Ezra Taylor stared at the decorated tree through the narrow slot built into the sugar house. Hessian soldiers had spent the afternoon festooning the limbs of the fir with apples, candied fruits, and ribbons. He’d thought it an odd custom at the time but now that candles flickered in the boughs, its beauty mesmerized him.

“Taylor, you gonna stare at them soldiers all night? Come eat. Walley will be back any moment, and then you’ll get nothing,” Small William said. William’s perpetual stoop in the low ceilinged prison had earned him the incongruous moniker “small”, despite his six foot plus stature; hell, even Ezra, at five feet seven, had developed a bowed posture after only six weeks in the storehouse the British used for a jail.

He sighed. The rich aroma of mince pie and roast mutton abounded, making it almost possible to forget he was held captive were it not for the icy night air swirling about and the squalid mass of humanity huddled with him in the corner. They had scrambled forward when Sgt. Walley appeared, bucket in hand. “It’s a Christmas feast, lads” he’d said, as if the bits of rancid pork and worm-riddled biscuits were what all the fashionable people were eating this Christmas.

Still, bad food was better than none. Their last meal had been two days ago.

“You can have my portion, Will. I haven’t the stomach for it. Besides, I’d like to sit a bit longer and listen to the singing.”

The carols made him think of home. And Elizabeth.

If he closed his eyes, he could see her standing in front of their hearth, singing quietly while she stirred the kettle, an refugee curl escaping from her cap. The cabin would smell sweet, of mountain laurel and yew; the fire beckoning him into its warm glow.

Snow fluttered in, and with it a frosty chill, shattering the image in his head. He tried to hold onto the vision of Elizabeth singing but it distorted into the Hessians’ drunken rendition of Joy to the World, leaving him once more prisoner to Christmas in the sugar house.

a fictional account of Ezra Taylor in the Sugar House

Having never been a soldier…

or a prisoner, I find it difficult to imagine how Ezra might have felt that Christmas in 1776, captive in the Liberty Street Sugar House. Continue reading “A Sugar House Christmas”