Those weeks in August were not easy ones for those of us besieged. The rebel blockade deprived the town of victuals. Rations among the Army were reduced to salt-pork, now rank with flies and greening. Hunger was become general in the city, and sickness too. There were few engagements with the enemy at that time — the rebels, we suspected, had little powder and less spirit — so the most numerous deaths were from distempers and disorders.
Sally often came back from the market without meat or vegetable, and we all fell to eating Dr. Trefusis’s diet: biscuits and whatever broth could be won from the bone.
Mrs. Platt’s circumnavigation of her supper table completed, she began to revolve around the parlor, the plates being lain on the mantelpiece or the gaming table. The fewer viands, the more dishes. Dr. Trefusis asked for daily reports on the progress of her table settings.
“Today,” I would tell him heavily, “she ate upon her sewing table.”
“I am impressed with her store of china,” said Dr. Trefusis. “Prodigious. Is it still Canton porcelain?”
“She has passed out of the china, sir,” I informed him. “She has descended to common redware.”
“Ye gods. Humility at last.”
I had little stomach for Dr. Trefusis’s sparkishness. I feared for his life; I despaired that he should ever rise from his bed again; and I could not abide the hunger.
Many in the city were taken with the smallpox, not so much among the soldiery as among the remaining citizens. Red cloths were hung up upon their doors to mark their festering and convalescence. I saw mothers issuing out of doorways behind small coffins, screaming at the pall-bearers to return the dear corpse.
Though it was summer and the leaves heavy on the trees, people went about the streets coughing as if it were the catarrh season. The derelict bodies of the poor were found in abandoned houses, disfigured with disease’s scabs, swaddled in table-clothes and all the refinements of shattered luxury. Society matrons who had fled to the sanctuary of the city when riots had broke out in the countryside now caught their deaths of fever, their eyes ringed with spectacles of corruption, their mouths bearded with sores.
The carts carried their bodies through the streets, finery stained with blood and the exudations of their scabbing.
These unfortunates were buried in silence. General Gage had ordered that no bells were to be rung for funerals, for fear the rebels should know how sickly lay the city. All solemnity, therefore, was silent, the peals muffled; and bodies went unheralded to their final rest; and we shoveled dirt atop the dead and watched their wooden vessels sink beneath the earth without a cry.