girl held down in a washtub who can't go up the back stairs until somebody calls her clean.

When the woman straightens to wring the rag out, the water in front of me goes still, and for a moment it holds an image instead of breaking it, and I look down into it before I can talk myself out of it. A face looks back. Young. Soft-jawed, dark hair plastered flat to it, a red print already coming up on one cheek where her hand caught me. Wet lashes. It isn't my face. It isn't anywhere close. I look at it until she drops the rag back in and it shivers apart, and I'm glad when it goes.

She hauls me up by one arm without warning and I come up streaming, and my feet land somewhere lower and farther forward than I keep expecting, and I grab the edge of the tub before the room can tip me over. The weight of me has moved south and back, into the hips, the seat, a heaviness that swings a half-beat behind me when I shift my balance, and my thighs come together higher than they used to and brush when I stand, so that even still I'm aware of the space between them and the soft press where they meet. Cold takes all of me at once, every wet inch, the nipples drawing up to the point of ache, and I stand there shaking while she comes at me with a length of gray linen and dries me down hard, my back, my legs, a bunched corner shoved up between them that drags over that hooded knot again and makes my knees want to fold, and she never once stops talking.

She drops a shift over my head. The linen catches on skin that hasn't dried and clings down the front of me, settling against the nipples and staying there, light, maddening. Then the stays. She holds them to my front and laces them up the middle and starts to pull, and the whole architecture of me changes under her hands, the soft of my chest pushed up and gathered and set on a shelf of stiffened linen, my waist drawn in and in until the bottom third of my breath has nowhere to go and I'm left taking little sips off the top of my lungs. The petticoat after, tied at the waist, a weight of cloth hanging off the hips that makes me newly aware of how far out the world sits on either side of me now.

And she talks me through it the whole time she's lacing, low, fast, close to my ear, under the noise of the fire, and it lands slow because I'm still half drowned in the body, but it lands.

"You'll find your nerve again before that door at the top or we both hang, so find it. The major. Far end of the gallery. Wrenford." A lace pulled tight. "He carries the whole of it on him. The crossing, the boats, the night, all of it folded in a little book on a cord he wears against his chest, under his shirt, and it does not come off him. A girl with a duster could turn that room over a year and find a deal of nothing." Another pull, and her voice goes flatter, harder. "There's one hour a man sets a thing like that down beside him and forgets to keep his hand on it, and that's the hour he's spent and sleeping with something warm in the bed to keep him that way." She steps back and looks at me, head to foot, pricing me. "You he'll have. That is the whole of why you're in this house and not another."

So there it is, said plain in a washhouse by a woman who'll swing if the wrong ear catches her. Get the major spent and sleeping. Take what he wears against his skin while he sleeps, and read it, and bring the war back to where the books say it went, Cornwallis pinned in this town with the river at his back and no boats to cross it. That's the only door I have left, because the pull is dead and the rig won't hear me, and the door doesn't open until the scene is run all the way to its end. I think I knew it the moment the still water gave me back that young marked face and called it mine.

"Eyes down. Mouth shut." She turns me toward the door by the shoulder, and the turn swings my hips around behind the rest of me, low and late. She pats me on my bottom. "Far end. Go on up, girl."