Mr. Turner had informed me of the pay per concert, which seemed adequate to my needs; but he had not disclosed that the concert season per se should not be well under way until the fall, when hostilities with the rebels were expected to taper off as both camps settled into siege and winter quarters — or by which season, as everyone buzzed and histled, the Redcoats should have issued forth from the city gates, laid waste to the countryside, dispersed the militia with a proud show of superior weaponry and tactics, reduced the pamphleteers to quivering, and hung high the few sneering Harvardians who had engineered the plot.

The other musicians supplemented their pay through various individual engagements, most of which were arranged by Mr. Turner, he taking some portion of our pay for the privilege of our hire. Through him, a few of the orchestra played at small dances held by officers and Tories, or accompanied suppers with chamber music. At first, having little to recommend me, I was not chosen for these grander occasions; but was equally gratified to be chosen, with two of my fellows, to play a few nights of the week at the Weary Pilgrim, a tavern on Fish Street. We fiddled dances, rounds, and catches, and the soldiers were glad enough of our company. Some would demand songs of their homeland which we did not know; and they would sing them for us, thinking of their beloved moors or the charcoal-pits of their youth, the wolds, the village churches, green with mold, ancient as the kings of legend; and we would oblige them, playing these songs back to them as they drank New England rum and wept for a country far over the sea.

Upon one day, the Negroes in the city were swept up into a general work-party, for which the pay was in no coin but stale dinner. It was our commission to clean the streets, so I spent some time in sweeping gutters, which was a profession too full of monotony and the despair of seeing one’s work undone even as one did it. The defecation of horses clotted my broom.

The day after this Negro sweeping-bee, we were enjoined, such of us as wished employment, to lend our aid to the Army in erecting fortifications; which work I undertook with a fellow violinist from the orchestra — a fellow named Scipio and called Sip, a freeman and a father who spake always kindly to me in our rehearsals and observed my destitution was as great as his own.

The Army offered us rations, which gettings Sip and I could not refuse; and so we repaired to the city gates, where our fiddlers’ fingers took to ruder labor.

Such lowly offices as I had performed for the rebels, I was now commissioned to perform for the King’s Army: the work of mattock, spade, and shovel. ’Twas a curious reversal, and made no less singular by the fact that Bunker Hill, the rebel fortification to which I had lent my sinew some months previous, was now an Army outpost, stormed upon that fateful morning.

Our work-party was peopled entirely by Negroes. As we labored that day, half-naked, in the sun, binding together stakes to enhance the fortifications near the city gates, we heard shouts of alarm above us — followed by the smart crack of volleys — and then the cries of battle; and we who labored regarded the walls and our brethren in consternation.

“Steady, boys,” called our overseer. “Eyes and hands to the work.”

Frowning, we bound the stakes, our knots loose with inattention. Across the saltmarshes of the Neck, the blinds and redoubts, the flanks and faces of the bastions, the gates near us, armed with their anxious picket-guards, the reports of the conflict grew more insistent in their clamor — the rattle of musketry, the calling of commands. Then commenced the thunder of the howitzers.

Sip did not look at me as he spake; but low, he muttered to me, “Jesus God, them rebels crash through those gates, we’s in a sorry state. It’ll go mighty ill with us. They come through them gates, we is standing here tying together twigs without the least weapon. They take this city . . . Don’t bear thinking on. Jesus God. I ain’t going be taken for a slave and sold to the Indies. I got a wife and I got two babies. I ain’t —”

“Back!” cried one of the overseers —“Back, back, back!” Disturbed by the man’s alarum, we looked up from our labor and found a detachment of Redcoats running in formation for the gates. We retreated from our work, leaving our frames half-bound and unmanned.

We huddled in the shadow of one of the half-completed breastworks, crouched in a ditch; and there situated, we watched the light infantry, alert with their danger, pass through to the outer fortifications.

While we stood, Sip muttered to the others, “News. News, boys.”

“What’s news?” asked one.

“News,” said Sip. “From the Sixty-fourth. Hautboy player — what’s they called? Hautboyiste, I reckon. This hautboyiste tells me that General Gage, he asks about whether slaves’ll join the King’s Army, gave the chance. It’s an idea he has. An army of Negroes.”

“When?”

“When he pleases.”

“If he pleases,” said another. “All of them are too affrighted.” He spat and kicked at the spit with his heel.

Sip turned to me, and seeking intelligence, demanded, “Augustus, I hear you dug ditches for the rebs. I hear you dug out Bunker Hill.”

Little did I wish to become an object of disesteem among my new colleagues; and I hastened to say, “The conflict was then in a very different moment, and my circumstances would not allow of —”

“How is they set for food and powder?”

I began to recount that of food, there seemed ample provision, but that they husbanded their powder; in which recollection I was interrupted by a man who said, “You couldn’t serve with them, now. Couldn’t join them. Couldn’t carry arms.”

I allowed I did not carry arms among the rebels, but dug among the artificers.

“Well, the rebels says we can’t carry firelocks with their army. Heard this from a sutler. You hear this?”

“I ain’t heard it,” said Sip.

“Their general gets up here few weeks ago, gets to Cambridge —”

“What general?”

“The rebs’ general. The Virginia slave-driver general.”

“Washington.”

“That general. There’s a proclamation now, no Negroes can bear arms in the reb army. He don’t like Africans carrying muskets. It’s all . . .” The man held up his hand in a gesture I understood not.

This was a circumstance which could not be other than galling; for I still harbored a hope that the rebels would at length resolve to comply with the firm dictates of humanity and the soft graces of benevolence.

Without such a reprieve, we knew ourselves in constant danger if the city should be retaken. We many of us had escaped, and so, upon the town’s falling, we would be conveyed to our former masters — at which thought, my spirits froze, thinking upon Mr. Sharpe and his devices.

The cannonade which had disturbed our labors being at an end, the corporal called to us to continue our binding of chevaux de frise, which labor we undertook again in silence.

Later that afternoon, a detachment returned through the gates with two of their number dead, arms sprawling, the hair on one a ruddy sop. The rebels had annoyed them with fire from the Roxbury lines; some contretemps had begun amidst the warehouses of the Neck; and, no ground won or lost, two had died.

We continued our solemn work of fortifying against invasion.

So we exchanged intelligence, and watched each other as we held our own silent deliberations, and considered which side might favor us with liberty. We worked at our dusty tasks beneath the summer sun; later, we played for tavern dances.

The British Army and Navy sang a rousing song called “Heart of Oak”; the rebels had writ one to counter it called “The Liberty Song.” Both songs blustered of freedom; but both were sung to the same tune.

And we, to avoid offense, played the tune without words.