The Family Greene by Ann Rinaldi Read Free Book Online

knew I was with child. Oh, I was so anxious to tell Nathanael! He had wanted a child so badly! But I could not tell him. I knew I could not burden him with such knowledge when he was going off to war again.
    "The New England provincial brigades are meeting at Cambridge, Massachusetts," he told me, when home only a few days, "and they're being joined by brigades from middle and southern states. We have to drive the British out of Boston."
    Jacob and Peggy came two days before Nathanael left for Cambridge. I liked Jacob. He was easygoing and paternal, a little like Uncle Greene. But Peggy proved to be as she had been when I helped Nathanael move into his house: sharp around the edges and immediately wanting to establish her superiority over me.
    And she did so in those two days in the only way she could. In a way that left me in tears and acting like a little girl in front of Nathanael before he left.
    I had taken to throwing up in the mornings because of my condition. Bless Nathanael. He was totally ignorant of the ways of women during their confinement time.
    "You must have eaten something strange," he said to me the first morning I threw up into the chamber pot in our room.
    Peggy, of course, with her eagle's eye, knew from the moment she laid eyes upon me that I was in a "child-carrying" way.
    That first day, she pulled me aside. "How far gone are you?" she asked.
    And, "Have you told him yet?"
    And, "You mean you're not going to tell him before he goes away? Well, he has a right to know! Don't you think? Now, you tell him today. Or I'll tell him tomorrow!"
    She wouldn't, I decided. She wouldn't dare interfere with our marriage like that. And every time I looked at her that first day, she returned the look with a significant one of her own.
    And so the second day, after I had thrown up into the chamber pot in our room and was presentable again, Nathanael and I went to the breakfast table as if nothing had happened.
    But he said something to Peggy almost immediately. "You'll have to keep an eye on my wife," he told her. "She's not feeling well. She's been having an upset stomach of late."
    Peggy's fork clattered to her plate. Her eyes went wide. I clenched my fists in my lap. "You mean she hasn't told you, Brother Nathanael?"
    Nathanael was taken aback. "Told me what?"
    "I told her if she didn't tell you today, that I would. She's with child!"
    Now it was Nathanael's turn to be taken aback. He set his mug down carefully and looked at me. "Caty?" he said. "Is it true? Are you with child?"
    I looked up at him and nodded. Tears came to my eyes.
    "And you didn't tell me, love? Someone else had to tell me?"
    I was blinded with tears, as in a snowstorm. I reached for him in my blindness and he put his arms around me and held me. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't want you going off to war and worrying about me."
    He rested his chin on top of my head. "My little Caty, going to be a mother. Come." And he pushed back his chair and lifted me up out of mine, and he took me off, through the hall, and into our own room, which was across the way. And Peggy followed, scolding us both the whole while.
    "Well, you'd better scold her good. And if I'm to take care of her, you'd better tell her she's to mind me. Do you hear me, Brother Nathanael?"
    Without taking his arms from me, Nathanael closed the door of our room with his booted foot.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    W ITHIN DAYS , Rhode Island's General Assembly called an emergency session. They voted to form a Rhode Island army of fifteen hundred men. And they needed a general to lead it.
    They did not pick the natural choice, General Simeon Potter, who was a veteran of the French and Indian War.
    They did not pick James Varnum, captain of the Kentish Guards.
    They picked a lowly private in the Kentish Guards, Private Nathanael Greene.
    Why me?
Nathanael wrote to me from Cambridge.
    Because,
I wrote back,
they know a good man when they see one. Because you are intelligent and you study books. Because you have