Bunker Hill by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

could
think of some excuse that would allow him to be elsewhere.
    On the
other hand, why not invite her to the review—unless that would bring her
husband along with her. The old man was quite a fire-eater. As this and that
plan went through his mind, he found himself losing interest. It had been a
full day; he would think about it tomorrow. He recalled the feel of her naked
body, her lips, her breasts, and slowly a feeling of satisfaction replaced his
sense of loutishness and loss.
    The two
guards at the door of the house where he was quartered regarded him without
curiosity. They were well trained. Had he come in with Mrs. Hallsbury upon his
arm, they would have been equally graven and silent.
    Slowly, he
climbed the stairs to his rooms. It had been a long day, and he was, after all,
forty-five years old. His sitting room was empty. O’Brian should have been
waiting there with warm water and freshly done nightclothes, and his first
impulse was to fling open the door and roar out the bastard’s name. Then he
realized that the house was asleep. Burgoyne and their aides would not bless
him for awakening them at this hour, unless, of course, they were still away, bedded
down in the arms of less fettered Boston ladies.
    His eyes
drifted around the room. The candles had been lit no more than an hour before,
so O’Brian must have been there and then given up like the lazy bastard he was.
He wondered whether Mrs. Hallsbury’s sitting room had this same restrained
elegance that one found among the upper classes in the colonies: the
hand-blocked wallpaper, the simple yet lovely wing chairs that flanked the
fireplace, the oriental rugs, the plain yet beautiful silver that they wrought
so well in America—all of it carefully protected by Sir William’s mania against
looting. At least that—and beyond her sitting room, what? Would she be in bed
with the old man now, warming his cold, ecclesiastical bones?
    He sighed
and went into his bedroom, pulled off his boots, and began to strip himself of
his uniform. He was naked except for his singlet when he heard the door to his
sitting room open and then a light knock on his bedroom door.
    “Come in,
you wretch,” he said, thinking that it was O’Brian.
    It was
Mary O’Brian who opened the door and entered, a
pitcher of warm water in one hand and his freshly laundered nightdress over her
arm. She had washed her hair and set it up high on her head, and she was clad
in a long linen robe that fell to her ankles yet revealed the curves of her
full, womanly figure. There was just the slightest smile upon her lips, and as
earlier in the day, she accepted his nakedness matter-of-factly. She laid the
nightdress upon the bed, poured water into the hand basin, and then dipped a
towel into the water and squeezed it out.
    “Where’s
O’Brian?” Clinton asked her.
    “Sleeping, the lazy pig. Take off the shirt, General, and I’ll be refreshing you.”
    He stared
at her for a long moment, pulled his singlet off over his head, and then stood
by the bedside while she sponged his body with the towel. Then she took a fresh
towel and dried his body, her fingers gently massaging his flesh through the
cloth. He had no thoughts in his mind, indeed no mind at all, only a luxurious
sense of the passion rising inside of him. She finished drying him, then turned down the covers of his bed.
    “Will ye
be wanting a nightdress, me lord?” she asked, a note
of archness creeping into her voice.
    He shook
his head.
    “Then will ye have the left or the right side of the
bed, me lord.”
    “I am no lord, as you damn well know.”
    “In my eyes, me lord.”
    He grinned at her, and she grinned back.
    “Is O’Brian really asleep?”
    “Who the
hell cares! ”
    She
unbelted her robe and slipped it off, a great mountain of a woman, as tall as
Clinton, yet not fat, as he had thought; her breasts high and enormous, her
hips wide and womanly, and quite beautiful, with her dead white skin and her
mountain of red