The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

The lieutenant, one of Captain Fielding’s men, commanded the three small cannon placed just behind Dyce’s Head. The gunners had replaced the naval crews, releasing the sailors back to their ships, which expected an attack by the enemy fleet. The gunner lieutenant, a boy no older than Moore, stopped beside the picquet. “What’s happening?”

“An attack,” Moore said with brutal simplicity. He had looped the dead man’s belt through his sword belt and now fumbled in the pouch for a cartridge, but McClure distracted him.

“We should go back, sir,” the sergeant declared.

“We stay here and keep firing!” Moore insisted. His Hamiltons were now in a single line at the bluff’s top. Behind them was a small clearing, then a stand of pines beyond which the three cannon still fired across the harbor at the rebel battery on Cross Island.

“Should I take the guns away?” the artillery lieutenant asked.

“Can you fire down the bluff?” Moore asked.

“Down the bluff?”

“At them!” Moore said impatiently, pointing to where the green-coated attackers were momentarily visible in the shadowed undergrowth.

“No.”

A blast of musketry erupted on Moore’s right. Two of his men collapsed and another dropped his musket to clutch at his shoulder. One of the fallen men was writhing in agony as his blood spread on the ground. He began to scream in high-pitched yelps, and the remaining men backed away in horror. More shots came from the trees and a third man fell, dropping to his knees with his right thigh shattered by a musket-ball. Moore’s small line was ragged now and, worse, the men were edging backwards. Their faces were pale, their eyes skittering in fear. “Will you leave me here?” Moore shouted at them. “Will the Hamiltons leave me alone? Come back! Behave like soldiers!” Moore rather surprised himself by sounding so confident, and was even more surprised when the picquet obeyed him. They had been gripped by fear and the fear had been a heartbeat away from panic, but Moore’s voice had checked them. “Fire!” he shouted, pointing towards the cloud of powder smoke showing where the enemy’s destructive volley had been fired. He tried to see the enemy who had shot that volley, but the green coats of the marines melded into the trees. Moore’s men fired, the heavy musket butts thumping back into bruised shoulders.

“We have to get the guns out!” the artillery lieutenant said.

“Then do it!” Moore snarled and turned away. His men’s ramrods rattled in powder-fouled barrels as they reloaded.

A musket-ball hit the artillery lieutenant in the small of his back and he crumpled. “No,” he said, more in surprise than protest, “no!” His boots scrabbled in the leaf mold. “No,” he said again, and another volley came, this time from the north, and Moore knew he was in danger of being cut off from the fort.

“Help me,” the artillery lieutenant said.

“Sergeant!” Moore called.

“We have to go, sir,” Sergeant McClure said, “we’re the only ones left here.”

The artillery lieutenant suddenly arched his back and gave a shriek. Another of Moore’s men was on the ground, blood sheeting his bleached deerskin trousers.

“We have to go back, sir!” McClure shouted angrily.

“Back to the trees,” Moore called to his men, “steady now!” He backed with them, stopping them again when they reached the stand of pines. The guns were just behind them now, while in front was the clearing where the dead and the dying lay and beyond which the enemy was gathering. “Fire!” Moore shouted, his voice hoarse. The fog was much thinner and being lit by the rising sun so that the musket smoke seemed to rise into a glowing vapor.

“We have to go, sir,” McClure urged, “back to the fort, sir.”

“Reinforcements will come,” Moore said, and a musket-ball struck Sergeant McClure’s mouth, splintering his teeth, piercing his throat, and severing his spine. The sergeant dropped noiselessly. His blood spattered John Moore’s immaculate breeches. “Fire!” Moore shouted, but he could have wept for frustration. He was in his first battle and he was losing it, but he would not give in. Surely the brigadier would send more men, and so John Moore, the dead man’s musket still in his hand, stood his uncertain ground.

And still more rebels climbed the bluff.

Captain Welch was frustrated. He wanted to close on the enemy. He wanted to terrify, kill, and conquer. He knew he led the best soldiers and if he could just lead them to the enemy then his green-jacketed marines would rip through the red ranks with a ferocious efficiency. He just needed to close on that enemy, drive him back in terror, and then keep advancing until the fort, and every damned redcoat inside it, belonged to the marines.

The slope frustrated him. It was steep and the enemy, retreating slowly, kept up a galling fire on his men, a fire the marines could scarcely return most of the time. They shot upwards when they could, but the enemy was half-hidden by trees, by shadow, and by the smoke-writhing fog, and too many musket-balls were deflected by branches, or just wasted in the air. “Keep going!” Welch shouted. The higher they went the easier the slope became, but until they reached that friendlier ground good men were being killed or wounded, struck by musket-balls that plunged relentlessly from above, and every shot made Welch angrier and more determined.

He sensed, rather than saw, that he was opposed by a small group of men. They fired constantly, but because they were few their fire was limited. “Lieutenant Dennis! Sergeant Sykes!” Welch shouted, “Take your men left!” He would outflank the bastards.

“Aye aye, sir!” Sykes roared back. Welch could hear the cannons firing above him, but no round shot or grapeshot came his way, just the damned musket-balls. He gripped a spruce branch and hauled himself up the slope, and a musket-ball smacked into the spruce’s trunk and showered his face with splinters, but he was on easier ground now and he yelled at the men following to join him. He could see the enemy now, he could see they were a small group of men wearing black-faced red jackets who were stubbornly retreating across an open patch of ground. “Kill them!” he called to his men, and the muskets of the marines belched smoke and noise, and when the smoke thinned Welch could see he had hurt the enemy. Men were on the ground, but still the rest stood and still they fired back, and Welch heard their officer shout at them. That officer annoyed him. He was a slight and elegant figure in a coat that, even in the misted dawn, looked expensively tailored. The buttons glinted gold, there was lace at the officer’s throat, his breeches were snow-white, and his top boots gleamed. A puppy, Welch thought sourly, a sprig of privilege, a target. Welch, in his captivity, had met a handful of supercilious Britons and they had burned a hatred of the breed into his soul. It was such men who had taken Americans to be fools, who had thought they could lord it over a despised breed, and who must now be taught a bloody lesson. “Kill the officer,” he told his men, and the marines’ muskets crashed another volley. Men bit cartridges, skinned their knuckles on the fixed bayonets as they slammed ramrods down barrels, primed locks, shot again, but still the damned puppy lived. He was holding a musket, while his sword, which hung from silver chains, was in its scabbard. He wore a cocked hat, its brim edged with silver, and beneath it his shadowed face looked very young and, Welch thought, arrogant. Goddamned puppy, Welch thought, and the goddamned puppy shouted at his men to fire and the small volley slammed into the marines, then Lieutenant Dennis’s men shot from the north and that outflanking fire drove the puppy and his redcoats further back across the clearing. They left bodies behind, but the arrogant young officer still lived. He stopped his redcoats at the far trees and shouted at them to kill Americans and Welch had taken enough. He drew his heavy cutlass from its plain leather scabbard. The blade felt good in his hand. He saw the redcoats were reloading, tearing at cartridges while their muskets were butt-down on the ground. Another redcoat was struck down, his blood spattering the clean white breeches of the young officer whose men, because they were still reloading, were now defenseless. “Use your bayonets!” Welch shouted, “and charge!”

Welch led the charge across the clearing. He would cut the puppy down. He would slaughter these damned fools, he would take the guns behind them, then lead his green-coated killers along Majabigwaduce’s spine to take the fort. The marines had reached the bluff’s summit and, for Captain John Welch, that meant the battle was won.

* * *

General McLean had convinced himself that the rebel attack would be launched across the neck and so was surprised by the dawn’s assault on the bluff. At first he was pleased with their choice, reckoning that Archibald Campbell’s picquet was heavy enough to inflict real damage on the attackers, but the brevity of the fight told him that Campbell had achieved little. McLean could not see the fighting from Fort George because fog shrouded the ridge, but his ears told him all he needed to know, and his heart sank because he had readied the fort for an attack from the north. Instead the assault would come from the west, and the intensity of the musket-fire told McLean that the attack would come in overwhelming force. The fog was clearing quickly now, coalescing into tendrils of mist that blew like gunsmoke across the stumps of the ridge. Once the rebels gained the bluff’s summit, and McLean’s ears told him that was already happening, and once they reached the edge of the trees on that high western ground, they would see that Fort George was merely a name and not yet a stronghold. It had only two guns facing the bluff, its rampart was a risible obstacle and the abatis was a frail barricade to protect the unfinished work. The rebels would surely capture the fort and Francis McLean regretted that. “The fortunes of war,” he said.

“McLean?” Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell, the commanding officer of the highlanders, asked. Most of Campbell’s regiment, those who were not on the picquet line, now stood behind the rampart. Their two colors were at the center of their line and McLean felt a pang of sadness that those proud flags must become trophies to the rebels. “Did you speak, McLean?” Campbell asked.

“Nothing, Colonel, nothing,” McLean said, staring west through the thinning fog. He crossed the rampart and walked towards the abatis because he wanted to be closer to the fighting. The crackling noise of musketry still rose and fell, sounding like dry thorns burning and snapping. He sent one of his aides to recall Major Dunlop’s picquet, which had been guarding the isthmus, “and tell Major Dunlop I need Lieutenant Caffrae’s company! Quick now!” He leaned on his blackthorn stick and turned to see that Captain Fielding’s men had already moved a twelve-pounder from the fort’s northeastern corner to the northwestern bastion. Good, he thought, but he doubted any effort now would be sufficient. He looked back to the high ground where smoke and fog filtered through the trees, and from where the sound of musketry grew louder again and where the redcoats were appearing at the edge of the far trees. So his picquet, he thought regretfully, had not delayed the enemy long. He saw men fire, he saw a man fall, and then the redcoats were streaming back across the cleared land, running through the raw tree stumps as they fled an enemy whose coats made them invisible among the distant trees. The only evidence of the rebels was the smoke of their muskets, which blossomed and faded on the morning’s light breeze.

There was a small gap in the abatis, left there deliberately so the defenders could negotiate the tangled branches, and the fleeing redcoats filed through that gap where McLean met them. “Form ranks,” he greeted them. Men looked at him with startled expressions. “Form in your companies,” he said. “Sergeant? Dress the ranks!”

The fugitives made three ranks, and behind them, summoned from their picquet duty on the ground overlooking the neck, Major Dunlop and Lieutenant Caffrae’s company arrived. “Wait a moment, Major,” McLean said to Dunlop. “Captain Campbell!” he shouted, indicating with his stick that he meant Archibald Campbell, who had retreated just as precipitously as his men.

Campbell, nervous and lanky, fidgeted in front of McLean. “Sir?”

“You were driven back?” McLean asked.

“There are hundreds of them, sir,” Campbell said, not meeting McLean’s gaze, “hundreds!”

“And where is Lieutenant Moore?”

“Taken, sir,” Campbell said after a pause. His eyes met McLean’s and instantly looked away. “Or worse, sir.”

“Then what is that firing about?” McLean asked.

Campbell turned and stared at the far trees from where musketry still sounded. “I don’t know, sir,” the highlander said miserably.

McLean turned to Major Dunlop. “Quick as you can,” he said, “take Caffrae’s company and advance at the double, see if you can discover young Moore. Don’t tangle with too many rebels, just see if Moore can be found.” Major Dunlop, the temporary commander of the 82nd, was an officer of rare verve and ability and he wasted no time. He shouted orders and his company, with their muskets at the trail, started westwards. It would have been suicide to advance along the cleared spine of the ridge and thus straight towards the rebels who were now gathering at the edge of the trees, so instead the company used the low ground by the harbor where they were concealed by the scatter of houses and by small fields where the maize had grown taller than a man. McLean watched them disappear, heard the fighting continue, and prayed that Moore survived. The general reckoned that young John Moore had promise, but that was not sufficient reason to rescue him, nor was it reason enough that Moore was a friend of the regiment’s patron, the Duke of Hamilton, but rather it was because Moore had been given into McLean’s charge. McLean would not abandon him, nor any other man under his care, and so he had sent Dunlop and the single company into danger. Because it was his duty.

Solomon Lovell landed on the narrow beach an hour after Captain Welch’s marines had spearheaded the American attack. The general arrived with Lieutenant-Colonel Revere and his eighty artillerymen who, today, were armed with muskets and would serve as a reserve force to the nine hundred and fifty men who had already landed, most of whom were now at the top of the bluff. A few had never made it and their bodies lay on the steep slope, while others, the wounded, had been carried back to the beach where Eliphalet Downer, the surgeon general of the Massachusetts Militia, was organizing their treatment and evacuation. Lovell crouched beside a man whose eyes were bandaged. “Soldier?” Lovell said. “This is General Lovell.”

“We beat them, sir.”

“Of course we did! Are you in pain, soldier?”

“I’m blinded, sir,” the man said. A musket-ball had spattered razor-sharp splinters of beechwood into both eyes,

“But you will see your country at liberty,” Lovell said, “I promise.”

“And how do I feed my family?” the man asked. “I’m a farmer!”

“All will be well,” Lovell said and patted the man’s shoulder. “Your country will look after you.” He straightened, listening to the staccato rattle of musketry at the bluff’s summit, which told him that some redcoats must still be fighting on the heights. “We’ll need to bring artillery ashore, Colonel,” he said to Revere.

“Soon as you release us, General,” Revere said. There was an edge of resentment in his voice, suggesting that he thought it demeaning for his men to carry muskets instead of serving cannons. “Just as soon as you release us,” he said again, though more willingly this time.

“Let’s first see what we’ve achieved,” Lovell said. He patted the blinded man’s shoulder a second time and started up the bluff, hauling himself on saplings. “It’ll be a hard job to get cannon up this slope, Colonel.”

“We’ll manage that,” Revere said confidently. Taking heavy artillery up a bluff’s steep face was a practical problem, and Lieutenant-Colonel Revere liked overcoming such challenges.

“I never did congratulate you on the success of your gunners at Cross Island,” Lovell said. “You’ve hurt the enemy ships! A splendid achievement, Colonel.”

“Just doing our duty, General,” Revere said, but pleased all the same at the compliment. “We killed some damned Britons!” He went on happily. “I’ve dreamed of killing the damned beasts!”

“And you drove the enemy’s ships back! So now there’s nothing to stop our fleet from entering the harbor.”

“Nothing at all, General,” Revere agreed.

The stutter of musketry still sounded from Lovell’s right, evidence that some redcoats yet remained on the high ground above the bay, but it was clear that most of the enemy had retreated because, as Lovell reached the easier slope at the top of the bluff, he found grinning militiamen who gave him a cheer. “We beat them, sir!”

“Of course we beat them,” Lovell said, beaming, “and all of you,” he raised his voice and lifted his hands in a gesture of benediction, “all of you have my thanks and my congratulations on this magnificent feat of arms!”

The woods at the top of the bluff were now in rebel hands, all but for a stand of pines above Dyce’s Head, which was far to the general’s right and from where the musketry still sounded. Lovell’s militia were thick in the woods. They had climbed the precipitous slope, they had taken casualties, but they had shot the British off the summit and all the way back to the fort. Men looked happy. They talked excitedly, recounting incidents in the fight up the steep slope, and Lovell enjoyed their happiness. “Well done!” he said again and again.

He went to the edge of the trees and there, in front of him, was the enemy. The fog had quite gone now and he could see every detail of the fort that lay only half a mile to the east. The enemy had made a screen of branches between the woods and the fort, but from his high ground Lovell could easily see over that flimsy barricade and he could see that Fort George did not look like a stronghold at all, but instead resembled an earthen scar in the ridge’s soil. The nearest rampart was thickly lined with redcoats, but he still felt relief. The fort, which in Lovell’s imagination had been a daunting prospect of stone walls and sheer ramparts, now proved to be a mere scratch in the dirt.

Colonel McCobb of the Lincoln County militia hailed the general cheerfully. “A good morning’s work, sir!”

“One for the history books, McCobb! Without doubt, one for the history books!” Lovell said. “But not quite done yet. I think, don’t you, that we should keep going?”

“Why not, sir?” McCobb answered.

Solomon Lovell’s heart seemed to miss a beat. He scarcely dared believe the speed and extent of the morning’s victory, but the sight of those distant redcoats behind the low rampart told him that the victory was not yet complete. He had a vision of the redcoats’ muskets flaring volleys at his men. “Is General Wadsworth here?”

“He was, sir.” McCobb said Wadsworth had been at the wood’s edge where he had encouraged Colonel McCobb and Colonel Mitchell to keep their militiamen moving forward onto the cleared land, but both colonels had pleaded they needed time to reorganize their troops. Units had become scattered as they clambered up the bluff and the necessity of carrying the wounded back to the beach meant that most companies were shorthanded. Besides, the capture of the high woods had seemed like a victory in itself and men wanted to savor that triumph before they advanced on Fort George. Peleg Wadsworth had urged haste, but then had been distracted by the musket-fire which still filled the trees at Dyce’s Head with smoke. “I believe he went to the right.” McCobb continued, “to the marines.”

“The marines are still fighting?” Lovell asked McCobb.

“A few stubborn bastards are holding out there,” McCobb said.

Lovell hesitated, but the sight of the enemy’s flags tipped his indecision towards confidence. “We shall advance to victory!” he announced cheerfully. He wanted to add those arrogant enemy flags to his trophies. “Form your fine fellows into line,” he told McCobb, then plucked at the colonel’s sleeve as another doubt flickered in his mind. “Have the enemy fired on you? With cannon, I mean?”

“Not a shot, General.”

“Well, let’s stir your men from the woods! Tell them they’ll be eating British beef for their suppers!” The musketry from Dyce’s Head suddenly intensified into an angry and concentrated crackle, and then, just as suddenly, went silent. Lovell stared towards the smoke, the only visible evidence of whatever battle was being fought among those trees. “We should tell the marines we’re advancing,” he said. “Major Brown? Would you convey that message to Captain Welch? Tell him to advance with us as soon as he’s ready?”

“I will, sir,” Major Gawen Brown, the second of Lovell’s brigade majors, started off southwards.

Lovell could not stop smiling. The Massachusetts Militia had taken the bluff! They had climbed the precipitous slope, they had fought the regulars of the British Army, and they had conquered. “I do believe,” he said to Lieutenant-Colonel Revere, “that we may not need your cannon after all! Not if we can drive the enemy out of their works with infantry.”

“I’d still like a chance to hammer them,” Revere said. He was staring at the fort and was not impressed by what he saw. The curtain wall was low and its flanking bastions were unfinished, and he reckoned his artillery could reduce that feeble excuse for a fort into a smear of bloodied dirt.

“You zeal does you credit,” Lovell said, “indeed it does, Colonel.” Behind him the militia sergeants and officers were rousting men from among the trees and shouting at them to form line on the open ground. The flags of Massachusetts and of the United States of America flew above them and it was time for the decisive assault.

Lieutenant Moore heard the bellowed order to charge and saw the green-uniformed men erupt out of the trees and he was aware of muskets flaming unexpectedly from his left and the chaos of the moment overwhelmed him. There was only terror in his head. He opened his mouth to shout an order, but no words came, and a hugely tall rebel in a green coat crossed by white belts, and with a long black pigtail flapping behind his neck, and with a cutlass catching the morning sun in his right hand was running straight towards him and John Moore, almost without thinking, raised the musket he had rescued from Private McPhail and his finger fumbled at the trigger, and then he realized he had not even loaded or cocked the musket, but it was too late because the big rebel was almost on him and the man’s face was a savagely frightening grimace of hatred and Moore convulsively pulled the trigger anyway and the musket fired.

It had been cocked and loaded and Moore had never noticed.

The ball took the rebel under the chin, it seared up through his mouth and out through his skull, lifting his hat into the air. The shock wave of the ball, compressed by the skull, drove an eye from its socket. Blood misted, blurring red in fine droplets as the rebel, dead in an instant, fell forward onto his knees. The cutlass dropped and the man’s dead arms wrapped themselves round Moore’s waist and then slid slowly down to his feet. Moore, aghast, noticed that the pigtail was dripping blood.

“For God’s sake, young Moore, you want to win this bloody war single-handed?” Major Dunlop greeted the young lieutenant. Dunlop’s men had fired a company volley from the trees to Moore’s left, and that sudden volley had served to drive the momentarily outnumbered marines back to the trees.

Moore could not speak. A musket-ball plucked at the tails of his coat. He was gazing down at the dead rebel whose head was a mess of blood, red-wet hair, and scraps of bone.

“Come on, lad,” Dunlop took Moore’s elbow, “let’s get the devil out of here.”

The company retreated, taking Moore’s surviving men with them. They withdrew along the lower ground beside the harbor as the American marines captured the three naval cannon abandoned on Dyce’s Head. The rebel battery was firing from Cross Island, relentlessly thumping round shot into Captain Mowat’s ships. The crest of the bluff was thick with rebels and the redcoats had no place to go now except the unfinished Fort George.

And Captain John Welch was dead.

It took time to fetch the militia from the trees, but gradually they were formed into a line. It was a rough line stretching clear across the high ground with the marines on its right, the Indians on the left, and the flags at its center. Paul Revere’s men, Lovell’s reserve, were in three ranks behind the two flags, one the proud starred stripes of the United States and the other the pine-tree banner of the Massachusetts Militia.

“What a magnificent morning’s work,” Lovell greeted Peleg Wadsworth.

“I congratulate you, sir.”

“I thank you, Wadsworth, I thank you! But on to victory now?”

“On to victory, sir,” Wadsworth said. He decided he would not tell Lovell about Captain Welch’s death, not till the battle was over and the victory gained.

“God has granted us the victory!” the Reverend Jonathan Murray announced. He had joined Lovell on the heights and, besides his brace of pistols, carried a Bible. He lifted the book high. “God promises us ‘I will scatter them as with an east wind!’”

“Amen,” Lovell said. Israel Trask played his fife behind the marines, while three drummer boys and two more fifers played the “Rogue’s March” beside the two flags. Lovell’s heart swelled with pride. He drew his sword, looked towards the enemy, and pointed the blade forward. “On to victory!”

A half mile away, inside the fort, General McLean watched the rebels form at the tree line. He had seen Major Dunlop’s men climb to the battery on Dyce’s Head and, with the help of a telescope, he had seen that young Moore and his men had been rescued. Those redcoats were now coming back to the fort through the low ground beside the harbor, while the remaining picquets that had guarded the neck were all inside Fort George, where McLean’s troops stood in three ranks behind the western rampart. Their job now was to defend that low wall with volley fire. McLean, watching the rebel line thicken, still believed he was faced by thousands, not hundreds, of enemy infantry, and now more rebels appeared to the north, showing at the trees above the neck. So he would be attacked from two sides? He glanced at the harbor and saw, to his surprise, that the enemy ships had made no aggressive move, but why should they? The fort was going to fall without their assistance. McLean limped up onto the unfinished western rampart. “Captain Fielding!”

“Sir?” The English artillery commander hurried to join McLean.

“We’ll give them a few shots, I think?”

“Wait till they advance, sir?” Fielding suggested.

“I think we might treat them now, Captain,” McLean said.

“They’re too far for grape or case, sir.”

“Then give them round shot,” McLean said. He spoke wearily. He knew what must happen now. The rebels would advance and such was the length of their line that they must inevitably wrap around three sides of his unfinished fort. They would take some casualties at the abatis, which was well within the effective range of the grape shot that Captain Mowat had sent ashore, but Fielding’s few guns could do only limited damage and the rebels would surely surge on to assault the low walls. Then there would be chaos, panic, and bayonets. His men would stand, of that McLean was sure, but they would stand and die.

So the battle was lost. Yet honor alone dictated that he showed some resistance before he surrendered the fort. No one would blame him for its loss, not when he was so outnumbered, but he would be universally despised if he yielded without showing some defiance, and so McLean had determined on his course of action. He would fire round shot and keep firing as the rebels began their advance, and then, before they came into range of Captain Fielding’s more lethal case and grape shot, he would haul the flag down. It was sad, he thought, but surrender would save his men from massacre.

McLean walked to the flagpole in the southwestern bastion. He had asked his aides to place a table beside the tall staff, but his slight limp and his crippled right arm made the effort of climbing onto the table difficult. “Need a hand, sir?” Sergeant Lawrence asked.

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

“You want to see how well our guns can cut down rebels, sir?” the sergeant asked happily after he had helped McLean onto the table.

“Oh, I know you lads can defend us,” McLean lied. He stood on the table and wondered why no bagpipers had come with the two regiments. He smiled that so strange a thought should have occurred to him at such a moment. “I do miss the pipes,” he said.

“Bagpipes, sir?” Lawrence asked.

“Indeed! The music of war.”

“Give me a good English band any day, sir.”

McLean smiled. His undignified perch on the table gave him an excellent view of the ground over which the rebels must advance. He reached into a pocket of his red coat and took out a folded penknife. “Sergeant, would you be so kind as to open that?”

“Going to stick a rebel, General?” Lawrence asked as he extracted the blade. “I reckon your sword will do more damage.”

McLean took the knife back. The hand of his injured right arm was too weak to loosen the halliard holding the flag and so he held the short blade in his left hand ready to cut the line when the moment came.

Captain Fielding came to the bastion where he insisted on laying the twelve-pounder cannon himself. “What’s the charge?” he asked Lawrence.

“Quarter charge, sir,” Lawrence said, “three pounds.”

Fielding nodded and made some calculations in his head. The gun was cold, which meant the shot would lose some power, so he elevated the barrel just a trifle, then used the trail spike to aim the gun at a knot of men standing close to the rebels’ bright flags. Satisfied that his aim and elevation were good, he stepped back and nodded to Sergeant Lawrence. “Carry on, Sergeant,” he said.

Lawrence primed the gun, ordered the crew to cover their ears and step aside, then touched flame to the portfire. The gun roared, smoke smothered the bastion, and the round shot flew.

It flew above the abatis and over the shattered stumps, and it began to lose height as the ground rose to meet it. To Peleg Wadsworth, standing to Lovell’s left, the ball appeared as a lead-gray streak in the sky. It was a flicker of gray, a pencil stroke against the sudden white-gray of powder smoke that obscured the fort, and then the streak vanished and the ball struck. It hit a militiaman in the chest, shattering ribs, blood, and flesh in an explosion of butchery, and plunged on, flicking blood behind its passage, to rip a man in the groin, more blood and meat in the air, and then the ball struck the ground, bounced, and decapitated one of Revere’s gunners before vanishing noisily into the woods behind.

Solomon Lovell was standing just two paces away from the first man struck by the round shot. A splinter of rib hit the general on the shoulder and a stringy splat of bloody flesh spattered wetly across his face, and just then HMS North, which lay closest to the fort, fired its broadside at the marines who were on the right of Lovell’s lines, and the thunder of the sloop’s gunfire filled the Majabigwaduce sky as Captain Fielding’s second gun fired. That second ball hit a tree stump just in front of Colonel McCobb’s men and struck with such violence that the stump was half-uprooted as it shattered into scraps that drove into McCobb’s front rank. A man screamed in pain.

Sergeant Lawrence’s crew, drilled and practiced, had swabbed and reloaded the first gun, which they now levered back to the low embrasure so Lawrence could fire it a second time. The ball struck the ground just paces from Lovell and bounced harmlessly overhead, though not before it drove a shower of soil at the general’s staff.

The man whose groin had been pulped by the first shot was still alive, but his belly was eviscerated and his guts coiled on the ground and he breathed in short, desperate spasms. Lovell, transfixed, watched appalled as a pulse of blood, obscenely thick, spilled out of the man’s gutted trunk. The wounded man was making a pathetic noise and Lieutenant-Colonel Revere, whose uniform had been spattered by blood, was white-faced, staring wide-eyed, unmoving. Wadsworth noted the pine needles sticking to the loops of intestine on the ground. The man somehow brought up his head and looked beseechingly at Wadsworth, and Wadsworth involuntarily moved towards him, wondering what in God’s name he could do or say when, with another surge of blood from his ruined guts, the man’s head fell back.

“Oh dear God,” Lovell said to no one.

“God rest his soul,” the Reverend Jonathan Murray said, his voice unusually strained.

Wadsworth looked into the dead man’s face. No movement there except for a fly crawling on an unshaven cheek. Behind Wadsworth a man vomited. He turned to stare at the fort where the cannon smoke lingered. “We should advance, sir,” he said to Lovell, and was surprised that he had spoken at all, let alone sounded so detached. Lovell seemed not to have heard him. “We should advance, sir!” Wadsworth said in a louder voice.

Solomon Lovell was gazing at the fort where another billow of smoke jetted from an unfinished bastion. The ball flew to the general’s left, crashing into a tree behind the militia. “Colonel Revere?” Lovell asked, still looking at the fort.

“General?” Revere acknowledged.

“Can your artillery reduce the fort?”

“It can,” Revere said, though without any of his usual confidence. “It can,” he said again, unable to take his eyes from the bloody mess on the ground.

“Then we shall give your guns that chance,” Lovell said. “The men will shelter in the trees.”

“But now’s the moment to advance and’” Wadsworth began a protest.

“I can’t attack into those guns!” Lovell interrupted shrilly. He blinked, surprised by his own tone of voice. “I can’t,” he began again, then seemed to forget what he wanted to say. “We shall reduce their walls with artillery,” he said decisively, then frowned as another British gun hammered a ball up the ridge. “The enemy might counterattack,” he went on with a note of panic, “so we must be ready to repel them. Into the trees!” He turned and waved his sword at the thick woods. “Take the men into the trees!” he shouted at the militia officers. “Dig defenses! Here, at the tree line. I want earthworks.” He paused, watching his men retreat, then led his staff into the cover of the high wood.

Brigadier-General McLean watched in astonishment as his enemy vanished. Was it a trick? One moment there had been hundreds of men forming into ranks, then suddenly they had all retreated into the trees. He watched and waited, but as time passed he realized that the rebels really had gone into the woods and were showing no sign of renewing their attack. He let out a long breath, took his hand from the flag’s halliard, and pushed the open penknife back into his pocket. “Colonel Campbell!” he called, “stand down three companies! Form them into work parties to heighten the ramparts!”

“Yes, sir!” Campbell called back.

Fort George would live a few hours yet.

From Brigadier-General Lovell’s despatch to Jeremiah Powell, President of the Council Board of the State of Massachusetts Bay, dated July 28th, 1779:This morning I have made my landing good on the S.W. Head of the Peninsula which is one hundred feet high and almost perpendicular very thickly covered with Brush and trees, the men ascended the Precipice with alacrity and after a very smart conflict we put them to rout, they left in the Woods a number killed and wounded and we took a few Prisoners our loss is about thirty kill’d and wounded, we are with in 100 Rod of the Enemey’s main fort on a Commanding peice of Ground, and hope soon to have the Satisfaction of informing you of the Capturing the whole Army, you will please to excuse my not being more particular, as you may Judge my situation.Am Sir your most Obedient Humble Servant

From Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell’s Journal. Wednesday July 28th, 1779:When I returned to the Shore it struck me with admiration to see what a Precipice we had ascended, not being able to take so scrutinous a view of it in time of Battle, it is at least where we landed three hundred feet high, and almost perpendicular and the men were obliged to pull themselves up by the twigs and trees. I don’t think such a landing has been made since Wolfe.

From the letter of Colonel John Brewer to David Perham, written in 1779 and published in the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, August 13th, 1846:The General [McLean] he received me very politely, and said . . . “I was in no situation to defend myself, I only meant to give them one or two guns, so as not to be called a coward, and then have struck my colors, which I stood for some time to do, as I did not want to throw away the lives of my men for nothing.”

Chapter Eight

Marine Captain Thomas Carnes and thirty men had been on the right flank of the marines who had fought their way up the bluff. Carnes’s route lay up the steepest part of the bluff’s slope and his men did not reach the summit until after Welch was shot and after the sudden counterattack by a company of redcoats who, their volley fired, had retreated as suddenly as they had arrived. Captain Davis had taken over command of Dyce’s Head and his immediate problem was the wounded marines. “They need a doctor,” he told Carnes.

“The nearest surgeon is probably still on the beach,” Carnes said.

“Damn it, damn it,” Davis looked harried. “Can your men carry them down? And we need cartridges.”

So Carnes took his thirty men back to the beach. They escorted two prisoners and, because they carried eight of their own wounded and did not want to cause those casualties even more pain, they descended the bluff very slowly and carefully. The injured men were laid on the shingle, joining the other men who waited for the surgeons. Carnes then led his two captives to where another six prisoners were under militia guard beside the big granite boulder. “What happens to us, sir?” one of the prisoners asked, but the man’s Scottish accent was so strange that Carnes had to make him repeat the question twice before he understood.

“You’ll be looked after,” he said, “and probably a lot better than I was,” he added bitterly. Carnes had been taken captive two years earlier and had spent a hungry six months in New York before being exchanged.

The narrow strip of beach was busy. Doctor Downer, distinguished by his blood-soaked apron and an ancient straw hat, was using a probe to track a musket-ball buried in a militiaman’s buttock. The injured man was held down by the doctor’s two assistants, while the Reverend Murray knelt beside a dying man, holding his hand and reciting the twenty-third psalm. Sailors were landing boxes of musket ammunition, while those wounded who did not require immediate treatment were waiting patiently. A number of militiamen, too many to Carnes’s eyes, seemed to have no purpose at all on the beach, but were sitting around idle. Some had even lit driftwood fires, a few of which were much too close to the newly arrived boxes of musket cartridges that were stacked above the high-tide line. That ammunition belonged to the militia, and Carnes suspected the minutemen would not be generous if he requested replacement cartridges. “Sergeant Sykes?”

“Sir?”

“How many thieves in our party?”

“Every last man, sir. They’re marines.”

“Two or three of those boxes would be mighty useful.”

“So they would, sir.”

“Carry on, Sergeant.”

“What’s happening on the heights, Captain?” Doctor Eliphalet Downer called from a few paces away. “I’ve found the ball,” he said to his assistants as he selected a pair of blood-caked tongs, “so hold him tight. Stay still, man, you’re not dying. You’ve just got a British ball up your American bottom. Did the redcoats counterattack?”

“They haven’t yet, Doctor,” Carnes said.

“But they might?”

“That’s what the general believes.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a gasp from the wounded man, then the dull boom of a British cannon firing from the distant fort. When Carnes had left the heights to bring the wounded down to the beach all the American forces had been back among the trees, but the British gunners were still sustaining a desultory fire, presumably to keep the Americans at bay. “So what happens now?” Eliphalet Downer asked, then grunted as he forced the tongs into the narrow wound. “Mop that blood.”

“General Lovell has called for artillery,” Carnes said, “so I guess we batter the bastards before we assault them.”

“I’ve got the ball,” Downer said, feeling the jaws of his tongs scrape and close around the musket-ball.

“He’s fainted, sir,” an assistant said.

“Sensible fellow. Here is comes.” The ball’s extraction provoked a spurt of blood which the assistant staunched with a linen pad as Downer moved to the next patient. “Bone saw and knife,” Downer ordered after a glance at the man’s shattered leg. “Good morning, Colonel!” This last was to Lieutenant-Colonel Revere who had just appeared on the crowded beach with three of his artillerymen. “I hear you’re moving guns to the heights?” Downer asked cheerfully as he knelt beside the injured man.

Revere looked startled at the question, perhaps because he thought it was none of Downer’s business, but he nodded. “The general wants batteries established, Doctor, yes.”

“I hope that means no more work for us today,” Downer said, “not if your guns keep the wretches well away.”

“They will, Doctor, never you fret,” Revere said, then walked towards his white-painted barge, which waited a few paces down the shingle. “Wait here,” he called back to his men, “I’ll be back after breakfast.”

Carnes was not certain he had heard the last words correctly. “Sir?” He had to repeat the word to get Revere’s attention. “Sir? If you need help taking the guns up the slope, my marines are good and ready.”

Revere paused at the barge to give Carnes a suspicious look. “We don’t need help,” he said brusquely, “we’ve got men enough.” He had not met Cames and had no idea that this was the marine officer who had been an artilleryman in General Washington’s army. He stepped over the barge’s gunwale. “Back to the Samuel,” he ordered the crew.

The general wanted artillery at the top of the bluff, but Colonel Revere wanted a hot breakfast. So the general had to wait.

Lieutenant John Moore accompanied his two wounded men to Doctor Calef’s barn, which now served as the garrison’s hospital. He tried to comfort the two men, but felt his words were inadequate, and afterwards he went into the small vegetable garden outside where, overcome with remorse, he sat on the log pile. He was shaking. He held out his left hand and saw it quivering, and he bit his lip because he sensed he was about to shed tears and he did not want to do that, not where people could see him, and to distract himself he stared across the harbor to where Mowat’s ships were cannonading the rebel battery on Cross Island.

Someone came from the house and wordlessly offered him a mug of tea. He looked up and saw it was Bethany Fletcher and the sight of her provoked the tears he had been trying so hard to suppress. They rolled down his cheeks. He attempted to stand in welcome, but he was shaking too much and the gesture failed. He sniffed and took the tea. “Thank you,” he said.

“What happened?” she asked.

“The rebels beat us,” Moore said bleakly.

“They haven’t taken the fort,” Beth said.

“No. Not yet.” Moore gripped the mug with both hands. The cannon smoke lay like fog on the harbor and more smoke drifted slowly from the fort where Captain Fielding’s cannons shot into the distant trees. The rebels, despite their capture of the high ground, were showing no sign of wanting to attack the fort, though Moore supposed they were organizing that attack from within the cover of the woods. “I failed,” he said bitterly.

“Failed?”

“I should have retreated, but I stayed. I killed six of my men.” Moore drank some of the tea, which was very sweet. “I wanted to win,” he said, “and so I stayed.” Beth said nothing. She was wearing a linen apron smeared with blood and Moore flinched at the memory of Sergeant McClure’s death, then he remembered the tall American in his green coat charging across the clearing. He could still see the man’s upraised cutlass blade reflecting the day’s new light, the bared teeth, the intensity of hatred on the rebel’s face, the determination to kill, and Moore remembered his own panic and the sheer luck that had saved his life. He made himself drink more tea. “Why do they wear white crossbelts?” he asked.

“White crossbelts?” Beth was puzzled.

“You could hardly see them in the trees, except they wore white belts and that made them visible,” Moore said. “Black crossbelts,” he said, “they should be black,” and he had a sudden vision of the spray of blood from Sergeant McClure’s mouth. “I killed them,” he said, “by being selfish.”

“It was your first fight,” Beth said sympathetically.

And it had been so different from anything Moore had expected. In his mind, for years, there had been a vision of redcoats drawn up in three ranks, their flags bright above them, the enemy similarly arrayed and the bands playing as the muskets volleyed. Cavalry was always resplendent in their finery, decorating the dream-fields of glory, but instead Moore’s first battle had been a chaotic defeat in dark woods. The enemy had been in the trees and his men, ranked in their red line, had been easy targets for those men in green coats. “But why white crossbelts?” he asked again.

“Were there many dead?” Beth asked.

“Six of my men,” Moore answered bleakly. He remembered the stench of shit from McPhail’s corpse and closed his eyes as if he could blot that memory away.

“Among the rebels?” Beth asked anxiously.

“Some, yes, I don’t know.” Moore was too distracted by guilt to hear the anxiety in Bethany’s voice. “The rest of the picquet ran away, but they must have killed some.”

“And now?”

Moore finished the tea. He was not looking at Beth, but gazing at the ships in the harbor, noting how HMS Albany seemed to shiver when her guns fired. “We did it all wrong,” he said, frowning. “We should have moved most of the picquet to the beach and shot at them as they rowed towards the shore, then put more men halfway up the slope. We could have beaten them!” He put the mug on the logs and saw that his hand was no longer shaking. He stood. “I’m sorry, Miss Fletcher, I never thanked you for the tea.”

“You did, Lieutenant,” Beth said. “Doctor Calef told me to give it to you,” she added.

“That was kind of him. Are you helping him?”

“We all are,” Beth said, meaning the women of Majabigwaduce. She watched Moore, noting the blood on his finely tailored clothes. He looked so young, she thought, just a boy with a long sword.

“I must get back to the fort,” Moore said. “Thank you for the tea.” His job, he remembered, was to burn the oaths before the rebels discovered them. And the rebels would come now, he was sure, and all he was good for was burning papers because he had failed. He had killed six of his men by making the wrong decision and John Moore was certain that General McLean would not let him lead any more men to their deaths.

He walked back to the fort, where the flag still flew. The harbor was a sudden cauldron of noise as more guns filled the shallow basin with smoke and, as Moore reached the fort’s entrance, he saw why. Three enemy ships were under foresails and topsails, and they were sailing straight for the harbor.

They were coming to finish the job.

Commodore Saltonstall had promised to engage the enemy shipping with gunfire and so had cleared the Warren for action. Fog had prevented an engagement at first light and once that fog lifted there was a further delay because the Charming Sally, one of the privateers that would support the Warren, had a fouled anchor, but at last Captain Holmes solved the problem by buoying the anchor cable and casting it overboard, and so the three ships sailed slowly eastwards on the light wind. The commodore planned to sail into the harbor mouth and there use the frigate’s powerful broadside to batter the three enemy sloops. The heaviest British guns on those sloops were nine-pounders, while the Warren had twelve- and eighteen-pounders, guns that would mangle British timber and British flesh. The commodore would have liked nothing more than to have used those big guns on the thirty-two impudent men who had dared send him a letter which, though expressed in the politest words, implicitly accused him of cowardice. How dare they! He shook with suppressed anger as he recalled the letter. There were times, the commodore thought, when the notion that all men were created equal led to nothing but insolence.

He turned to see that the Black Prince and Charming Sally were following his frigate. The battery on Cross Island was already firing at the three British sloops which now barricaded the harbor’s center. There was water at either end of the British line, but the larger transport ships had been moored to block those shallow channels. Not that Saltonstall had any intention of piercing or flanking Mowat’s ships; he simply wanted to keep the Royal Marines on board the enemy sloops while Lovell assaulted the fort.

The wind was slight. Saltonstall had ordered battle-sails, which meant his two big courses, the mainsail and foresail, were furled onto their yards so that their canvas would not block the view forrard. He had kept the staysail furled for the same reason, so the Warren was being driven by flying jib, jib, and topsails. She went slowly, creeping ever closer to the narrow entrance between Cross Island and Dyce’s Head, which was now in American hands. Saltonstall could see the green coats of his marines on that height. They were watching the Warren and evidently cheering because they waved their hats towards the frigate.

The three British sloops had been shooting towards the rebel battery on Cross Island until they saw the topsails loosed on the enemy ships, when they had immediately ceased fire so that their guns could be levered round to point at the harbor mouth. Every cannon was double-shotted so that two round shots would be fired by each gun in the first broadside. The Warren, by far the largest warship in the Penobscot River, looked huge as she loomed in the entrance narrows. Captain Mowat, standing on the Albany’s afterdeck, was surprised that only three ships were approaching, though he was more than sensible that three ships were sufficient. Still, he reckoned, if he had commanded the rebel fleet he would have sent every available vessel in an irresistible and overwhelming attack. He trained his glass on the Warren, noting that there were no marines on her forecastle, which suggested the frigate was not planning to try and board his sloops. Maybe the marines were hiding? The frigate’s cutwater appeared huge in his glass. He collapsed the tubes and nodded to his first lieutenant. “You may open fire,” Mowat said.

Mowat’s three sloops had twenty-eight guns in their combined broadsides, a mix of nine- and six-pounders, and all of them shot two balls at the Warren. The noise of the guns filled the wide basin of Penobscot Bay while the Half Moon Battery, which had been dug into the harbor slope west of the fort, added her four twelve-pounders. All of those round shot were aimed at the Warren’s bows, and the frigate shuddered under their massive blows. “You will return the fire, Mister Fenwick!” Saltonstall shouted at his first lieutenant, and Fenwick gave the order, but the only guns that the Warren could use were its two nine-pounder bow-chasers, which fired together to shroud the rearing bowsprit with smoke. The Warren’s bows were being splintered by round shot, the impacts sending shock waves through the hull. A man was screaming in the fo’c’sle, a sound that irritated Saltonstall.

His ship palpably slowed under the constant blows. Dudley Saltonstall, standing next to the impassive helmsman, could hear timbers splintering. He was not an imaginative man, but it suddenly struck him that this vicious, concentrated gunfire was an expression of British anger against the rebels who had captured the high ground of their peninsula. Defeated on land they were revenging themselves with cannon-fire, well-aimed, brisk and efficient cannon-fire, and Saltonstall seethed with anger that his fine ship should be its victim. A twelve-pounder ball, fired from the harbor shore, struck a forrard nine-pounder, shearing its breech lines, shattering a trunnion, and slaughtering two crewmen whose blood spattered twenty feet across the deck. A spew of intestines lay like an untidy rope in the ugly bloodstain. The nine-pounder sagged in its carriage. One man had lost half his head, the other had been eviscerated by the ball, which had lost its volition and come to rest by the starboard gangway.

“Swab the deck!” Saltonstall shouted. “Be lively!” A lieutenant called for seamen to fetch buckets of water, but before they could wash the sprawling blood from the scrubbed planks, the commodore shouted again. “Belay that order!”

Mister Fenwick, the first lieutenant, stared at Saltonstall. The commodore was famous for keeping a spanking clean ship, yet he had reversed the order to swab the deck? “Sir?” Fenwick called uncertainly.

“Leave it be,” Saltonstall insisted. He half-smiled to himself. An idea had occurred to him and he liked it. “Throw that offal overboard,” he gestured to the spilled intestines, “but leave the blood.”

A twelve-pounder ball struck the mainmast with enough force to make the canvas of the big maintopsail quiver. Saltonstall watched the mast, wondering if it would fall, but the great spar held. “Summon the carpenter, Mister Coningsby,” he ordered.

“Aye aye, sir,” Midshipman Fanning, resigned to being called Coningsby, answered.

“I want a report on the mainmast. Don’t just stand there! Look lively!”

Fanning ran to a companionway to find the ship’s carpenter who, he suspected, would be somewhere forrard surveying the damage that was being done to the Warren’s bows where most of the enemy shots were slamming into the frigate. A nine-pounder ball slashed the shrouds of the spritsail yard so that it dangled into the water, though luckily the spritsail itself was not bent onto the spar and so the canvas could not drag in the water to slow the Warren even more. The jibboom was cut through and the remnant of the bowsprit was being held by only one shroud, and still the cannon-balls crashed home. Lieutenant Fenwick had six men retrieving the spritsail yard and one of them suddenly turned with an astonished expression and no left arm, just a ragged bloody stump that was gushing blood. The wind of the ball buffeted Fenwick and spattered him with blood. “Put a tourniquet on that,” he ordered, marveling that he sounded so calm, but the wounded man, before anyone could help him, fell sideways into the water and another six-pounder ball gouged along the gunwale to plow out long, sharp splinters that flickered across the deck. The ship shuddered again and blood oozed along the seams between the deck planking. A shot struck the waterline, spraying the forecastle with cold seawater, and then Fenwick was aware that the Warren was turning, turning so slowly, lumbering around to starboard so her larboard broadside could be brought to bear on the enemy. Marines were cheering the frigate from Dyce’s Head, but that was small consolation as two more shots ripped into her hull. One of the big elm pumps was working now, its crew working the long levers so that water gushed rhythmically over the Warren’s side. A man was whimpering somewhere, but Fenwick could not see him. “Throw that overboard,” he snapped, pointing to the severed arm.

The frigate was turning with agonizing slowness, but her bows were at last pointed at the harbor’s southern side and her powerful broadside could return the British cannonade. The commodore ordered the frigate’s big guns to open fire as soon as the slow turn brought the Half Moon Battery abreast of his broadside, and the noise of those cannons drowned the universe as they roared at the British emplacement. Smoke billowed as high as the furled mainyard. The guns recoiled, their trucks momentarily leaving the deck until the breech ropes took the strain. Water hissed into steam as gunners swabbed barrels. A twelve-pounder shot slashed across the poop deck, miraculously doing no damage except to a bucket that was shattered into a thousand pieces. “Fire as you bear!” Saltonstall called, meaning that his gunners should fire as soon as the ship had turned sufficiently to bring the guns to bear on the enemy sloops, though the gunners were so obstructed by their own smoke that they could scarcely see the enemy, who, in turn, were smothered by their own powder smoke, which constantly renewed itself as the flames spat through the cloud to punch more shots at the frigate.

“The carpenter says he’ll look at the mainmast as soon as he can, sir!” Midshipman Fanning had to shout to make himself heard over the gunfire.

“As soon as he can?” Saltonstall repeated angrily.

“The bows are holed, sir, he says he’s plugging it.”

Saltonstall grunted and a six-pounder shot, fired from HMS Albany, hit Fanning in the groin. He screamed and fell. Bone was showing ivory-white in the mangled remnants of his hip. He was staring up at Saltonstall, teeth bared, screaming, and his blood was sticky on the ship’s wheel. “Mother,” Fanning whimpered, “Mother!”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Saltonstall muttered.

“You two!” the helmsman called to two crewmen crouching by the portside rail. “Take the boy below.”

“Mother,” Fanning was crying. “Mother.” He reached out a hand and gripped the lower wheel. “Oh, Mother!”

“Fire!” Saltonstall shouted at his gun crews, not because they needed the order, but because he did not want to listen to the boy’s pathetic crying, which, thankfully and abruptly, faded to nothing.

“He’s dead,” one of the crewmen said, “poor little bastard.”

“Watch your tongue!” Saltonstall snarled, “and take Mister Coningsby away.”

“Take him away.” The helmsman pointed at Fanning, realizing that the seamen had been confused by the commodore’s order. He stooped and prised the dead boy’s grasp from the wheel.

The Warren’s guns were firing at the enemy sloops now, but the frigate’s crew was raw. Few of the men were regular sailors, most had been pressed from the wharves of Boston and they served the guns much more slowly than the British sailors. The frigate’s fire did more damage because her guns were heavier, but for every shot the Warren fired she received six. Another ball hit the bowsprit, almost splintering it into two long shards, then a twelve-pounder hit the mainmast again and the long spar wavered dangerously before being held by the shrouds. “Furl the maintopsail!” Saltonstall called to the second lieutenant. He needed to take the pressure off the damaged mast or else it would go overboard and he would be a floating wreck under the pounding of the British guns. He saw smoke jet from the fort on the skyline and saw a rent appear in his foretopgallant sail. “Take in the foresails! Mister Fenwick!” Saltonstall called through a speaking trumpet. The jibs and staysail would pull the damaged bowsprit to pieces unless they were furled. A round shot from the Half Moon Battery thumped hard into the hull, shaking the shrouds.

The two privateers had not followed the Warren into the harbor’s mouth, but instead stood just outside the entrance and fired past the frigate at the distant sloops. So the Warren was taking almost all of the British cannon-fire and Saltonstall knew he could not just stay and be shot to splinters. “Mister Fenwick! Launch two longboats! Tow the bows round!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

“We kept their marines busy,” Saltonstall muttered. That had been the arrangement, that his ships would threaten the British line and so keep the Royal Marines away from the fort, which, he assumed, General Lovell was even now attacking. It should all be over by midday, he reckoned, and there was small point in taking any more casualties and so he would retreat. He needed to turn the frigate in the narrow space and because the wind was fitful he had men tow the Warren’s head around. British cannon-balls exploded great spouts of water about the heaving oarsmen, but none of the shots struck the longboats, which at last succeeded in turning the Warren westwards. Saltonstall dared not set the jib, flying jib, or staysail because even this small wind would exert enough pressure on those sails to pull his damaged bowsprit to pieces, and so he relied on the longboats to tow the frigate to safety. The men hauled on their oars and slowly, persistently hammered by British round shot, the Warren edged her way back into the wider bay.

Saltonstall heard a cheer from the three British sloops. The commodore sneered at the sound. The fools thought they had beaten his powerful frigate, but he had never planned to engage them closely, merely to keep their marines aboard while Lovell assaulted the fort. A last shot slashed into the water to spray the quarterdeck, then the Warren was towed north under the lee of Dyce’s Head and so out of sight of the impudent enemy. The two forrard anchors were let go, the oarsmen in the longboats rested, and the guns were housed. It was time to make repairs.

Peleg Wadsworth crouched opposite the captured highlander who was sitting with his back against a bullet-scarred beech tree. The prisoner had been found hiding in a thick stand of brush, perhaps hoping to sneak his way back to Fort George, but he would have found any escape difficult because he had been struck in his calf by a musket-ball. The ball had mangled his flesh, but it had missed the bone and the doctor with the Lincoln County militia had reckoned the man would live if the wound did not turn gangrenous. “You’re to keep the wound bandaged,” Wadsworth said, “and keep the bandage damp. You understand that?”

The man nodded. He was a tall youngster, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old, with raven-black hair, pale skin, dark eyes, and an expression of befuddlement, as if he had no comprehension of what fate had just done to him. He kept looking from Wadsworth to James Fletcher, then back to Wadsworth again. He had been stripped of his red coat and wore nothing but shirt and kilt. “Where are you from, soldier?” Wadsworth asked.

The man answered, but his accent was so strong that even when he repeated the name Wadsworth did not understand. “You’ll be properly looked after,” Wadsworth said. “In time you’ll go to Boston.” The man spoke again, though what he said was impossible to tell. “When the war is over,” Wadsworth said slowly, as if he was talking to someone who did not speak English. He assumed the Scotsman did, but he was not sure. “When the war is over you will go home. Unless, of course, you choose to stay here. America welcomes good men.”

James Fletcher offered the prisoner a canteen of water which the man took and drank greedily. His lips were stained by the powder from the cartridges he had bitten during the fight, and tearing the cartridges open with the teeth left a man’s mouth dry as dust. He handed back the canteen and asked a question that neither Fletcher nor Wadsworth could understand or answer. “Can you stand?” Wadsworth asked.

The man answered by standing up, though he winced when he put any weight on his injured left leg. “Help him down to the beach,” Wadsworth ordered Fletcher, “then find me up here again.”

It was midday. Smoke rose all along the height of the bluff where men had made campfires to brew tea. The British cannon still fired from the fort, but their rate of fire was much slower now. Wadsworth reckoned there were at least ten minutes between each shot, and none did any damage because the rebels were staying out of sight among the trees, which meant the enemy had nothing to aim at and their fire, Wadsworth supposed, was a mere message of defiance.

He walked southwards to where the marines held Dyce’s Head. The gunfire in the harbor had died, leaving long skeins of smoke drifting slowly across the sun-rippled water. The Warren, her bows scarred by round shot, was seeking shelter west of the bluff where the three captured British cannon were now pointing at the fort under the guard of Lieutenant William Dennis.

Dennis smiled when his old schoolmaster appeared. “I’m delighted to see you unscathed, sir,” he greeted Wadsworth.

“As I am you, Lieutenant,” Wadsworth said. “Are you thinking of using these cannon?”

“I wish we could,” Dennis said, and pointed to a fire-scarred pit. “They exploded their ready magazine, sir. They should have spiked the guns, but they didn’t. So we’ve sent for more powder bags.”

“I’m sorry about Captain Welch,” Wadsworth said.

“It’s almost too hard to believe,” Dennis said in a puzzled tone.

“I didn’t know him well. Hardly at all! But he inspired confidence.”

“We thought him indestructible,” Dennis said, then made an uncertain gesture towards the west. “The men want to bury him up here, sir, where he led the fight.”

Wadsworth looked to where Dennis pointed and saw a body shrouded by two blankets. He realized it had to be Welch’s corpse. “That seems fitting,” he said.

“When we take the fort, sir,” Dennis said, “it should be called Fort Welch.”

“I have a suspicion,” Wadsworth replied drily, “that we must call it Fort Lovell instead.”

Dennis smiled at Wadsworth’s tone, then reached into his tailcoat pocket. “The book I was going to give you, sir,” he said, holding out the volume by Cesare Beccaria.

Wadsworth was about to express his thanks, then saw that the book’s cover had been ripped and the pages churned into a mangled mess. “Good Lord!” he said. “A bullet?” The book was unreadable, nothing but torn paper now.

“I hadn’t finished it,” Dennis said ruefully, trying to separate the pages.

“A bullet?”

“Yes, sir. But it missed me, which is a good omen, I think.”

“I pray so.”

“I’ll find you another copy,” Dennis said, then summoned a lean, hatchet-faced marine a few paces away. “Sergeant Sykes! Didn’t you say my books were only good for lighting fires?”

“True, sir,” Sykes said, “I did.”

“Here!” Dennis tossed the ruined book to the sergeant. “Kindling!”

Sykes grinned. “Best use for a book, Lieutenant,” he said, then looked at Peleg Wadsworth. “Are we going to attack the fort, General?”

“I’m certain we will,” Wadsworth said. He had encouraged Lovell to order an attack late in the day when the setting sun would be in the eyes of the fort’s defenders, but so far Lovell had not committed himself. Lovell wanted to be certain that the American lines were secure from any British counterattack before launching his troops at the fort, and so he had ordered the rebel force to dig trenches and throw up earth walls at the wood’s edge. The marines had ignored the order. “Aren’t you supposed to be digging a trench here?” Wadsworth asked.

“Lord above, sir,” Dennis said, “we don’t need a trench. We’re here to attack them!”

Wadsworth wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment, but he could hardly express his agreement without seeming disloyal to Lovell. Instead he borrowed a telescope from Dennis and used it to gaze at the small British gun emplacement that was now the nearest enemy post. He could not see the battery clearly because it was half-hidden by a cornfield, but he could see enough. The earthwork was a semicircle a small distance up the slope from the harbor and halfway between the marines and the fort. The battery’s cannon were facing southwest, towards the harbor entrance, but Wadsworth supposed they could easily be levered around to face west and so rip into any infantry attacking from Dyce’s Head. “You think those guns are a menace, sir?” Dennis asked, seeing where Wadsworth was looking.

“They could be,” Wadsworth said.

“We can get close,” Dennis said confidently. “They’ll not see us in the corn. Fifty men could take that battery easily.”

“We may not need to capture it,” Wadsworth said. He had swung the glass to study the fort. The walls were so low that the redcoats behind it were exposed from the waist upwards, though even as he watched he could see men lifting a huge log to heighten the rampart. Then his view was blotted out by whiteness and he lowered the telescope to see that a cannon had fired, only this gun smoke was blossoming at the center of the fort’s western wall while all the previous smoke had jetted from the bastions at either end of that curtain wall. “Is that a new cannon?”

“Must be,” Dennis said.

Wadsworth was not a man who liked curses, but he was tempted to swear. Lovell was fortifying the heights and the British, given the precious gift of time, were raising the fort’s wall and placing more cannon on those ramparts, and every hour that passed would make the fort more difficult to attack. “I trust you and your marines will stay here,” he said to Dennis, “and join the attack.”

“I hope so too, sir, but that’s the commodore’s decision.”

“I suppose it is,” Wadsworth said.

“He sailed halfway into the entrance,” Dennis said, “hammered the enemy for a half hour and then sailed out.” He sounded disappointed, as if he had expected more from the rebels’ flagship. He looked down at the British ships, which had just started firing at the rebel battery on Cross Island again. “We need heavy guns up here,” he said.

“If we take the fort,” Wadsworth said, and wished he had said when instead of if, “we won’t need any more batteries.”

Because once the Americans captured the fort the three British sloops were doomed. And the fort was pathetic, a scar in the earth, not even half-built yet, but Solomon Lovell, after his triumph in taking the high ground, had decided to dig defenses rather than make an assault. Wadsworth gave Dennis back the glass and went north to find Lovell. They must attack, he thought, they must attack.

But there was no attack. The long summer day passed and the rebels made their earthworks and the British guns pounded the trees and General Lovell ordered a space cleared at the top of the bluff to be his headquarters. Lieutenant-Colonel Revere, neat in a clean shirt, discovered an easier route from the beach, one that curved about the northern end of the bluff, and his gunners cut down trees to make that track. By dusk they had hauled four guns to the summit, but it was too late to emplace the weapons and so they were parked under the trees. Mosquitoes plagued the troops who, lacking tents, slept in the open. A few made crude shelters of branches.

Night fell. The last British cannon-shot of the day lit the cleared ridge smoky red with its flash and flickered long dark shadows from the jagged stumps. The gun smoke drifted northeast and then an uneasy silence fell on Majabigwaduce.

“Tomorrow,” General Lovell spoke from beside a fire in his newly cleared headquarters, “we shall make a grand attack.”

“Good,” Wadsworth said firmly.

“Is this beef?” Lovell asked, spooning from a pewter dish.

“Salt pork, sir,” Filmer, the general’s servant, answered.

“It’s very good,” Lovell said in a slightly dubious tone, “will you take some, Wadsworth?”

“The marines were kind enough to give me some British beef, sir.”

“How thoughtful of our enemies to feed us,” Lovell said, amused. He watched as Wadsworth shrugged off his Continental Army jacket, settled by the fire, and produced a needle, thread, and a button that had evidently come loose. “Don’t you have a man to do that sort of thing?”

“I’m happy to look after myself, sir,” Wadsworth said. He licked the thread and managed to fiddle it through the needle’s eye. “I thought Colonel Revere did well to make the new road up the bluff.”

“Did he not do well!” Lovell responded enthusiastically. “I wanted to tell him so, but it seems he went back to the Samuel at dusk.”

Wadsworth began reattaching the button and the simple task brought a sudden vision of his wife, Elizabeth. It was a vision of her darning socks beside the evening fire, her workbasket on the wide hearthstone, and Wadsworth suddenly missed her so keenly that his eyes watered. “I hope Colonel Revere brings howitzers,” he said, hoping no one around the fire had seen the gleam in his eyes. Howitzers, unlike cannon, lobbed their missiles in high arcs so that the gunners could shoot safely over the heads of the attacking troops.

“We only have one howitzer,” Major Todd said.

“We need it for the attack tomorrow,” Wadsworth said.

“I’m sure the colonel knows his business,” Lovell said hurriedly, “but there won’t be any attack unless I receive assurances from Commodore Saltonstall that our gallant ships will again advance through the harbor mouth.”

A small breath of wind dipped the woodsmoke to swirl around Wadsworth’s face. He blinked, then frowned at the general through the fire’s dancing flames. “No attack, sir?” he asked.

“Not unless the fleet attacks at the same time,” Lovell replied.

“Do we need them to do that, sir?” Wadsworth asked. “If we attack on land I cannot see the enemy ships interfering with us. Not if we keep our troops off the southern slope and away from their broadsides?”

“I want the British marines kept aboard their ships,” Lovell said firmly.

“I’m told the Warren is damaged,” Wadsworth said. He was appalled that Lovell should demand a simultaneous attack. There was no need! All the rebels had to do was attack on land and the fort would surely fall, British marines or no British marines.

“We have plenty of ships,” Lovell said dismissively. “And I want our ships and men, our soldiers and sailors, arm in arm, advancing irresistibly to earn their laurels.” He smiled. “I’m sure the commodore will oblige us.”

Tomorrow.

Thursday brought a clear sky and a gentle southerly wind that ruffled the bay. Longboats brought the skippers of all the warships to the Warren where Commodore Saltonstall welcomed them with an exaggerated and atypical courtesy. He had directed that all the visiting captains must board the Warren by the forrard starboard gangway because that entranceway allowed them a good view of the blood-smeared deck and of the cannon-shattered base of the mainmast. He wanted the visiting captains to imagine what damage the enemy could do to their own ships, none of which was as large or powerful as the Warren.

Once they had seen the damage they were escorted to Saltonstall’s cabin where the long table was set with glasses and bottles of rum. The commodore invited the captains to sit and took amusement from the discomfort that many of them plainly felt at the unaccustomed elegance of the furnishings. The table was polished maple and at night could be illuminated by spermaceti candles, which now stood unlit in elaborate silver sticks. Two of the transom windows had been broken by a British round shot and Saltonstall had deliberately left the shattered panes and splintered frames as reminders to the captains what their own ships might suffer if they insisted on an attack. “We must congratulate the army,” Saltonstall began the council of war, “for their success yesterday in dislodging the enemy from the heights, though I deeply regret that Captain Welch was lost in that success.”

A few men murmured expressions of sympathy, but most watched Saltonstall warily. He was known as a supercilious, distant man, and a man to whom they had jointly sent a letter chiding him for failing to press home his attack on Mowat’s ships, yet now he was apparently affable. “Do partake of the rum,” he said, waving carelessly at the dark bottles, “provided by our enemies. It was taken from a merchantman off Nantucket.”

“Never too early in the day for a tot,” Nathaniel West of the Black Prince said, and poured himself a generous glass. “Your health, Commodore.”

“I appreciate your sentiment,” Saltonstall said silkily, “just as I would appreciate your advice.” He waved around the table, indicating that he sought every man’s opinion. “Our army,” he said, “now commands the fort and may attack when and how it wishes. Once the fort has fallen, as it must, then the enemy’s position in the harbor is untenable. Their ships must either sail out into our guns or else surrender.”

“Or scuttle themselves,” James Johnston of the Pallas said.

“Or scuttle themselves,” Saltonstall agreed. “Now, I know there is an opinion that we should preempt that choice by sailing into the harbor and attacking the enemy directly. It is the propriety of that action I wish to discuss.” He paused and there was an embarrassed silence in the cabin, every man there remembering the letter they had jointly signed. That letter had chided Saltonstall for not sailing into the harbor and bringing on a general action with the three sloops, an action that surely would have resulted in an American victory. Saltonstall let their embarrassment stretch for an uncomfortable time, then smiled. “Allow me to present you with the circumstances, gentlemen. The enemy have three armed ships arrayed in line facing the harbor entrance. Therefore any ship which enters the harbor will be raked by their combined broadsides. In addition, the enemy has a grand battery in the fort and a second battery on the slope beneath the fort. Those combined guns will have free play on any attacking ships. I need hardly tell you that the leading vessels will suffer considerable damage and endure grievous casualties from the enemy’s cannonade.”

“As you did yesterday, sir,” Captain Philip Brown of the Continental Navy’s brig Diligent, said loyally.

“As we did,” Saltonstall agreed.

“But the enemy will be hurt too,” John Cathcart of Tyrannicide said.

“The enemy will indeed be hurt,” Saltonstall agreed, “but are we not persuaded that the enemy is doomed anyway? Our infantry are poised to assault the fort and, when the fort surrenders, so must the ships. On the other hand,” he paused to add emphasis to what he was about to say, “the defeat of the ships in no way forces the fort to surrender. Do I make myself plain? Take the fort and the ships are doomed. Take the ships and the fort survives. Our business here is to remove the British troops, to which end the fort must be taken. The enemy ships, gentlemen, are as dependant on the fort as are the British redcoats.”

None of the men about the table were cowards, but half of them were in business and their business was privateering. Nine captains at the table either owned the ship they commanded or else possessed a high share in the vessel’s ownership, and a privateer did not make a profit by fighting enemy warships. Privateers pursued lightly armed merchantmen. If a privateer was lost then the owner’s investment was lost with it, and those captains, weighting the chances of high casualties and expensive damage to their ships, began to see the wisdom of Saltonstall’s suggestion. They had all seen the bloodied deck and splintered mast of the Warren and feared seeing worse on their own expensive ships. So why not allow the army to capture the fort? It was as good as captured anyway, and the commodore was plainly right that the British ships would have no choice but to surrender once the fort fell.

Lieutenant George Little of the Massachusetts Navy was more belligerent. “It isn’t to do with the fort,” he insisted, “it’s to do with killing the bastards and taking their ships.”

“Which ships will be ours,” Saltonstall said, miraculously keeping his temper, “when the fort falls.”

“Which it must,” Philip Brown said.

“Which it must,” Saltonstall agreed. He forced himself to look into Little’s angry eyes. “Suppose twenty of your men are killed in an attack on the ships, and after the battle the fort still survives. To what purpose, then, did your men die?”

“We came here to kill the enemy,” Little said.

“We came here to defeat the enemy,” Saltonstall corrected him, and a murmur of agreement sounded in the cabin. The commodore sensed the mood and took a leaf from General Lovell’s book. “You all expressed your sentiments to me in a letter,” he said, “and I appreciate the zeal that letter displayed, but I would humbly suggest,” he paused, having surprised even himself by using the word “humbly,” “that the letter was sent without a full appreciation of the tactical circumstances that confront us. So permit me to put a motion to the vote. Considering the enemy positions, would it not be more prudent to allow the army to complete its success without risking our ships in what must prove to be an attack irrelevant to the expedition’s stated purpose?”

The assembled captains hesitated, but one by one the privateer owners voted against any attack through the harbor entrance and, once those men gave the lead, the rest followed, all except for George Little who neither voted for nor against, but just scowled at the table.

“I thank you, gentlemen,” Saltonstall said, hiding his satisfaction. These men had possessed the temerity to write him a letter which implicitly suggested cowardice, and yet, faced with the facts of the situation, they had overwhelmingly voted against the very sentiments their letter had expressed. The commodore despised them. “I shall inform General Lovell,” Saltonstall said, “of the Council’s decision.”

So the warships would not attack.

And General Lovell was digging earthworks in the woods to repel a British attack.

And General McLean was strengthening the fort.

Captain Welch was buried close to where he had died on Dyce’s Head. Marines dug the grave. They had already buried six of their companions lower down the slope where the soil was easier to dig, and at first they had put Welch’s corpse in that common grave, but a sergeant had ordered the captain’s body removed before the grave was filled with earth. “He took the high ground,” the sergeant said, “and he should hold it forever.”

So a new grave had been hacked on the rocky headland. Peleg Wadsworth came to see the corpse lowered into the hole and with him was the Reverend Murray who spoke a few somber words in the gray dawn. A cutlass and a pistol were laid on the blanket-shrouded corpse. “So he can kill the red-coated bastards in hell,” Sergeant Sykes explained. The Reverend Murray smiled bravely and Wadsworth nodded approval. Rocks were heaped on the captain’s grave so that scavening animals could not scratch him out of the ground he had captured.

Once the brief ceremony was over Wadsworth walked to the tree line and gazed at the fort. Lieutenant Dennis joined him. “The wall’s higher today,” Dennis said.

“It is.”

“But we can scale it,” Dennis said robustly.

Wadsworth used a small telescope to examine the British work. Redcoats were deepening the western ditch that faced the American lines and using the excavated soil to heighten the wall, but the farther wall, the eastern rampart, was still little more than a scrape in the dirt. “If we could get behind them . . .” he mused aloud.

“Oh we can!” Dennis said.

“You think so?”

A thunder of gunfire obliterated the marine lieutenant’s reply. The semicircular British battery on the harbor’s lower slope had fired its cannon across the harbor towards Cross Island. No sooner had the sound faded than the three enemy sloops began firing. “Is the commodore attacking?” Wadsworth asked.

The two men moved to the southern crest and saw that two privateers were firing through the harbor entrance, though neither ship was making any attempt to sail through that narrow gap. They fired at long range and the three sloops shot back. “Gun practice,” Dennis said dismissively.

“You think we can get behind the fort?” Wadsworth asked.

“Capture that battery, sir,” Dennis said, pointing down at the semicircle of earth that protected the British cannon. “Once we have that we can make our way along the harbor shore. There’s plenty of cover!” The route along the harbor shore wandered past cornfields, log piles, houses, and barns, all of which could conceal men from the guns of the fort and the broadsides of the sloops.

“Young Fletcher would guide us,” Wadsworth said. James Fletcher had rescued his fishing boat, Felicity, and was using it to carry wounded men to the hospital the rebels had established on Wasaumkeag Point on the far shore of the bay. “But I still think a direct assault would be best,” Wadsworth added.

“Straight at the fort, sir?”

“Why not? Let’s attack before they make that nearer wall any higher.” A cannon fired to the north, the noise sudden, close and loud. It was an eighteen-pounder of the Massachusetts Artillery Regiment and it fired from the trees on the high ground at the redcoats working to raise the fort’s curtain wall. The sound of the cannon cheered Wadsworth. “We won’t need to get behind them now,” he said to Dennis. “Colonel Revere’s guns will batter that rampart down to nothing!”

“So we attack along the ridge?” Dennis asked.

“It’s the simplest way,” Wadsworth said, “and I have a mind that simplicity is good.”

“Captain Welch would approve, sir.”

“And I shall recommend it,” Wadsworth said.

They were so close, the fort was unfinished, and all they needed to do was attack.

“I hate New York,” Sir George Collier said. He thought New York a slum; a fetid, overcrowded, ill-mannered, pestilential, humid hell on earth. “We should just give it to the bloody rebels,” he snarled, “let the bastards stew here.”

“Please stay still, Sir George,” the doctor said.

“Oh Christ in his britches, man, get on with it! I thought Lisbon was hell on earth and it’s a goddamn paradise compared to this filthy bloody town.”

“Allow me to draw your thigh?” the doctor said.

“It’s even worse than Bristol,” Sir George growled.

Admiral Sir George Collier was a small, irascible and unpleasant man who commanded the British fleet on the American coast. He was sick, which is why he was ashore in New York, and the doctor was attempting to allay the fever by drawing blood. He was using one of the newest and finest pieces of medical equipment from London, a scarifier, which he now cocked so that the twenty-four ground-steel blades disappeared smoothly into their gleaming housing. “Are you ready, Sir George?”

“Don’t blather, man. Just do it.”

“There will be a slight sensation of discomfort, Sir George,” the doctor said, concealing his pleasure at that thought, then placed the metal box against the patient’s scrawny thigh and pulled the trigger. The spring-loaded blades leaped out of their slits to pierce Sir George’s skin and start a flow of blood which the doctor staunched with a piece of Turkey cloth. “I would wish to see more blood, Sir George,” the doctor said.

“Don’t be a bloody fool, man. You’ve drained me dry.”

“You should wrap yourself in flannel, Sir George.”

“In this damned heat?” Sir George’s foxlike face was glistening with sweat. Winter in New York was brutally cold, the summer was a steamy hell, and in between it was merely unbearable. On the wall of his quarters, next to an etching of his home in England, was a framed poster advertising that London’s Drury Lane Theatre was presenting “Selima and Azor, a Musical Delectation in Five Acts written by Sir George Collier.” London, he thought, now that was a city! Decent theater, well-dressed whores, fine clubs, and no damned humidity. A theater owner in New York had thought to please Sir George by offering to present Selima and Azor on his stage, but Sir George had forbidden it. To hear his songs murdered by caterwauling Americans? The very thought was disgusting.

“Come!” he shouted in response to a knock on the door. A naval lieutenant entered the room. The newcomer shuddered at the blood smearing Sir George’s bare thigh, then averted his eyes and stood respectfully just inside the door. “Well, Forester?” Sir George snarled.

“I regret to inform you, sir, that the Iris won’t be ready for sea,” Lieutenant Forester said.

“Her copper?”

“Indeed, sir,” Forester said, relieved that his bad news had not been greeted by anger.

“Pity,” Sir George grunted. HMS Iris was a fine 32-gun frigate that Sir George had captured two years previously. Back then she had been called the Hancock, an American ship, but though the Royal Navy usually kept the names of captured warships Sir George would be damned and condemned to eternal hell in New York before he allowed a British naval ship to bear the name of some filthy rebel traitor, and so the Hancock had been renamed for a splendid London actress. “Legs as long as a spritsail yard,” Sir George said wistfully.

“Sir?” Lieutenant Forester asked.

“Mind your own damned business.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Copper, you say?”

“At least two weeks’ work, sir.”

Sir George grunted. “Blonde?”

“Ready, sir.”

“Virginia?”

“Fully manned and seaworthy, sir.”

“Write them both orders,” Sir George said. The Blonde and Virginia were also 32-gun frigates and the Blonde, usefully, had just returned from the Penobscot River, which meant Captain Barkley knew the waters. “Grayhound? Camille? Galatea?”

“The Grayhound is provisioning, Sir George. The Galatea and Camille both need crewmen.”

“I want all three ready to sail in two days. Send out the press gangs.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The Grayhound carried twenty-eight guns, while the Camille and Galatea were smaller frigates with just twenty guns apiece.

“The Otter,” Sir George said, “to carry despatches.” The Otter was a 14-gun brig.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Sir George watched the doctor bandage his thigh. “And the Raisonable,” he said, smiling wolfishly.

“The Raisonable, Sir George?” Forester asked in astonishment.

“You heard me! Tell Captain Evans she’s to be ready for sea in two days. And tell him he’ll be flying my flag.”

The Raisonable was a captured French ship, and she was also a proper warship fit to stand in the line of battle. She carried sixty-four guns, the heaviest of them thirty-two pounders, and the rebels had nothing afloat that could match the Raisonable even though she was one of the smallest ships of the line in the Royal Navy.

“You’re going to sea, Sir George?” the doctor asked nervously.

“I’m going to sea.”

“But your health!”

“Oh, stop twittering, you imbecile. How can it be bad for me? Even the Dead Sea’s healthier than New York.”

Sir George was going to sea, and he was taking seven ships led by a vast, slab-sided battleship that could blow any rebel warship clean out of the water with a single broadside.

And the fleet would sail east. To the Penobscot River and Penobscot Bay and Majabigwaduce.

Excerpts from Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell’s orders to his troops, Penobscot, July 30th, 1779:The General is much alarm’d at the loose and disorderly inattentive Behaviour of the Camp. . . . As the Success of Arms under God depends principally on good Subordination the General expects that every Officer and Soldier who has the least Spark of honor left will endeavor to have his Orders put in Execution and that Colonel Revere and the Corps under his Command incamp with the Army in future on Shore, in order not only to strengthen the Lines but to manage the Cannon.

Excerpts from a letter sent by General George Washington to the Council of Massachusetts. August 3rd, 1779:Head Quarters, West Point.I have Just received a Letter from Lord Stirling stationed in the Jerseys dated yesterday . . . by which it appears the Ships of War at New York have all put to sea since. I thought it my duty to communicate this Intelligence that the Vessells employed in this expedition to Penobscot may be put upon their Guard, as it is probable enough that these Ships may be destined against them and if they should be surprised the consequences would be desagreeable. I have the honor to be with very great respect and esteem, Gentlemen Your Most Obedient ServantGeorge Washington

From the deposition of John Lymburner to Justice of the Peace Joseph Hibbert, 12th May 1788:[I was] taken prisoner by the Americans at the Siege of Penobscot, and was in close confinement . . . we were treated very severely for adhering to the British troops, called Tories and Refugees, was threatened to be hanged as soon as they had taken Fort George.

Chapter Nine

“Where the devil is Revere?” Lovell asked. He had asked the question a dozen times in the two days since he had captured the heights of Majabigwaduce and each time there had been increasing irritation in his usually calm voice. “Has he attended a single council of war?”

“He likes to sleep aboard the Samuel,” William Todd said.

“Sleep? It’s broad daylight!” That was an exaggeration, for it was only a few minutes since the sun had lit the eastern fog bright.

“I believe,” Todd said carefully, “that he finds his quarters aboard the Samuel more amenable to his comfort.” He was polishing his spectacles on the skirt of his coat and his face looked strangely vulnerable without them.

“We’re not here for comfort,” Lovell said.

“Indeed we are not, sir,” Todd said.

“And his men?”

“They sleep on the Samuel too, sir,” Todd said, carefully hooking the cleaned spectacles over his ears.

“It won’t do,” Lovell exploded, “it will not do!”

“Indeed it will not, General,” Major Todd agreed, then hesitated. Fog made the treetops vague and inhibited the gunners on Cross Island and aboard the British ships so that a kind of quiet enveloped Majabigwaduce. Smoke drifted among the trees from the campfires on which troops boiled water for tea. “If you approve, sir,” Todd said carefully, watching Lovell pacing up and down in front of the crude shelter made of branches and sod that was his sleeping quarters, “I could advert to Colonel Revere’s absence in the daily orders?”

“You can advert?” Lovell asked curtly. He stopped his pacing and turned to glare at the major. “Advert?”

“You could issue a requirement in the daily orders that the colonel and his men must sleep ashore?” Todd suggested. He doubted Lovell would agree, because any such order would be recognized throughout the army as a very public reprimand.

“A very good idea,” Lovell said, “an excellent notion. Do it. And draft me a letter to the colonel as well!”

Before Lovell could change his mind Peleg Wadsworth came to the clearing. The younger general was wearing a greatcoat buttoned against the dawn chill. “Good morning!” he greeted Lovell and Todd cheerfully.

“An ill-fitting coat, General,” Major Todd observed with ponderous amusement.

“It belonged to my father, Major. He was a big man.”

“Did you know Revere sleeps aboard his ship?” Lovell demanded indignantly.

“I did know, sir,” Wadsworth said, “but I thought he had your permission.”

“He has no such thing. We’re not here on a pleasure cruise! You want tea?” Lovell waved towards the fire where his servant crouched by a pot. “The water must have boiled.”

“I’d appreciate a word first, sir?”

“Of course, of course. In private?”

“If you please, sir.” Wadsworth said and the two generals walked a few paces west to where the trees thinned and from where they could gaze over the fog-haunted waters of Penobscot Bay. The topmasts of the transport ships appeared above the lowest and densest layer of fog like splinters in a snowbank. “What would happen if we all slept aboard our ships, eh?” Lovell asked, still indignant.

“I did mention the matter to Colonel Revere,” Wadsworth said.

“You did?”

“Yesterday, sir. I said he should move his quarters ashore.”

“And his response?”

Fury, Wadsworth thought. Revere had responded like a man insulted. “The guns can’t fire at night,” he had spat at Wadsworth, “so why man them at night? I know how to command my regiment!” Wadsworth chided himself for having let the matter slide, but at this moment he had a greater concern. “The colonel disagreed with me, sir,” he said tonelessly, “but I wished to speak of something else.”

“Of course, yes, whatever is on your mind.” Lovell frowned towards the topmasts. “Sleeping aboard his ship!”

Wadsworth looked south to where the fog now lay like a great river of whiteness between the hills bordering the Penobscot River. “Should the enemy send reinforcements, sir’” he began.

“They’ll come upriver, certainly,” Lovell interjected, following Wadsworth’s gaze.

“And discover our fleet, sir,” Wadsworth continued.

“Of course they would, yes,” Lovell said as if the point was not very important.

“Sir,” Wadsworth was urgent now. “If the enemy come in force they’ll be among our fleet like wolves in a flock. Might I urge a precaution?”

“A precaution,” Lovell repeated as if the word was unfamiliar.

“Permit me to explore upriver, sir,” Wadsworth said, pointing north to where the Penobscot River flowed into the wider bay. “Let me find and fortify a place to which we can retreat if the enemy comes. Young Fletcher knows the upper river. He tells me it narrows, sir, and twists between high banks. If it was necessary, sir, we could take the fleet upriver and shelter behind a bluff. A cannon emplacement at the river bend will check any enemy pursuit.”

“Find and fortify, eh?” Lovell said, more to buy time than as a coherent response. He turned and stared into the northern fog. “You’d make a fort?”

“I would certainly emplace some guns, sir.”

“In earthworks?”

“The batteries must be made defensible. The enemy will surely bring troops.”

“If they come,” Lovell said dubiously.

“It’s prudent, sir, to prepare for the least desirable eventuality.”

Lovell grimaced, then placed a fatherly hand on Wadsworth’s shoulder. “You worry too much, Wadsworth. That’s a good thing! We should be worried about eventualities.” He nodded sagely. “But I do assure you we shall capture the fort long before any more redcoats arrive.” He saw Wadsworth was about to speak so hurried on. “You’d require men to make an emplacement and we cannot afford to detach men to dig a fort we may never need! We shall require every man we have to make the assault once the commodore agrees to enter the harbor.”

“If he agrees,” Wadsworth said drily.

“Oh, he will, I’m sure he will. Haven’t you seen? The enemy’s been driven back yet again! It’s only a matter of time now!”

“Driven back?” Wadsworth asked.

“The sentries say so,” Lovell exulted, “indeed they do.” Mowat’s three ships, constantly battered by Colonel Revere’s cannon on Cross Island, had moved still farther eastwards during the night. Their topmasts, hung with the British flags, were all that were presently visible and the sentries on Dyce’s Head reckoned that those topmasts were now almost a mile away from the harbor entrance. “The commodore doesn’t have to fight his way into the harbor now,” Lovell said happily, “because we’ve driven them away. By God, we have! Almost the whole harbor belongs to us now!”

“But even if the commodore doesn’t enter the harbor, sir’” Wadsworth began.

“Oh, I know!” the older man interrupted. “You think we can take the fort without the navy’s help, but we can’t, Wadsworth, we can’t.” Lovell repeated all his old arguments, how the British ships would bombard the attacking troops and how the British marines would reinforce the garrison, and Wadsworth nodded politely though he believed none of it. He watched Lovell’s earnest face. The man was eminent now, a landowner, a selectman, a churchwarden, and a legislator, but the schoolmaster in Wadsworth was trying to imagine Solomon Lovell as a boy, and he conjured an image of a big, clumsy lad who would earnestly try to be helpful, but never be a rule breaker. Lovell was declaring his belief that Brigadier McLean’s men outnumbered his own. “Oh, I realize you disagree, Wadsworth,” Lovell said, “but you young men can be headstrong. In truth we face a malevolent and a mighty foe, and to overcome him we must harness all our oxen together!”

“We must attack, sir,” Wadsworth said forcefully.

Lovell laughed, though without much humor. “One minute you tell me to prepare ourselves for defeat, and the next moment you wish me to attack!”

“The one will happen without the other, sir.”

Lovell frowned as he worked out what Wadsworth meant, then shook his head dismissively. “We shall conquer!” he said, then described his grand idea that the commodore’s ships should sail majestically into the harbor, their cannons blazing, while all along the ridge the rebel army advanced on a fort being hammered by naval gunfire. “Just imagine it,” he said enthusiastically, “all our warships bombarding the fort! My goodness, but we’ll just stroll across those ramparts!”

“I’d rather we attacked in tomorrow’s dawn,” Wadsworth said, “in the fog. We can close on the enemy in the fog, sir, and take them by surprise.”

“The commodore can’t shift in the fog,” Lovell said dismissively. “Quite impossible!”

Wadsworth looked eastwards. The fog seemed to have thickened so that the topmasts of only one ship were visible, and it had to be a ship because there were three topmasts, each crossed by a topgallant yard. Three crosses. Wadsworth did not think it mattered whether the commodore attacked or not, or rather he thought it should not matter because Lovell had the men to assault the fort whether the commodore attacked or not. It was like chess, Wadsworth thought, and had a sudden image of his wife smiling as she took his castle with her bishop. The fort was the king, and all Lovell had to do was move one piece to acheive checkmate, but the general and Saltonstall insisted on a more complex plan. They wanted bishops and knights zigzagging all over the board, and Wadsworth knew he could never persuade either man to take the simple route. So, he thought, make their complicated moves work, and make them work soon before the British brought new pieces to the board. “Has the commodore agreed to enter the harbor?” he asked Lovell.

“Not exactly agreed,” Lovell said uncomfortably, “not yet.”

“But you believe he will, sir?”

“I’m sure he will,” Lovell said, “in time he will.”

Time was precisely what the rebels lacked, or so Wadsworth believed. “If we control the harbor entrance’” he began and was again interrupted by Lovell.

“It’s that wretched battery on the harbor foreshore,” the general said, and Wadsworth knew he was referring to the semicircular earthwork the British had dug to cover the harbor entrance. That battery was now the closest enemy post.

“So if the battery was captured, sir,” Wadsworth suggested, “then the commodore would take advantage?”

“I would hope he would,” Lovell said.

“So why don’t I prepare a plan to capture it?” Wadsworth asked.

Lovell stared at Wadsworth as though the younger man had just wrought a miracle. “Would you do that?” the general asked, immensely pleased. “Yes, do that! Then we can advance together. Soldier and sailor, marine and militia, together! How soon can you have such a plan? By noon, perhaps?”

“I’m sure I can, sir.”

“Then I shall propose your plan at this afternoon’s council,” Lovell said, “and urge every man present to vote for it. My goodness, if we capture that battery then the commodore . . .” Lovell checked whatever he might have said because there was an abrupt crackle of musketry. It rose in intensity and was answered by a cannon shot. “What the devil are those rogues doing now?” Lovell asked plaintively and hurried away eastwards to find out. Wadsworth followed.

As gunfire splintered the morning.

“You can’t give the enemy any rest,” Brigadier McLean had said. The Scotsman had been astonished that the rebels had not assaulted the fort, and even more surprised when it became clear that General Lovell was digging defenses on the high ground. McLean now knew his opponent’s name, learned from an American deserter who had crept across the ridgetop at night and called aloud to the sentries from the abatis. McLean had questioned the man, who, trying to be helpful, expressed his belief that Lovell had brought two thousand troops to the peninsula. “It may be even more, sir,” the man said.

“Or fewer,” McLean retorted.

“Yes, sir,” the miserable wretch had said, “but it looked like plenty enough at Townsend, sir,” which was no help at all. The deserter was a man in his forties who claimed he had been pressed into the militia ranks and had no wish to fight. “I just want to go home, sir,” he said plaintively.

“As do we all,” McLean had said and put the man to work in the hospital’s cookhouse.

The rebel guns had opened fire the day after the high ground was lost. The rate of fire was not high, and many of the balls were wasted, but the fort was a big target and a near one, and so the big eighteen-pounder balls thrashed into the newly made rampart, scattering dirt and timber. The new storehouse was hit repeatedly until its gabled roof was virtually demolished, but so far no shot had managed to hit any of McLean’s own cannon. Six were now mounted on the western wall and Captain Fielding was keeping up a steady fire at the distant tree line. The rebels, rather than mount their cannon at the edge of the woods, had emplaced them deep inside the trees, then cut down corridors to give the cannons avenues of fire. “You might not hit much,” McLean had told Fielding, “but you’ll keep them worried and you’ll hide us in smoke.”

It was not enough to just worry the enemy, McLean knew they had to be kept off-balance and so he had ordered Lieutenant Caffrae to assemble forty of the liveliest men into a skirmishing company. Caffrae was a sensible and intelligent young man who liked his new orders. He added a pair of drummer boys to his unit and four fife players, and the company used the fog, or else the trees to the peninsula’s north, to get close to the enemy lines. Once there the small band played “Yankee-Doodle,” a tune that for some reason annoyed the rebels. The skirmishers would shout orders to imaginary men and shoot at the rebel trenches, and whenever a large party of the enemy came to challenge Caffrae’s company he would withdraw under cover, only to reappear somewhere else to taunt and to shoot again. Caffrae, temporarily promoted to captain, danced in front of Lovell’s men. He provoked, he challenged. He would sometimes go at night to disturb the rebel sleep. Lovell’s men were to be given neither rest nor comfort, but be constantly harassed and alarmed.

“Let me go, sir,” Lieutenant Moore pleaded with McLean.

“You will, John, you will,” McLean promised. Caffrae was out in the ground between the lines and his men had just fired a volley to wake the morning. The skirmishers’ fifes were trilling their mocking tune, which always provoked a wild response of ill-aimed musketry from the trees where the rebels sheltered. McLean stared westwards in an attempt to discover Caffrae’s position among the wisps of fog that slowly cleared from the heights, and instead saw the rebels’ gun corridors choke with sudden smoke as the enemy guns began their daily fire. The first shots fell short, plowing into the ridge to throw up plumes of soil and wood chips.

The rebel gunfire was a nuisance, but McLean was grateful that it was no more than that. If the Scotsman had been commanding the besiegers he would have ordered his gunners to concentrate the balls at one point of the defenses and, when that place had been thoroughly destroyed, to move their aim slightly left or right and so demolish the fort systematically. Instead the enemy gunners fired at whatever they pleased, or else they just aimed generally at the fort, and McLean was finding it a simple enough task to repair whatever damage the balls did to the western curtain wall and its flanking bastions. Yet, if the gunfire was not proving as destructive as he had feared, it was still eroding his men’s confidence. Sentries had to stand with their heads exposed above the rampart if they were to watch the enemy and, on the very first day of the rebel bombardment, one such sentry had been hit by a cannon-ball that had shattered his head into a mess of blood, bone, and brains. The ball had then struck the remnants of the storehouse gable and come to rest, still plastered with bloody hair, against a water butt. Other men had been injured, mostly by stones or splinters jarred from the rampart by a cannon-ball. The rebels were using an howitzer too, a weapon McLean feared more than their largest cannon, but the gunners were inexpert and the howitzer dropped its exploding shot randomly across the ridgetop.

“I have a job for you now, Lieutenant,” McLean said to Moore.

“Of course, sir.”

“Come with me,” McLean said and walked towards the fort’s gate, stabbing his blackthorn stick into the soil with each step. He knew that the day’s onset of rebel cannon-fire would make his men nervous and he wanted to allay their fears. “Captain Fielding!”

“Sir?” the English artilleryman called back.

“Bide your fire a short while!”

“I will, sir.”

McLean went outside the fort, then led Moore west and north until they were standing some twenty paces in front of Fort George’s ditch and in full view of the rebel lines. “Our task is just to stand here, Lieutenant,” McLean explained.

Moore was amused. “It is, sir?”

“To show the men they have nothing to fear.”

“Ah, and if we’re killed, sir?”

“Then they will have something to fear,” McLean said. He smiled. “But this is a large part of an officer’s responsibility, Lieutenant.”

“To die very visibly, sir?”

“To set an example,” McLean said. “I want our men to see that you and I don’t fear the cannonade.” He turned and looked towards the distant trees. “Why in God’s name don’t they attack us?”

“Maybe we should attack them, sir?” Moore suggested.

McLean smiled. “I’m thinking we could do that,” he said slowly, “but to what end?”

“To defeat them, sir?”

“They’re doing that to themselves, Lieutenant.”

“They’ll wake up to that knowledge, sir, won’t they?”

“Aye, they will. And when they realize by how many they outnumber us then they’ll come swarming across that land,” he waved the stick at the ridge, “but we’ve a good few guns emplaced now, and the wall’s higher, and they’ll find us a more difficult nut to crack.” The brigadier was still convinced the rebels numbered at least three thousand men. Why else would they have needed so many transport ships? “But they needs do it quickly, Lieutenant, because I dare hope there are reinforcements on their way to us.” He handed Moore the blackthorn stick. “Hold that for me, will you?” he asked, then took a tinderbox and a tobacco-filled clay pipe from his pocket. Moore, knowing the general’s wounded right arm made McLean clumsy, took the tinderbox and struck a flame from the charred linen. McLean bent forward to light the pipe, then took back his tinderbox and stick. “Thank you, John,” he said, puffing contentedly as a cannon-ball churned up soil fifteen paces away and bounced to fly above the fort. “And I dare say we could attack them,” McLean continued his earlier train of thought, “but I’ve no mind to do that. Fighting gets very confused among trees, and once they see how few we are, they’re likely to rally and countercharge. It could all get lamentably messy. No, for now it’s better to make them die on Captain Fielding’s guns, eh? And every day that passes, Lieutenant, is worth a thousand men to us. The ditch gets deeper and the wall gets higher. See?” He had turned to watch an ox dragging another oak trunk up the slope from the village. The big trunk would be used to heighten the western rampart.

McLean turned back as a renewed crescendo of musketry sounded from where Captain Caffrae was evidently poking the wasp’s nest. “Please let me accompany Caffrae, sir,” Moore pleaded again.

“He knows when to retreat, Lieutenant,” McLean said sternly.

Moore smarted from that gentle reprimand. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“No, no, you learned your lesson. And you showed the right instinct, I grant you that. A soldier’s job is to fight, God help him, and you fought well. So aye, I’ll let you go, but you take your orders from Caffrae!”

“Of course I will, sir. And, sir’” Whatever Moore had been about to say went unexpressed, because a sudden blow threw him backwards. It felt as though he had been punched in the belly. He staggered a half-pace and instinctively clutched a hand to where the blow had landed, but discovered he was unwounded and his uniform undamaged. McLean had also been thrown backwards, held upright only by his blackthorn stick, but the brigadier was also untouched. “What’” Moore began. He was aware that his ears rang from a gigantic noise, but what had caused it he did not know.

“Don’t move,” McLean said, “and look cheerful.”

Moore forced a smile. “That was a cannon-ball?”

“It was indeed,” McLean said, “and it went between us.” He looked towards the fort where the ox was bellowing. The round shot, that had flown clean between the two redcoats, had struck the ox’s haunches. The fallen animal was bleeding and bellowing on the track just a few paces from Fort George’s entrance. A sentry ran from the gate, cocked his musket and shot the animal just above the eyes. It twitched and was still. “Fresh beef!” McLean said.

“Dear God,” Moore said.

“You brushed with death, Mister Moore,” McLean said, “but I do believe you were born under a lucky star.”

“You too, sir.”

“Now we wait for four more shots,” McLean said.

“Four, sir?”

“They play four cannon on us,” McLean said, “two eighteen-pounders, a twelve-pounder,” he paused while a rebel gun fired, “and a howitzer.” The shot rumbled high overhead to fall somewhere far to the east. “So the fourth shot, John, will almost certainly be from the same gentlemen who so narrowly missed killing us, and I wish to see if they shoot at us again.”

“A quite natural curiosity, sir,” Moore said, making the brigadier laugh.

The howitzer fired next, and its shell landed short of the fort, where it lay trickling smoke from its fuse until it exploded harmlessly. The twelve-pounder slammed a ball into the southwestern bastion, and then the eighteen-pounder that had come so close to killing McLean and Moore fired again. The ball skimmed the abatis well to the general’s north, bounced short of the ditch and flew over the ramparts to crash into a spruce on Doctor Calef’s property. “You see,” McLean said, “they’re not aiming true. There’s no consistency in their aim. Captain Fielding!”

“Sir?”

“You may engage the enemy again!” McLean called as he led Moore back to the fort.

The British guns opened fire. All day long the opposing artillery dueled, Captain Caffrae taunted the enemy, Fort George’s ramparts grew higher, and General Lovell waited for Commodore Saltonstall.

Peleg Wadsworth wanted a force of marines, sailors, and militia for his attack on the Half Moon Battery. He had decided to attack under cover of darkness, and to do it that very night. The rebels had already captured the British batteries on Cross Island and on Dyce’s Head, now they would take the last of the British outworks and once that was taken there would only be the fort left to conquer.

“What you don’t understand,” Commodore Saltonstall had told Wadsworth, “is that the fort is formidable.”

Wadsworth, seeking the help of the marines, had gone that afternoon to the Warren where he discovered Saltonstall examining four iron hoops that had been strapped about the frigate’s damaged mainmast. The commodore had greeted Wadsworth with a grunt, then invited him to the quarter-deck. “I presume you want my marines again?” the commodore asked.

“I do, sir. The army’s Council voted to make an attack tonight, sir, and to request the assistance of your marines.”

“You can have Carnes, Dennis, and fifty men,” Saltonstall said briskly, as if by agreeing quickly he could rid himself of Wadsworth’s company.

“And I’d also be grateful for your advice, Commodore,” Wadsworth said.

“My advice, eh?” Saltonstall sounded suspicious, but his tone had softened. He looked cautiously at Wadsworth, but the younger man’s face was so open and honest that the commodore decided there was nothing underhand in the request. “Well, advice is free,” he said with heavy humor.

“General Lovell is convinced the fort will not fall while the enemy ships remain,” Wadsworth said.

“Which is not your opinion?” Saltonstall guessed shrewdly.

“I am General Lovell’s deputy, sir,” Wadsworth said tactfully.

“Ha.”

“Can the enemy ships be taken, sir?” Wadsworth asked, broaching the subject directly.

“Oh, they can be taken!” Saltonstall said dismissively. He disconcerted Wadsworth by looking just past the brigadier’s left ear rather than into his eyes. “Of course they can be taken.”

“Then’”

“But at what price, Wadsworth? Tell me that! At what price?”

“You must tell me, sir.”

Saltonstall deigned to look directly at Wadsworth for a moment as if deciding whether his answer would be wasted on such a man. He evidently decided it would not be, because he sighed heavily as though he was weary of explaining the obvious. “The wind sets from the southwest,” he said, looking past Wadsworth again, “which means we can sail into the harbor, but we cannot sail out. Once inside the harbor we lay under the enemy’s guns. Those guns, Wadsworth, as you may have observed, are efficiently manned.” He paused, plainly tempted to make a comparison with the militia’s artillery, but he managed to suppress the comment. “The harbor is constricted,” he went on, “which dictates that we must enter in file, which in turn means the lead ship must inevitably sustain heavy damage from the enemy’s fire.” He waved briskly towards the Warren’s bows, which still showed evidence of hasty repairs to her bowsprit and forecastle. “Once inside we have no room to maneuver so we must anchor to preserve our position opposite the enemy ships. Either that or sail directly at them and board them. And all that while, Wadsworth, we are under the cannon of the fort, and what you don’t understand is that the fort is formidable.”

Wadsworth wondered whether to argue, but decided argument would merely goad Saltonstall into stubbornness. “It seems that what you’re saying, sir,” he said, “is that the ships will not fall till the fort is taken?”

“Precisely!” Saltonstall sounded relieved, as if Wadsworth was a dim pupil who had at last grasped the simplest of propositions.

“Whereas General Lovell is convinced the fort cannot be taken until the ships are destroyed.”

“General Lovell is entitled to his opinion,” Saltonstall said loftily.

“If we succeed in capturing the enemy’s remaining shore battery,” Wadsworth suggested, “it will make your task easier, sir?”

“My task?”

“Of capturing the enemy ships, sir.”

“My task, Wadsworth, is to support your forces in the capture of the fort.”

“Thank you, sir,” Wadsworth said, hiding his exasperation, “but might I assure General Lovell that you will attack their shipping if we mount an assault on the fort?”

“This presupposes that you have disposed of the enemy’s shore battery?”

“It does, sir.”

“A joint attack, eh?” Saltonstall still sounded suspicious, but after a brief hesitation, nodded cautiously. “I would consider a joint attack,” he said grudgingly, “but you do realize, I trust, that the position of Mowat’s ships becomes untenable once the fort is taken?”

“I do, sir.”

“But that McLean’s position is still formidable whether the ships are taken or not?”

“I understand that too, sir.”

Saltonstall turned to glower at the waist of the Warren, but saw nothing to provoke a complaint. “The Congress, Wadsworth, has spent precious public money building a dozen frigates.”

“Indeed it has, sir,” Wadsworth said, wondering what that had to do with the fort on Majabigwaduce’s peninsula.

“The Washington, the Effingham, the Congress and the Montgomery are all scuttled, Wadsworth. They are lost.”

“Sadly, sir, yes,” Wadsworth said. The four frigates had been destroyed to prevent their capture.

“The Virginia, taken,” Saltonstall went on remorselessly, “the Hancock, taken. The Raleigh, taken. The Randolph, sunk. Do you wish me to add the Warren to that sad record?”

“Of course not, sir,” Wadsworth said. He glanced up at the snake-embossed flag flying at the Warren’s stern. It bore the proud motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” but how could the British even try if the snake’s only ambition was to avoid battle?

“Capture the shore battery,” Saltonstall said in his most lordly voice, “and the fleet will reconsider its opportunities.”

“Thank you, sir,” Wadsworth said.

He had been silent as he was rowed ashore from the frigate. Saltonstall was right, Wadsworth did disagree with Lovell. Wadsworth knew the fort was the king on Majabigwaduce’s chessboard, and the three British ships were pawns. Take the fort and the pawns surrendered, but take the pawns and the king remained, yet Lovell would not be persuaded to attack the fort any more than Saltonstall could be persuaded to throw caution to the southwest wind and destroy Mowat’s three sloops. So now the battery must be attacked in hope that a successful assault would persuade the two commanders to greater boldness.

And time was short and it was shrinking, so Peleg Wadsworth would attack that night. In the dark.

James Fletcher tacked the Felicity south from Wasaumkeag Point where the rebels had taken over the remaining buildings of Fort Pownall, a decayed wooden and earth-banked fortress erected some thirty years before to deter attacks upriver by French raiders. There was no adequate shelter for wounded men on the heights of Majabigwaduce, so the house and storerooms of the old fort were now the rebels’ hospital. Wasaumkeag Point lay on the far bank of Penobscot Bay, just south of where the river opened from being a narrow and fast-flowing channel between high wooded banks. James, when he was not needed by Wadsworth, used the Felicity to carry wounded men to the hospital and now he did his best to hurry back, eager to join Wadsworth before dusk and the attack on the British battery.

The Felicity’s course was frustrating. She made good enough progress on each starboard tack, but inevitably the wind drove the small boat nearer and nearer the eastern bank and then James had to endure a long port tack, which, in the flooding tide, seemed to take him farther and farther from Majabigwaduce’s bluff beneath which he wanted to anchor the Felicity. But James was used to the southwest wind. “You can’t hurry the breeze,” his father had said, “and you can’t change its mind, so there’s no point in getting irritated by it.” James wondered what his father would think of the rebellion. Nothing good, he supposed. His father, like many who lived about the river, had been proud to be an Englishman. It did not matter to him that the Fletchers had lived in Massachusetts for over a hundred years, they were still Englishmen. An old, yellowing print of King Charles I had hung in the log house throughout James’s childhood, and was now tacked above his mother’s sickbed. The king looked haughty, but somehow sad, as if he knew that one day a rebellion would topple him and lead him to the executioner’s block. In Boston, James had heard, there was a tavern called the Cromwell’s Head which hung its inn-sign so low above the door that men had to bow their heads to the king-killer every time they entered. That story had angered his father.

He tacked the Felicity in the cove just north of the bluff. The sound of the cannonade between the fort and the rebel lines was loud now, the smoke from the guns drifting like a cloud above the peninsula. He was on a port tack again, but it would be a short one and he knew he would reach the shore well before nightfall. He sailed under the stern of the Industry, a transport sloop, and waved to its captain, Will Young, who shouted some good-natured remark that was lost in the sound of the cannons.

James tacked to run down the Industry’s flank where a longboat was secured. Three men were in the longboat while above them, at the sloop’s gunwale, two men threatened the trio with muskets. Then, with a shock, James recognized the three captives: Archibald Haney, John Lymburner, and William Greenlaw, all from Majabigwaduce. Haney and Lymburner had been friends of his father, while Will Greenlaw had often accompanied James on fishing trips downriver and had paid court to Beth once or twice, though never successfully. All three men were Tories, Loyalists, and now they were evidently prisoners. James let his sheets go so that the Felicity slowed and shivered. “What the devil are you doing with the bastards?” Archibald Haney called. Haney was like an uncle to James.

Before James could say a word in response a sailor appeared at the gunwale above the longboat. He carried a wooden pail. “Hey, Tories!” the sailor called, then upended the bucket to cascade urine and turds onto the prisoners’ heads. The two guards laughed.

“What the hell did you do that for?” James shouted.

The sailor mouthed some response and turned away. “They put us here one hour a day,” Will Greenlaw said miserably, “and pour their slops on us.”

The tide was taking the Felicity north and James tightened the jib sheet to get some way on her. “I’m sorry,” he called.

“You’ll be sorry when the king asks who was loyal to him!” Archibald Haney shouted angrily.

“The English treat our prisoners far worse!” Will Young bellowed from the Industry’s stern.

James had been forced onto a port tack again and the wind took him away from the sloop. Archibald Haney shouted something, but the words were lost on the breeze, all but one. Traitor.

James tacked the boat again and ran her towards the beach. He dropped her anchor, furled her mainsail, and stowed the foresails, then hailed a passing lighter to give him a dry-ride ashore. Traitor, rebel, Tory, Loyalist? If his father were still alive, he wondered, would he dare be a rebel?

He climbed the bluff, retrieved the musket from his shelter and walked south to Dyce’s Head to find Peleg Wadsworth. The sun was low now, casting a long shadow over the ridge and along the harbor’s foreshore. Wadsworth’s men were gathering in the trees where they could not be seen from the fort. “You look pensive, young James,” Wadsworth greeted him.

“I’m well enough, sir,” James said.

Wadsworth looked at him more closely. “What is it?”

“You know what they’re doing to the prisoners?” James asked, then blurted out the whole tale. “They’re my neighbors, sir,” he said, “and they called me traitor.”

Wadsworth had been listening patiently. “This is war, James,” he said gently, “and it creates passions we didn’t know we possessed.”

“They’re good men, sir!”

“And if we released them,” Wadsworth said, “they’d work for our enemies.”

“They would, yes,” James allowed.

“But that’s no reason to maltreat them,” Wadsworth said firmly, “and I’ll talk to the general, I promise,” though he knew well enough that whatever protest he made would change nothing. Men were frustrated. They wanted this expedition finished. They wanted to go home. “And you’re no traitor, James,” he said.

“No? My father would say I am.”

“Your father was British,” Wadsworth said, “and you and I were both born British, but that’s all changed now. We’re Americans.” He said the word as though he were not used to it, but felt a pang of pride because of it. And tonight, he thought, the Americans would take a small step towards their liberty. They would attack the battery.

In the dark.

The Indians joined Wadsworth’s militia after sunset. They appeared silently and, as ever, Wadsworth found their presence unsettling. He could not lose the impression that the dark-skinned warriors judged him and found him wanting, but he forced a welcome smile in the dark night. “I’m glad you’re here,” he told Johnny Feathers, who was apparently the Indian’s leader. Feathers, who had been given his name by John Preble, who negotiated for the State with the Penobscot tribe, neither answered nor even acknowledged the greeting. Feathers and his men, he had brought sixteen this night, squatted at the edge of the trees and scraped whetstones over the blades of their short axes. Tomahawks, Wadsworth supposed. He wondered if they were drunk. The general’s order that no liquor was to be given to the Indians had met with small success, but so far as Wadsworth could tell these men were sober as churchwardens. Not that he cared, drunk or sober the Indians were among his best warriors, though Solomon Lovell was more skeptical of their loyalties. “They’ll want something in exchange for helping us,” he had told Wadsworth, “and not just wampum. Guns, probably, and God knows what they’ll do with those.”

“Hunt?”

“Hunt what?”

But the Indians were here. The seventeen braves had muskets, but had all chosen to carry tomahawks as their primary weapon. The militia and marines had muskets with fixed bayonets. “I don’t want any man firing prematurely,” Wadsworth told his militiamen and saw, in the small light of the waning moon, the look of incomprehension on too many faces. “Don’t cock your muskets till you need to shoot,” he told them. “If you stumble and fall I don’t want a shot alerting the enemy. And you,” he pointed to a small boy who was armed with a sheathed bayonet and an enormous drum, “keep your drum silent till we’ve won!”

“Yes, sir.”

Wadsworth crossed to the boy who looked scarcely a day over eleven or twelve. “What’s your name, boy?”

“John, sir.”

“John what?”

“John Freer, sir.” John Freer’s voice had not broken. He was rake-thin, nothing but skin, bones, and wide eyes, but those eyes were bright and his back was straight.

“A good name,” Wadsworth said, “free and Freer. Tell me, John Freer, do you have your letters?”

“My letters, sir?”

“Can you read or write?”

The boy looked shifty. “I can read some, sir.”

“Then when this is all over,” Wadsworth said, “we must teach you the rest, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” Freer said unenthusiastically.

“He brings us luck, General,” an older man put in. He placed a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We can’t lose if Johnny Freer is with us, sir.”

“Where are your parents, John?” Wadsworth asked.

“Both dead,” the older man answered, “and I’m his grandfather.”

“I want to stay with the company, sir!” John Freer said eagerly. He had divined that Wadsworth was contemplating an order that he stay behind.

“We’ll look after him, sir,” the grandfather said, “we always do.”

“Just keep your drum quiet till we’ve beaten them, John Freer,” Wadsworth said and patted the boy on the head. “After that you can wake the dead for all I care.”

Wadsworth had three hundred militiamen, or rather two hundred and ninety-nine militiamen and one small drummer boy. Saltonstall had kept his word and sent fifty marines and had added a score of the Warren’s sailors who were armed with cutlasses, boarding pikes, and muskets. “The crew wants to fight,” Carnes explained the presence of the seamen.

“They’re most welcome,” Wadsworth had said.

“And they will fight!” Carnes said enthusiastically. “Demons, they are.”

The seamen were on the right. The militiamen and Indians were in the center and Captain Carnes and his marines on the left. Lieutenant Dennis was second in command of the marines. They were all lined at the edge of the trees by Dyce’s Head, close to Captain Welch’s grave, and to the east the ground dropped gently away towards the Half Moon Battery. Wadsworth could see the enemy earthwork in the small moonlight, and even if it had been dark its position would have been betrayed by two small campfires that burned behind the emplacement. The fort was a dark silhouette on the horizon.

Just beyond the enemy battery were the westernmost houses of the village. The closest, which was dwarfed by a large barn, lay only a few paces beyond the British guns. “That’s Jacob Dyce’s house,” James Fletcher told Wadsworth, “he’s a Dutchman.”

“So no love for the British?”

“Oh, he loves the British, Jacob does. Like as not old Jacob will shoot at us.”

“Let’s hope he’s asleep,” Wadsworth said and hoped all the enemy were sleeping. It was past midnight, a Sunday now, and the peninsula was moonlit black and silver. Small wisps of smoke drifted from chimneys and campfires.

The British sloops were black against the distant water and no lights showed aboard.

Two of the transport ships had been beached at Majabigwaduce’s eastern tip, while the third had been added to the line of sloops because, in their new position, the British were trying to blockade a much greater width of water. The transport ship, which was anchored at the southern end of the line, looked much bigger than the three sloops, but Carnes, who had used a telescope to examine the ship in daylight, reckoned it carried only six small cannon. “It looks big and bad,” he said now, watching the enemy ships in the dark, “but it’s feeble.”

“Like the fort,” Lieutenant Dennis put in.

“The fort gets more formidable every day,” Wadsworth said, “which is why we must use haste.” He had been appalled when, at the afternoon’s council of war, General Lovell had toyed with the idea of starving the British out of Fort George. The Council’s sentiment had been against such a plan, swayed by Wadsworth’s insistence that the British would surely be readying a relief force for the besieged garrison, but Lovell, Wadsworth knew, would not give up the idea easily. That made tonight’s action crucial. A clear victory would help persuade Lovell that his troops could outfight the redcoats, and Wadsworth, looking at the marines, had no doubt that they could. The green-coated men looked grim, lean, and frightening as they waited. With such troops, Wadsworth thought, a man might conquer the world.

The militia were not so threatening. Some looked eager, but most appeared frightened and a few were praying on their knees, though Colonel McCobb, his mustache very white against his tanned face, was confident of his men. “They’ll do just fine,” he said to Wadsworth. “How many enemy do you reckon?”

“No more than sixty. At least we couldn’t see more than sixty.”

“We’ll twist their tails right and proper,” McCobb said happily.

Wadsworth clapped his hands to get the militiamen’s attention again. “When I give the word,” he called to the men crouching at the edge of the wood, “we advance in line. We don’t run, we walk! When we get close to the enemy I’ll give the order to charge and then we run straight at their works.” Wadsworth reckoned he sounded confident enough, but it felt unnatural and he was assailed by the thought that he merely playacted at being a soldier. Elizabeth and his children would be sleeping. He drew his sword. “On your feet!” Let the enemy be sleeping too, he thought as he waited for the line to stand. “For America!” he called. “And for liberty, forward!”

And all along the wood’s edge men walked into the moonlight. Wadsworth glanced left and right and was astonished at how visible they were. The silvery light glittered from bayonets and lit the white crossbelts of the marines. The long line was walking raggedly downhill, through pastureland and scattered trees. The enemy was silent. The glow of the campfires marked the battery. The guns there faced the harbor entrance, but how soon could the British turn them to face the approaching patriots? Or were the gunners fast asleep? Wadsworth’s thoughts skittered, and he knew that was caused by nervousness. His belly felt empty and sour. He gripped his sword as he looked up at the fort, which appeared formidable from this lower ground. That is what we should be attacking, Wadsworth thought. Lovell should have every man under his command assaulting the fort, one screaming attack in the dark and the whole business would be over. But instead they were attacking the battery, and perhaps that would hasten the campaign’s end. Once the battery was taken then the Americans could mount their own guns on the harbor’s northern shore and hammer the ships, and once the ships were gone then Lovell would have no excuse not to attack the fort.

Wadsworth leaped a small ditch. He could hear the waves breaking on the shingle to his right. The long line of attackers was very ragged now, and he remembered the children on the common at home and how he had tried to rehearse maneuvering them from column to line. Maybe he should have advanced in column? The gun emplacement was only two hundred yards away now, so it was too late to try and change the formation. James Fletcher walked beside Wadsworth, his musket held in clenched hands. “They’re sleeping, sir,” Fletcher said in a tight voice.

“I hope so,” Wadsworth said.

Then the night exploded.

The first gun was fired from the fort. The flame leaped and curled into the night sky, the lurid flash lighting even the southern shore of the harbor before the powder smoke obscured the fort’s silhouette. The cannon-ball landed somewhere to Wadsworth’s right, bounced and crashed into the meadows behind and then two more guns split the night, and Wadsworth heard himself shouting. “Charge! Charge!”

Ahead of him a flame showed, then he was dazzled as he heard the sound of the gun and the whistle of grape shot. A man screamed. Other men were cheering and running. Wadsworth stumbled over the rough ground. Marines were dark shapes to his left. Another round shot slammed into the turf, bounced, and flew on. A splinter of light came from an enemy musket in the gun emplacement, then another cannon sounded and grape shot seethed around Wadsworth. James Fletcher was with him, but when Wadsworth glanced left and right he saw very few militiamen. Where were they? More muskets shot flame, smoke, and metal from the battery. There were men standing on the rampart, men who vanished behind a rill of smoke as still more muskets punched the night. The marines were ahead of Wadsworth now, running and shouting, and the sailors were coming from the beach and the battery was close now, so close. Wadsworth had no breath to shout, but his attackers needed no orders. The Indians overtook him and a cannon fired from the emplacement and the sound deafened Wadsworth, it punched the air about him, it dizzied him, it wreathed him in the foul egg stench of powder smoke that was thick as fog and he heard the screaming just ahead and the clash of blades, and a shouted order that was abruptly cut off, and then he was at the earthwork and he saw a smoking cannon muzzle just to his right as Fletcher pushed him upwards.

The devil’s work was being done inside the emplacement where marines, Indians, and sailors were slaughtering redcoats. A gun fired from the fort, but the ball went high to splash harmlessly into the harbor. Lieutenant Dennis had stabbed a sword into a British sergeant who was bent over, trapping the steel in his flesh. A marine clubbed the man on the head with a musket butt. The Indians were making a high-pitched shrieking sound as they killed. Wadsworth saw blood bright as a gun-flame spurt from a skull split by a tomahawk. He turned towards a British officer in a red coat whose face was a mask of terror and Wadsworth slashed his sword at the redcoat, the blade hissing in empty air as a marine drove a bayonet deep into the man’s lower belly and ripped the blade upwards, lifting the redcoat off his feet as an Indian chopped a hatchet into the man’s spine. Another redcoat was backing towards the fires, his hands raised, but a marine shot him anyway, then smashed the stock of his musket across the man’s face. The rest of the British were running. They were running! They were vanishing into Jacob Dyce’s cornfield, fleeing uphill towards the fort.

“Take prisoners!” Wadsworth shouted. There was no need for more killing. The gun emplacement was taken and, with a fierce joy, Wadsworth understood that the battery was too low on the shore to be hit by the fort’s guns. Those guns were trying, but the shots were flying just overhead to splash uselessly into the harbor. “Let’s hear your drum now, John Freer!” Wadsworth shouted. “You can sound the drum as loud as you like now!”

But John Freer, aged twelve, had been clubbed to death by a redcoat’s brass-bound musket butt. “Oh dear God,” Wadsworth said, gazing down at the small body. The bloodied skull was black in the moonlight. “I should never have let him come,” he said, and felt a tear in one eye.

“It was that bastard,” a marine said, indicating the twitching body of the redcoat who had tried to surrender and who had been shot before having his face beaten in by the marine. “I saw the bastard hit the lad.” The marine stepped to the fallen redcoat and kicked him in the belly. “You yellow bastard.”

Wadsworth stooped beside Freer and put a finger on the drummer’s neck, but there was no pulse. He looked up at James Fletcher. “Run back to the heights,” he said, “and tell General Lovell we’re in possession of the battery.” He held out a hand to check Fletcher. Wadsworth was gazing east-wards at the British ships. The dark shapes seemed so close now. “Tell the general we need to put our own guns here,” he said. Wadsworth had captured the British guns, but they were smaller than he had expected to find. The twelve-pounder cannons must have been moved back to the fort and replaced with six-pounders. “Tell the general we need a pair of eighteen-pounders,” he said, “and tell him we need them here by dawn.”

“Yes, sir,” Fletcher said, and ran back towards the high ground and Wadsworth, watching him go, saw militiamen scattered on that long slope leading to Dyce’s Head. Too many militiamen. At least half had refused to attack, evidently terrified by the British cannon-fire. Some had kept going and now stood in the battery watching the fifteen prisoners being searched, but most had simply run away and Wadsworth shuddered with anger. The marines, Indians, and sailors had done the night’s work, while most of the minutemen had hung back in fear. John Freer had been braver than all his comrades, and the boy had a crushed skull to prove it.

“Congratulations, sir,” Lieutenant Dennis smiled at Wadsworth.

“You and your marines achieved this,” Wadsworth said, still looking at the militia.

“We beat their marines, sir,” Dennis said cheerfully. The gun emplacement had been protected by Royal Marines. Dennis sensed Wadsworth’s unhappiness and saw where the general was looking. “They’re not soldiers, sir,” he said, nodding towards the militiamen who had refused to attack. Most of those laggards were now walking towards the battery, chivvied by their officers

“But they are soldiers!” Wadsworth said bitterly. “We all are!”

“They want to get back to their farms and families,” Dennis said.

“Then how do we take the fort?” Wadsworth asked.

“They have to be inspired, sir,” Dennis said.

“Inspired!” Wadsworth laughed, though not with any amusement.

“They’ll follow you, sir.”

“Like they did tonight?”

“Next time you’ll give them a speech, sir,” Dennis said, and Wadsworth felt his former pupil’s gentle childing. Dennis was right, he thought. He should have given them a rousing encouragement, he should have reminded the militia why they fought, but then a strange ripping noise interrupted his regrets and he turned to see an Indian crouching by a corpse. The dead marine had been stripped of his red coat, now he was being scalped. The Indian had cut the skin across the crown and was tearing it loose by the hair. The man sensed Wadsworth’s gaze and turned, his eyes and teeth bright in the moonlight. Four other corpses had already been scalped. Marines were searching among the billets, discovering tobacco and food. The militiamen just watched. Colonel McCobb was haranguing the three hundred men, telling them they should have behaved better. A marine knocked the top from one of two huge hogsheads that stood at the back of the emplacement and Wadsworth wondered what they contained, then was diverted by a dog barking fiercely from the battery’s southern edge. A sailor tried to calm the dog, but it snapped at him and a marine casually shot the animal. Another marine laughed.

That was the last gunfire of the night. Mist thickened on the harbor. James Fletcher returned to the captured battery just before dawn to say that General Lovell wanted Wadsworth back on the heights. “Is he going to send the guns?” Wadsworth asked.

“I think he wants you to arrange that, sir.”

Meaning Lovell wanted Wadsworth to deal with Lieutenant-Colonel Revere. The sailors had already gone back to their ships and Captain Carnes had been instructed to return with his marines as soon as possible, but Wadsworth was unhappy leaving the militia to guard the captured battery and Carnes agreed that a dozen marines should stay under Lieutenant Dennis’s command. “I’ll leave a good sergeant with young Dennis,” Carnes said.

“He needs that?”

“We all need that, sir,” Carnes said, and shouted at Sergeant Sykes to pick a dozen good men.

Colonel McCobb was officially in charge of the battery. “You might start by throwing up a rampart,” Wadsworth suggested to him. The existing semicircular rampart looked towards the harbor entrance and Wadsworth wanted an earthwork that faced the fort. “I’ll be bringing the guns as soon as I can,” he said.

“I’ll be waiting, sir,” McCobb promised.

Three hundred men now guarded the captured battery that could be used to destroy the ships. Then Lovell might attack the fort. And then the British would be gone.

Brigadier McLean appeared in a nightcap. He was in uniform and had a gray greatcoat, but had been given no time to dress his hair and so wore the red cap with its long blue tassel. He stood on Fort George’s southwestern bastion and stared down at the low ground where the Half Moon emplacement was mostly hidden by the cornfield. “I think we’re wasting our cannon-fire,” he told Fielding, who himself had been woken by the sudden eruption of firing.

“Cease fire!” Fielding called.

An alert gunner sergeant had seen the rebels attacking down the open slope from Dyce’s Head and had opened fire. “Give the man an extra ration of rum,” McLean said, “and my thanks.”

The gunners had done well, McLean thought, yet their efforts had not saved the Half Moon Battery. The Royal Marines and gunners evicted from the emplacement were straggling into the fort and telling their tale of rebels swarming over the ramparts. They claimed there had been hundreds of attackers, and the defenders had numbered just fifty. “Tea,” McLean said.

“Tea?” Fielding asked.

“They should brew some tea,” McLean gestured at the defeated men.

Hundreds? He wondered. Maybe two hundred. The sentries on Fort George’s ramparts had been given a clear view of the attackers, and the most reliable men reckoned they had seen two or three hundred rebels, many of whom had not pressed home the attack. Now a growing fog was obscuring all the lower ground.

“You sent for me, sir?” Captain Iain Campbell, one of the 74th’s best officers, now joined the brigadier on the rampart.

“Good morning, Campbell.”

“Good morning, sir.”

“Only it’s not a good morning,” McLean said. “Our enemy has shown initiative.”

“I heard, sir.” Iain Campbell had dressed hurriedly and one of his coat buttons was undone.

“Have you ever captured an enemy earthwork, Campbell?”

“No, sir.”

“Unless your men are very well-disciplined it leads to disorganization,” McLean said, “which leads me to believe that our enemy are rather disorganized right now.”

“Yes, sir,” the highlander said, smiling as he understood what the brigadier insinuated.

“And Captain Mowat won’t like it if the enemy holds the Half Moon Battery, he won’t like it at all.”

“And we must help the Royal Navy, sir,” Campbell said, still smiling.

“Indeed we must, it is our God-given duty. So take your good lads down there, Captain,” McLean said, “and shoo the rogues away, will you?”

Fifty marines had been surprised and driven from the Half Moon Battery so McLean would send fifty Scotsmen to take it back.

McLean went to have his hair dressed.

Excerpt of a letter from Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell to Jeremiah Powell, President of the Council Board of the State of Massachusetts Bay, August 1st, 1779:. . . that with the Troops that now constitute my Army it is not practicable to gain a Conquest by a storm and not probable without length of time to reduce them by a regular siege. To Effect the First I must request a few regular disciplined troops and Five Hundred hand Grenades . . . at least four Mortars of Nine Inches or as near as your Ordnance will admit with an ample supply of Fire Shells.

Excerpt of a letter from the Board of War to the Council Board of Massachusetts, August 3rd, 1779:The Board of War would represent to your Honors that by the great expence incurred by the Penobscot expedition they are so draind of Money that they are under the greatest embarrasments in the execution of the Common business of the Office, and are now calld upon for the payment of £100,000 due to persons for provision sent upon that expedition. The present scarcity of bread in the publick magazines both state and continental is alarming and may be attended with fatal consequences. . . .

Excerpt of a letter from Samuel Savage, President of the Board of War, Boston, to Major-General Nathaniel Gates, August 3rd, 1779:Reports say that our Forces at penobscot have, after a most vigorous resistance, obliged the Enemy to surrender themselves both Naval and Land Forces, Prisoners of War, and that this glorious event took place on Saturday last.

Chapter Ten

The sun had not risen when Peleg Wadsworth roused Lieutenant-Colonel Revere, who, publicly ordered to sleep ashore, had erected the tents captured on Cross Island and made them his new quarters. They were the only tents in Lovell’s army and some men wondered why they had not been offered to the general himself.

“I only just got to sleep,” Revere grumbled as he pushed the tent flap aside. Like most of the army he had watched the gunflashes in the night.

“The enemy battery is taken, Colonel,” Wadsworth said.

“I saw that. Very satisfying.” Revere pulled a wool blanket round his shoulders. “Friar!”

A man crawled from a turf-and-timber shelter. “Sir?”

“Rouse the fire, man, it’s chilly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very satisfying,” Revere said, looking at Wadsworth again.

“The captured battery is being entrenched,” Wadsworth said, “and we need to move our heaviest guns there.”

“Heaviest guns,” Revere echoed. “And boil some tea, Friar.”

“Tea, sir, yes, sir.”

“Heaviest guns,” Revere said again, “I suppose you mean the eighteens?”

“We have six of them, do we not?”

“We do.”

“The new battery is close to the enemy ships. I want them hit hard, Colonel.”

“We all want that,” Revere said. He went close to the campfire that, newly revived, flamed bright. He shivered. It might have been high summer, but the nights in eastern Massachusetts could be surprisingly cold. He stood by the blaze which lit his blunt face. “We’re scarce of eighteen-pounder round shot,” he said, “unless the commodore can provide some?”

“I’m certain he will,” Wadsworth said. “The shot is intended for the enemy ships, he can’t possibly object.”

“Possibly,” Revere said with evident amusement, then he shook his head as if clearing his mind of some unwelcome thought. “Do you have children, General?”

Wadsworth was taken aback by the question. “Yes,” he said after a pause, “I have three. Another coming very soon.”

“I miss my children,” Revere said tenderly. “I do miss them dearly.” He gazed into the flames. “Teapots and buckles,” he said ruefully.

“Teapots and buckles?” Wadsworth asked, wondering if they were nicknames for Revere’s children.

“How a man earns his living, General. Teapots and buckles, cream jugs and cutlery.” Revere smiled, then shrugged his home thoughts away. “So,” he sighed, “you want to take two of the eighteens from our lines here?”

“If they’re the closest, yes. Once the ships are sunk they can be returned.”

Revere grimaced. “If I put two eighteens down there,” he said, “the British are not going to like it. How do we defend the guns?”

It was a good question. Brigadier McLean would hardly stand idly by while two eighteen-pounders knocked splinters off the three sloops. “Colonel McCobb has three hundred men at the battery,” he told Revere, “and they’ll stay there till the ships are destroyed.”

“Three hundred men,” Revere said dubiously.

“And you may place smaller cannon for your defense,” Wadsworth suggested, “and by now the entrenchments should be well begun. I believe the battery will be safe.”

“I could take guns down in the fog,” Revere suggested. The air felt clammy and wisps of mist were already showing among the high trees.

“Then let’s do it,” Wadsworth said energetically. If the guns could be emplaced by midday then the enemy ships might be cruelly hurt by dusk. The range was short and the eighteen-pounder balls would strike with a savage force. Sink the ships and the harbor would belong to the patriots, and after that Lovell would have no reason not to storm the fort. Wadsworth, for the first time since the rebels had taken the heights of Majabigwaduce, felt optimistic.

Get it done, he thought. Pull down the enemy flag. Win.

And then the muskets sounded.

Captain Iain Campbell led his fifty highlanders down to the village, then followed a cart track westwards till the company reached the edge of Jacob Dyce’s land. A small light flickered from behind the Dutchman’s shutters, suggesting he was awake.

The highlanders crouched by the corn and Campbell stood above them. “Are you all listening well?” he asked them, “because I have a thing to tell you.”

They were listening. They were youngsters, most not yet twenty, and they trusted Iain Campbell because he was both a gentleman and a good officer. Many of these men had grown up on the lands of Captain Campbell’s father, the laird, and most of them bore the same surname. Some, indeed, were the captain’s half-brothers, though that was not a truth admitted on either side. Their parents had told them that the Campbells of Ballaculish were good people and that the laird was a hard man, but a fair one. Most had known Iain Campbell since before he became a man, and most supposed they would know him till they followed his coffin to the kirk. One day Iain Campbell would live in the big house and these men, and their children, would doff their hats to him and beg his help when they were in trouble. They would tell their children that Iain Campbell was a hard man, but a fair one, and they would say that not because he was their laird, but because they would remember a night when Captain Campbell took all the risks he asked them to take. He was a privileged man and a brave man and a very good officer.

“The rebels,” Campbell spoke low and forcefully, “captured the Half Moon Battery last night. They’re there now, and we’re going to take it back. I talked to some of the men they drove away, and they heard the rebels shouting at each other. They learned the name of the rebel leader, their officer. He’s a MacDonald.”

The crouching company made a noise like a low growl. Iain Campbell could have given them a rousing speech, a blood and thunder and fight-for-your-king speech, and if he had been given the tongue of an angel and the eloquence of the devil that speech would not have worked as well as the name MacDonald.

He had invented MacDonald’s existence, of course. He had no idea who led the rebels, but he did know that the Campbells hated the MacDonalds and the MacDonalds feared the Campbells, and by telling his men that a MacDonald was their enemy he had roused them to an ancient fury. It was no longer a war to suppress a rebellion, it was an ancestral blood feud.

“We’re going through the corn,” Captain Campbell said, “and we’ll form line at the other side and you charge with your bayonets. We go fast. We win.”

He said no more, except to give the necessary orders, then he led the fifty men past the field of corn that grew taller than a bonneted highlander’s head. Fog was spreading from the water, thickening over the battery and hiding the dark shapes of the highlanders.

The sky behind Campbell was lightening to a wolf-gray, but the tall corn shadowed his men as they spread into a line. Their muskets were loaded, but not cocked. Metal scraped on metal as men slotted and twisted their bayonets onto gun muzzles. The bayonets were seventeen-inch spikes, each sharpened to a wicked point. The battery was only a hundred paces away, yet the rebels had still not seen the kilted highlanders. Iain Campbell drew his broadsword and grinned in the half-darkness. “Let’s teach the Clan Donald who is master here,” he said to his men, “and now let’s kill the bastards.”

They charged.

They were highlanders from the hard country on Scotland’s west coast. War was in their blood, they had suckled tales of battle with their mother’s milk, and now, they believed, a MacDonald was waiting for them and they charged with all their clan’s ferocity. They screamed as they charged, they raced to be first among the enemy and they had the advantage of surprise.

Yet even so Iain Campbell could not believe how quickly the enemy broke. As he neared the battery and could see more through the dark fog he had a moment of alarm because there seemed to be hundreds of rebels, they were far more numerous than his company, and he thought what a ridiculous place this was to meet his death. Most of the rebels were in the battery itself, which was as crowded as a Methodist meeting. Only about twenty men were working on the entrenchments and it was evident they had set no sentries or, if they had placed picquets, those sentries were asleep. Astonished faces turned to stare at the shrieking highlanders. Too many faces, Campbell thought. There would be a marble plaque in the kirk with his name and this day’s date and a dignified epitaph, then that vision vanished because the enemy was already running. “Kill!” Campbell heard himself shout. “Kill!” And the shout spurred even more of the enemy to flee westwards. They dropped their picks and spades, they scrambled over the west-facing rampart and they ran. A few, very few, fired at the approaching highlanders, but most forgot they were carrying muskets and just abandoned the battery to run towards the heights.

One group of men was dressed in dark uniforms crossed by white belts and those men did not run. They tried to form a line and they presented muskets and they fired a ragged volley at Campbell’s men as the highlanders leaped the newly dug scratch of a ditch. Iain Campbell felt the wind of a ball whip past his cheek, then he was swinging his heavy blade at a smoking musket, knocking it aside as he brought the sword back to stab low and fast. The steel punctured cloth, skin, flesh, and muscle, and then his Campbells were all around him, screaming hatred and lunging with bayonets, and the outnumbered enemy broke. “Give them a volley!” Campbell shouted. He twisted his blade in the enemy’s belly and thumped his left fist into the man’s face. Corporal Campbell added his bayonet and the rebel went down. Captain Campbell kicked the musket from the enemy’s grasp and dragged his blade free of the clinging flesh. Musket flashes cast sudden stark light on blood, chaos, and Campbell fury.

A lone American officer tried to rally his men. He slashed his sword at Campbell, but the laird’s son had learned his fencing at Major Teague’s Academy on Edinburgh’s Grassmarket and he parried the swing effortlessly, reversed, turned his wrist and lunged the blade into the American officer’s chest. He felt the sword scrape on a rib, he grimaced and lunged harder. The man choked, gasped, spewed blood, and fell. “Give them a volley!” Campbell shouted again. He had hardly needed to think to defeat the rebel officer, it had all been instinctive. He dragged his sword free and saw an American sergeant in a green uniform coat stagger and fall. The sergeant was not wounded, but a highlander had thumped the side of his head with a musket stock and he was half-dazed. “Take his musket!” Campbell called sharply. “Don’t kill him! Just take him prisoner!”

“He could be a MacDonald,” a Campbell private said, quite ready to thrust his bayonet into the sergeant’s belly.

“Take him prisoner!” Campbell snapped. He turned and looked towards the heights where the dawn was lighting the slope, but the fog hid the fleeing rebels. Scottish muskets coughed smoke, stabbed flame into the fog, and shot balls uphill to where the Americans retreated. “Sergeant MacKellan!” Campbell called. “You’ll set a picquet! Smartly now!”

“You sure this bastard’s not a MacDonald?” the private standing above the dazed rebel sergeant asked.

“He’s called Sykes,” a voice said, and Campbell turned to see it was the wounded rebel officer who had spoken. The man had propped himself on an elbow. His face, very white in the dawn’s wan light, was streaked with blood that had spilled from his mouth. He looked towards the green-coated sergeant. “He’s not called MacDonald,” he managed to say, “he’s called Sykes.”

Campbell was impressed that the young officer, despite his chest wound, was trying to save his sergeant’s life. That sergeant was sitting now, guarded by Jamie Campbell, the youngest son of Ballaculish’s blacksmith. The wounded officer spat more blood. “He’s called Sykes,” he said yet again, “and they were drunk.”

Campbell crouched beside the injured officer. “Who was drunk?” he asked.

“They found barrels of rum,” the man said, “and I couldn’t stop them. The militia.” The highlanders were still shooting into the fog, hastening the retreat of the rebels who had now vanished into the fog that spread inexorably up the long slope. “I told McCobb,” the wounded officer said, “but he said they deserved the rum.”

“Rest,” Campbell said to the man. There were two great hogsheads at the back of the battery and they had evidently been full of naval rum, and the rebels, celebrating their victory, had celebrated too hard. Campbell found a discarded knapsack that he put beneath the wounded officer’s head. “Rest,” he said again. “What’s your name?”

“Lieutenant Dennis.”

The blood on Dennis’s coat looked black and Campbell would not even have known it was blood except that it reflected a sheen in the weak light. “You’re a marine?”

“Yes,” Dennis choked on the word and blood welled at his lips and ran down his cheek. His breath rasped. “We changed sentries,” he said, and whimpered with sudden pain. He wanted to explain that the defeat was not his fault, that his marines had done their job, but the militia picquet that had replaced his marine sentries had failed.

“Don’t speak.” Campbell said. He saw the fallen sword nearby and slid the blade into Dennis’s scabbard. Captured officers were allowed to keep their swords, and Campbell reckoned Lieutenant Dennis deserved it as a reward for his bravery. He patted Dennis’s blood-wet shoulder and stood. Robbie Campbell, a corporal, and almost as great a fool as his father, who was a drunken drover, had found a drum that was painted with an eagle and the word “Liberty” and he was beating it with his fists and capering like the fool he was. “Stop that noise, Robbie Campbell!” Campbell shouted, and was rewarded with silence. The drummer boy’s corpse was lying beside a newly dug grave. “Jamie Campbell! You and your brother will make a stretcher. Two muskets, two jackets!” The quickest way to fashion a stretcher was to thread the sleeves of two jackets onto a pair of muskets. “Carry Lieutenant Dennis to the hospital.”

“Did we kill the MacDonald, sir?”

“The MacDonald ran away,” Campbell said dismissively. “What do you expect of a MacDonald?”

“The yon bastards!” a private said angrily and Campbell turned to see the bloodied heads of the Royal Marine corpses, their scalps cut and torn away. “Bloody heathen savage god-damned bastards,” the man growled.

“Take Lieutenant Dennis to the surgeons,” Campbell ordered, “and the prisoner to the fort.” He found a rag in a corner of the battery and wiped his broadsword’s long blade clean. It was almost full light now. Rain began to fall, heavy rain that splashed on the battery’s wreckage and diluted the blood.

The Half Moon Battery was back in British hands, and on the high ground Peleg Wadsworth despaired.

“They’re patriots!” General Lovell complained. “They must fight for their liberty!”

“They’re farmers,” Wadsworth said wearily, “and carpenters and laborers and they’re the men who didn’t volunteer for the Continental Army, and half of them didn’t want to fight anyway. They were forced to fight by press gangs.”

“The Massachusetts Militia,” Lovell said in a hurt voice. He was standing beneath the cover of a sail that had been strung and pegged between two trees to make a headquarter’s tent. The rain pattered on the canvas and hissed in the camp-fire just outside the tent.

“They’re not the same militia who fought at Lexington,” Wadsworth said, “or who stormed Breed’s Hill. Those men are all gone into the army,” or their graves, he thought, “and we have the leavings.”

“Another eighteen deserted last night,” Lovell said despairingly. He had set a picquet on the neck, but that post did little to stop men sneaking away in the darkness. Some, he supposed, deserted to the British, but most went north into the wild woods and hoped to find their way home. Those who were caught were condemned to the Horse, a brutal punishment whereby a man was sat astride a narrow beam with muskets tied to his legs, but the punishment was evidently not brutal enough, because still the militiamen deserted. “I am ashamed,” Lovell said.

“We still have enough men to assult the fort,” Wadsworth said, not sure he believed the words.

Lovell ignored them anyway. “What can we do?” he asked helplessly.

Wadsworth wanted to kick the man. You can lead us, he thought, you can take command, but in fairness, and Peleg Wadsworth was a man given to honesty about himself, he did not think he was showing great leadership either. He sighed. The dawn’s fog had cleared to reveal that the British had abandoned the recaptured Half Moon Battery, leaving the earthwork empty, and there was something insulting in that abandonment. They seemed to be saying that they could retake the battery whenever they wished, though Lovell showed no desire to accept the challenge. “We can’t hold the battery,” the general said despairingly.

“Of course we can, sir,” Wadsworth insisted.

“You saw what happened! They ran! The rascals ran! You want me to attack the fort with such men?”

“I think we must, sir,” Wadsworth said, but Lovell said nothing in return. The rain was coming down harder, forcing Wadsworth to raise his voice. “And, sir,” he continued, “at least we’ve rid ourselves of the enemy battery. The commodore might sail into the harbor.”

“He might,” Lovell said in a tone that suggested pigs might take wings and circle the heights of Majabigwaduce singing hallelujahs. “But I fear . . .” he began, and stopped.

“Fear, sir?”

“We need disciplined troops, Wadsworth. We need General Washington’s men.”

Praise the Lord, Wadsworth thought, but did not betray his reaction. He knew how hard it had been for Lovell to make that admission. Lovell wanted the glory of this expedition to shine on Massachusetts, but the general must now share that renown with the other rebellious states by calling in troops from the Continental Army. That army had real soldiers, disciplined men, trained men.

“A single regiment would be enough,” Lovell said.

“Let me convey the request to Boston,” the Reverened Jonathan Murray suggested.

“Would you?” Lovell asked eagerly. He had become more than slightly tired of the Reverend Murray’s pious con- fidence. God might indeed wish the Americans to conquer here, but even the Almighty had so far failed to move the commodore’s ships past Dyce’s Head. The clergyman was no military man, but he possessed persuasive powers and Boston would surely listen to his pleas. “What will you tell them?”

“That the enemy is too powerful,” Murray said, “and that our men, though filled with zeal and imbued with a love of liberty, nevertheless lack the discipline to bring down the walls of Jericho.”

“And ask for mortars,” Wadsworth said.

“Mortars?” Lovell asked.

“We don’t have trumpets,” Wadsworth said, “but we can rain fire and brimstone on their heads.”

“Yes, mortars,” Lovell said. A mortar was even more deadly for siege work than an howitzer and, anyway, Lovell possessed only one howitzer. The mortars would fire their shells high in the sky so that they fell vertically into the fort and, as the fort’s walls grew higher, so those walls would contain the explosions and spread death among the redcoats. “I shall write the letter,” Lovell said heavily.

Because the rebels needed reinforcements.

Next day Peleg Wadsworth tied a large piece of white cloth to a long stick and walked towards the enemy fort. Colonel Revere’s guns had already fallen silent and, soon after, the British guns went quiet too.

Wadsworth went alone. He had asked James Fletcher to accompany him, but Fletcher had begged off. “They know me, sir.”

“And you like some of them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then stay here,” Wadsworth had said, and now he walked down the ridge’s gentle slope, between the shattered tree stumps, and he saw two red-coated officers leave the fort and come towards him. He thought that they would not want him to get too close in case he saw the state of the fort’s walls, but he was evidently wrong because the two men waited for him inside the abatis. It seemed they did not care if he had a good view of the ramparts. Those ramparts were under constant bombardment from Revere’s guns, yet to Wadsworth’s eyes, they looked remarkably undamaged. Maybe that was why the British officers did not mind him seeing the walls. They were mocking him.

It had rained again that morning. The rain had stopped, but the wind felt damp and the clouds were still low and threatening. The wet weather had soaked the men encamped on the heights, it had drenched the stored cartridges and increased the militia’s misery. Some men had hissed at Lovell as the general accompanied Wadsworth to the tree line and Lovell had pretended not to hear the sound.

The abatis had been knocked about by gunfire and it was not difficult to find a way through the tangled branches. Wadsworth felt foolish holding the flag of truce above his head so he lowered it as he approached the two enemy officers. One of them, the shortest, had gray hair beneath his cocked hat. He leaned on a stick and smiled as Wadsworth approached. “Good morning,” he called genially.

“Good morning,” Wadsworth responded.

“Not really a good morning, though, is it?” the man said. His right arm was held unnaturally. “It’s a chill and wet morning. It’s raw! I am Brigadier-General McLean, and you are?”

“Brigadier-General Wadsworth,” Wadsworth said, and felt entirely fraudulent in claiming the rank.

“Allow me to name Lieutenant Moore to you, General,” McLean said, indicating the good-looking young man who accompanied him.

“Sir,” Moore greeted Wadsworth by standing briefly to attention and bowing his head.

“Lieutenant,” Wadsworth acknowledged the politeness.

“Lieutenant Moore insisted on keeping me company in case you planned to kill me,” McLean said.

“Under a flag of truce?” Wadsworth asked sternly.

“Forgive me, General,” McLean said, “I jest. I would not think you capable of such perfidy. Might I ask what brings you to see us?”

“There was a young man,” Wadsworth said, “a marine officer called Dennis. I have a connection with his family,” he paused, “I taught him his letters. I believe he is your prisoner?”

“I believe he is,” McLean said gently.

“And I hear he was wounded yesterday. I was hoping . . .” Wadsworth paused because he had been about to call McLean “sir,” but managed to check that foolish impulse just in time, “I was hoping you could reassure me of his condition.”

“Of course,” McLean said and turned to Moore. “Lieutenant, be a good fellow and run to the hospital, would you?”

Moore left and McLean gestured at two tree stumps. “We might as well be comfortable while we wait,” he said. “I trust you’ll forgive me if I don’t invite you inside the fort?”

“I wouldn’t expect it,” Wadsworth said.

“Then please sit,” McLean said, and sat himself. “Tell me about young Dennis.”

Wadsworth perched on the adjacent stump. He talked awkwardly at first, merely saying how he had known the Dennis family, but his voice became warmer as he spoke of William Dennis’s cheerful and honest character. “He was always a fine boy,” Wadsworth said, “and he’s become a fine man. A good young man,” he stressed the “good,” “and he hopes to be a lawyer when this is all over.”

“I’ve heard there are honest lawyers,” McLean said with a smile.

“He will be an honest lawyer,” Wadsworth said firmly.

“Then he will do much good in the world,” McLean said. “And yourself, General? I surmise you were a schoolteacher?”

“Yes.”

“Then you have done much good in the world,” McLean said. “As for me? I went to be a soldier forty years ago and twenty battles later here I still am.”

“Not doing good for the world?” Wadsworth could not resist inquiring.

McLean took no offense. “I commanded troops for the King of Portugal,” he said, smiling, “and every year there was a great procession on All Saint’s Day. It was magnificent! Camels and horses! Well, two camels, and they were poor mangy beasts,” he paused, remembering, “and afterwards there was always dung on the square the king needed to cross to reach the cathedral, so a group of men and women were detailed to clean it up with brooms and shovels. They swept up the dung. That’s the soldier’s job, General, to sweep up the dung the politicians make.”

“Is that what you’re doing here?”

“Of course it is,” McLean said. He had taken a clay pipe from a pocket of his coat and put it between his teeth. He held a tinderbox awkwardly in his maimed right hand and struck the steel with his left. The linen flared up and McLean lit the pipe, then snapped the box closed to extinguish the flame. “You people,” he said when the pipe was drawing, “had a disagreement with my people, and you or I, General, might well have talked our way to an accord, but our lords and masters failed to agree so now you and I must decide their arguments a different way.”

“No,” Wadsworth said. “To my mind, General, you’re the camel, not the sweeper.”

McLean laughed at that. “I’m mangy enough, God knows. No, General, I didn’t cause this dung, but I am loyal to my king and this is his land, and he wants me to keep it for him.”

“The king might have kept it for himself,” Wadsworth said, “if he had chosen any rule except tyranny.”

“Oh, he’s such a tyrant!” McLean said, still amused. “Your leaders are wealthy men, I believe? Landowners, are they not? And merchants? And lawyers? This is a rebellion led by the wealthy. Strange how such men prospered so under tyranny.”

“Liberty is not the freedom to prosper,” Wadsworth said, “but the freedom to make choices that affect our own destiny.”

“But would a tyranny allow you to prosper?”

“You have restricted our trade and levied taxes without our consent,” Wadsworth said, wishing he did not sound so pedagogic.

“Ah! So our tyranny lies in not allowing you to become wealthier still?”

“Not all of us are wealthy men,” Wadsworth said heatedly, “and as you well know, General, tyranny is the denial of liberty.”

“And how many slaves do you keep?” McLean asked.

Wadsworth was tempted to retort that the question was a cheap jibe, except it had stung him. “None,” he said stiffly. “The keeping of Negroes is not common in Massachusetts.” He felt acutely uncomfortable. He knew he had not argued well, but he had been surprised by his enemy. He had anticipated a pompous, supercilious British officer, and instead found a courteous man, old enough to be his father, who seemed very relaxed in this unnatural encounter.

“Well, here the two of us are,” McLean said happily, “a tyrant and his downtrodden victim, talking together.” He pointed his pipe stem towards the fort where John Moore had gone on his way to the hospital. “Young Moore reads his history. He’s a fine young man too. He likes history, and here he is, here we both are, writing a new chapter. I sometimes wish I could peer into the future and read the chapter we write.”

“You might not like it,” Wadsworth said.

“I think it certain that one of us will not,” McLean said.

The conversation faltered. McLean drew on his pipe and Wadsworth gazed at the nearby ramparts. He could see the timber spikes in the ditch and, above them, the earth and log wall that was now higher than a man’s head. No one could leap the ramparts now, the wall would need to be climbed and fought for. It would be hard and bloody work and he wondered if even Continental Army troops could manage it. They could if the wall were breached and Wadsworth looked for evidence that Colonel Revere’s guns were having any effect, but other than the mangled roof of the storehouse inside the fort there was little sign of the cannonade. There were places where the wall had been battered by round shot, but those places had all been repaired. Mortars, he thought, mortars. We need to turn the interior of the fort into a cauldron of shrieking metal and searing flame. The curtain wall between the protruding corner bastions was lined with redcoats who gazed back at Wadsworth, intrigued by the proximity of a rebel. Wadsworth tried to count the men, but there were too many.

“I’m keeping most of my men hidden,” McLean said.

Wadsworth felt guilty, which was ridiculous because it was his duty to examine the enemy. Indeed, General Lovell had only agreed to this inquiry about Lieutenant Dennis’s fate because it offered Wadsworth an opportunity to examine the enemy’s defenses. “We’re keeping most of ours hidden too,” Wadsworth said.

“Which is sensible of you,” McLean said. “I see from your uniform you served in Mister Washington’s army?”

“I was an aide to the general, yes,” Wadsworth said, offended by the British habit of referring to George Washington as “mister.”

“A formidable man,” McLean said. “I’m sorry young Moore is taking so long.” Wadsworth made no answer and the Scotsman smiled wryly. “You very nearly killed him.”

“Lieutenant Moore?”

“He insisted on fighting the war single-handed, which I suppose is a good fault in a young officer, but I’m profoundly grateful he survived. He had great promise.”

“As a soldier?”

“As a man and as a soldier. Like your Lieutenant Dennis, he is a good young man. If I had a son, General, I should wish him to be like Moore. Do you have children?”

“Two sons and a daughter, and another child coming very soon.”

McLean heard the warmth in Wadsworth’s voice. “You’re a fortunate man, General.”

“I think so.”

McLean drew on the pipe, then blew a stream of smoke into the damp air. “If you will allow an enemy’s prayers, General, then let me pray you will be reunited with your family.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course,” McLean said blandly, “you could effect that reconciliation by withdrawing now?”

“But we have orders to capture you first,” Wadsworth said with some amusement in his voice.

“I shall not pray for that,” McLean said.

“I think, perhaps, we should have attempted it a week ago,” Wadsworth said ruefully, and immediately wished he had left the words unspoken. McLean said nothing, merely inclined his head, which small gesture might have been interpreted as agreement. “But we shall attempt it again,” Wadsworth finished.

“You must do your duty, General, of course you must,” McLean said, then turned because Wadsworth had looked towards the fort’s southwestern corner. John Moore had appeared there and now walked towards them with a scabbarded sword held in one hand. The lieutenant glanced at Wadsworth, then bent and whispered in McLean’s ear and the general winced and closed his eyes momentarily. “I am sorry, General Wadsworth,” he said, “but Lieutenant Dennis died this morning. You may be assured that he received the best treatment we could offer, but, alas, the ministrations were not sufficient.” McLean stood.

Wadsworth stood too. He looked at McLean’s grave face and then, to his shame, tears rolled down his cheeks. He turned away abruptly.

“There is nothing to be ashamed of,” McLean said.

“He was a fine man,” Wadsworth said, and he knew he was not crying because of Dennis’s death, but because of the waste and indecision of this campaign. He sniffed, composed himself, and turned back to McLean. “Please thank your doctor for whatever he attempted.”

“I will,” McLean said, “and please be assured we shall give Lieutenant Dennis a Christian burial.”

“Bury him in his uniform, please.”

“We shall do that, of course,” McLean promised. He took the scabbarded sword from Moore. “I presume you brought this because it belonged to the lieutenant?” he asked Moore.

“Yes, sir.”

McLean handed the sword to Wadsworth. “You might wish to return that to his family, General, and you may tell them from his enemy that their son died fighting heroically. They can be proud of him.”

“I shall,” Wadsworth said and took the sword. “Thank you for indulging my inquiry,” he said to McLean.

“I enjoyed most of our conversation,” McLean said and held a hand towards the abatis as though he were a host conducting an honored guest towards his front door. “I am truly sorry about your Lieutenant Dennis,” he said, walking westwards beside the much taller American. “Maybe one day, General, you and I can sit in peace and talk about these things.”

“I’d like that.”

“As would I,” McLean said, stopping just short of the abatis. He smiled mischievously. “And do please give my regards to young James Fletcher.”

“Fletcher,” Wadsworth said as if the name was new to him.

“We have telescopes, General,” McLean said, amused. “I regret he chose the allegiance he did. I regret that very much, but do tell him his sister is well, and that the tyrants give her and her mother rations.” He held out his hand. “We won’t resume our cannon practice till you’re back among the trees,” he said.

Wadsworth hesitated, then shook the offered hand. “Thank you, General,” he said, then began the long, lonely walk back up the ridge’s spine.

McLean stayed at the abatis, watching Wadsworth’s solitary walk. “He’s rather a good man, I think,” he said when the American was well out of earshot.

“He’s a rebel,” Moore said disapprovingly.

“And if you or I had been born here,” McLean said, “then like as not we would be rebels too.”

“Sir!” John Moore sounded shocked.

McLean laughed. “But we were born across the sea, and it’s not so many years since we had our own rebels in Scotland. And I did like him.” He still watched Wadsworth. “He’s a man who wears his honesty like a badge, but luckily for you and me he’s no soldier. He’s a schoolmaster and that makes us fortunate in our enemies. Now let’s get back inside before they start shooting at us again.”

At dusk, that same day, Lieutenant Dennis was buried in his green uniform. Four highlanders shot a volley into the fading light, then a wooden cross was hammered into the soil. The name Dennis was scratched on the cross with charcoal, but two days later a corporal took the cross for kindling.

And the siege went on.

The three redcoats slipped out of the tented encampment at mid-afternoon on the day that the enemy officer had come to the fort under a flag of truce. They had no idea why the rebel had come, nor did they care. They cared about the sentries placed to stop men sneaking out of the camp and into the woods, but that picquet was easy enough to avoid, and the three men vanished into the trees and then turned west towards the enemy.

Two were brothers called Campbell, the third was a Mackenzie. They all wore the dark kilt of Argyle and carried their muskets. Off to their left the cannons were firing, the sound sporadic, sudden, percussive and now a part of their daily lives. “Down there,” Jamie Campbell said, pointing, and the three followed a vague track which led downhill through the trees. All three were grinning, excited. The day was gray and a light rain spat from the southwest.

The track led to the marshy isthmus that connected Majabigwaduce’s peninsula to the mainland. Jamie, the oldest of the brothers and the acknowledged leader of the three men, did not want to reach the isthmus, rather he was hoping to work his way along the wooded slope just above the marsh. The rebels patrolled that ground. He had seen them there. Sometimes Captain Caffrae’s company went to the same land and ambushed a rebel patrol, or else mocked the Americans with fife music and jeers. This afternoon, though, the wood above the marsh seemed empty. The three crouched in the brush and gazed west towards the enemy lines. To their right the trees were thinner, while ahead was a small clearing in which a spring bubbled. “Not a bloody soul here,” Mackenzie grumbled.

“They come here,” Jamie said. He was nineteen, with dark eyes, black hair, and a hunter’s watchful face. “Watch up the slope,” he told his brother, “we don’t want bloody Caffrae finding us.”

They waited. Birds, now as accustomed to the cannon-fire as the troops, sang harshly in the trees. A small animal, strangely striped, flitted across the clearing. Jamie Campbell stroked the stock of his musket. He loved his musket. He treated the stock with oil and boot-blacking so that the wood was smooth like silk, and the caress of the weapon’s dark curves put him in mind of the sergeant’s widow in Halifax. He smiled.

“There!” his brother Robbie hissed.

Four rebels had appeared at the clearing’s far side. They were in dull brown coats, trews and hats, and festooned with belts, pouches, and bayonet scabbards. Three of the men carried two pails apiece, the fourth had a musket in his hands. They shambled to the spring where they stooped to fill their buckets.