The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

“Now!” Jamie said, and the three muskets flamed loud. One of the men at the spring was thrown sideways, his blood a flicker of red in the gray rain. The fourth rebel shot back at the smoke among the trees, but Mackenzie and the Campbell brothers were already running away, whooping and laughing.

It was sport. The general had forbidden it, and had threatened a dire punishment to any man who left the lines to take a shot at the enemy without permission, but the young Scotsmen loved the risk. If the rebels would not come to them then they would go to the rebels, whatever the general wanted. Now all they needed to do was get back safe to the tents without being found.

Then, tomorrow, do it again.

Samuel Adams reached Major-General Horatio Gates’s headquarters at Providence in Rhode Island late in the afternoon. Swollen clouds were heaping, and off to the west the thunder already grumbled. It was hot and humid and Adams was shown into a small parlor where, despite the open windows, no hint of wind brought relief. He wiped his face with a big spotted handkerchief. “Would you like tea, sir?” a pale lieutenant in Continental Army uniform asked.

“Ale,” Samuel Adams said firmly.

“Ale, sir?”

“Ale,” Samuel Adams said even more firmly.

“General Gates will be with you directly, sir,” the lieutenant said distantly and, Adams suspected, inaccurately, then vanished into the nether regions of the house.

The ale was brought. It was sour, but drinkable. Thunder sounded louder, though no rain fell and still no wind blew through the open sash windows. Adams wondered if he was hearing the sound of the siege guns pounding the British in Newport, but all reports said the attempts to evict that garrison had proven hopeless, and a moment later a distant flash of lightning confirmed that it was indeed thunder. A dog howled and a woman’s voice was raised in anger. Samuel Adams closed his eyes and dozed.

He was woken by the sound of nailed boots on the wooden floor of the hallway. He sat upright just as Major-General Horatio Gates came into the parlor. “You rode from Boston, Mister Adams?” the general boomed in greeting.

“Indeed I did.”

Despite the heat Gates had been wearing a greatcoat which he now threw to the lieutenant. “Tea,” he said, “tea, tea, tea.”

“Very good, your honor,” the lieutenant said.

“And tea for Mister Adams!”

“Ale!” Adams called in correction, but the lieutenant was already gone.

Gates unstrapped the scabbarded sword he wore over his Continental Army uniform and slammed it onto a table heaped with paperwork. “How are matters in Boston, Adams?”

“We do the Lord’s work,” Adams said gently, though Gates entirely missed the irony. The general was a tall man a few years younger than Samuel Adams, who, after his long ride down the Boston Post Road, was feeling every one of his fifty-seven years. Gates glared at the papers resting under his sword. He was, Adams thought, an officer much given to glaring. The general was heavy-jowled with a powdered wig that was not quite large enough to hide his gray hairs. Sweat trickled from under the wig. “And how do you fare in this fair island?” Adams asked.

“Island?” Gates asked, looking suspiciously at his visitor. “Ah, Rhode Island. Damn silly name. It’s all the fault of the French, Adams, the French. If the damned French had kept their word we’d have evicted the enemy from Newport. But the French, damn their eyes, won’t bring their ships. Damned fart-catchers, every last one of them.”

“Yet they are our valued allies.”

“So are the damned Spanish,” Gates said disparagingly.

“As are the damned Spanish,” Adams agreed.

“Fart-catchers and papists,” Gates said, “what kind of allies are those, eh?” He sat opposite Adams, long booted legs sprawling on a faded rug. Mud and horse dung were caked on the soles of his boots. He steepled his fingers and stared at his visitor. “What brings you to Providence?” he asked. “No, don’t tell me yet. On the table. Serve us.” The last five words were addressed to the pale lieutenant who placed a tray on the table and then, in an awkward silence, poured two cups of tea. “You can go now,” Gates said to the hapless lieutenant. “A man cannot live without tea,” he declared to Adams.

“A blessing of the British empire?” Adams suggested mischievously.

“Thunder,” Gates said, remarking on a clap that sounded loud and close, “but it won’t get here. It’ll die with the day.” He sipped his tea noisily. “You hear much from Philadelphia?”

“Little you cannot read in the newsprints.”

“We’re dillydallying,” Gates said, “dillydallying, shilly-shallying, and lollygagging. We need a great deal more energy, Adams.”

“I am sure your honor is right,” Adams said, taking his cue for the honorific from the lieutenant’s mode of address. Gates was nicknamed “Granny,” though Adams thought that too kind for a man so touchy and sensible of his dignity. Granny had been born and raised in England and had served in the British Army for many years before a lack of money, slow promotion, and an ambitious wife had driven him to settle in Virginia. His undoubted competence as an administrator had brought him high rank in the Continental Army, but it was no secret that Horatio Gates thought his rank should be higher still. He openly despised General Washington, believing that victory would only come when Major-General Horatio Gates was given command of the patriot armies. “And how would your honor suggest we campaign?” Adams asked.

“Well, it’s no damned good sitting on your fat backside staring at the enemy in New York,” Gates said energetically, “no damned good at all!”

Adams gave a flutter of his hands that might have been construed as agreement. When he rested his hands on his lap again he saw the slight tremor in his fingers. It would not go away. Age, he supposed, and sighed inwardly.

“The Congress must come to its senses,” Gates declared.

“The Congress, of course, pays close heed to the sentiments of Massachusetts,” Adams said, dangling a great fat carrot in front of Gates’s greedy mouth. The general wanted Massachusetts to demand George Washington’s dismissal and the appointment of Horatio Gates as commander of the Continental Army.

“And you agree with me?” Gates asked.

“How could I possibly disagree with a man of your military experience, General?”

Gates heard what he wanted to hear in that answer. He stood and poured himself more tea. “So the State of Massachusetts wants my help?” he asked.

“And I had not even stated my purpose,” Adams said with feigned admiration.

“Not difficult to grasp, is it? You’ve sent your pillow-biters off to Penobscot Bay and they can’t get the job done.” He turned a scornful face on Adams. “Sam Savage wrote to tell me the British had surrendered. Not true, eh?”

“Alas, not true,” Adams said with a sigh. “The garrison appears to be a more difficult nut to crack than we had supposed.”

“McLean, right? A competent man. Not brilliant, but competent. You wish for more tea?”

“This is as sufficient as it is delicious,” Adams said, touching a finger to the untasted cup.

“You sent your militia. How many?”

“General Lovell commands around a thousand men.”

“What does he want?”

“Regular troops.”

“Ah ha! He wants real soldiers, does he?” Gates drank his second cup of tea, poured a third, then sat again. “Who pays for this?”

“Massachusetts,” Adams said. God knew Massachusetts had already spent a fortune on the expedition, but it seemed another fortune must now be expended and he prayed that Brigadier-General McLean had a vast chest of treasure hidden in his toy fort or else the State’s debt would be crippling.

“Rations, transport,” Gates insisted, “both must be paid for!”

“Of course.”

“And how do you convey my troops to the Penobscot River?”

“There is shipping in Boston,” Adams said.

“You should have asked me a month ago,” Gates said.

“Indeed we should.”

“But I suppose Massachusetts wanted the battle honor for itself, eh?”

Adams gently inclined his head to indicate assent and tried to imagine this irascible, touchy, resentful Englishman in charge of the Continental Army and was profoundly grateful for George Washington.

“Lieutenant!” Gates barked.

The pale lieutenant appeared at the door. “Your honor?”

“My compliments to Colonel Jackson. His men are to march for Boston at daybreak. They march with arms, ammunition, and a day’s rations. Full orders will follow tonight. Tell the colonel he is to keep a detailed, mark that, detailed, list of all expenditures. Go.”

The lieutenant went.

“No good shilly-shallying,” Gates said to Adams. “Henry Jackson’s a good man and his regiment is as fine as any I’ve seen. They’ll finish McLean’s nonsense.”

“You are very kind, General,” Adams said.

“Not kind at all, efficient. We have a war to win! No good sending fart-catchers and pillow-biters to do a soldier’s job. You’ll do me the honor of dining with me?”

Samuel Adams sighed inwardly at that prospect, but liberty had its price. “It would be a distinct privilege, your honor,” he said.

Because, at last, a regiment of trained American soldiers was going to Penobscot Bay.

Letter from Brigadier-General Lovell to Commodore Saltonstall, August 5th, 1779:I have proceded as far as I Can on the present plan and find it inafectual for the purpose of disloging or destroying the Shiping. I must therefore request an ansure from you wether you will venter your Shiping up the River in order to demolish them or not that I may conduct my Self accordingly.

From the Minutes of Brigadier-General Lovell’s Council of War, Majabigwaduce, August 11th, 1779:Great want of Discipline and Subordination many of the Officers being so exceedingly slack in their Duty, the Soldiers so averse to the Service and the wood in which we encamped so very thick that on an alarm or any special occasion nearly one fourth part of the Army are skulked out of the way and conceal’d.

From the Journal of Sergeant Lawrence, Royal Artillery. Fort George, Majabigwaduce, August 5th and August 12th, 1779:The General was very much surprised to see so many Men leave the Fort today to take shots at the Enemy without leave. He assures them that any who may be Guilty of this again shall be most severely punished for disobedience of orders.

Chapter Eleven

Wednesday, August 11th, started with a thick fog and still airs. Small waves slapped wearily on the harbor shore where a lone gull cried. Peleg Wadsworth, standing on Dyce’s Head, could see neither the enemy fort nor their ships. Fog blanketed the world. No cannon fired because the whiteness concealed targets from rebel and king’s men alike.

Colonel Samuel McCobb had brought two hundred men from his Lincoln County militia to the meadow just beneath Dyce’s Head. These were the same men who had fled from the Half Moon Battery and now they waited for General Lovell, who had decided to send them back to the battery. “If you fall off a horse,” Lovell had asked Peleg Wadsworth the previous night, “what do you do?”

“Climb back into the saddle?”

“My sentiments, my sentiments,” Lovell had declared. The general, who had been in despair just a couple of days before, had apparently climbed back into his own saddle of confidence. “You dust yourself down,” Lovell had said, “and scramble back up! Our fellows need to be shown they can beat the enemy.”

James Fletcher was waiting with Peleg Wadsworth. Fletcher would guide McCobb’s men down to Jacob Dyce’s cornfield which lay a hundred or so paces up the slope from the deserted battery. There the militia would hide. It was a trap devised by Lovell, who was certain that McLean would not be able to resist the lure. Wadsworth had urged Lovell to assault the fort directly, but the general had insisted that McCobb’s men required heartening. “They need a victory, Wadsworth,” Lovell had declared.

“Indeed they do, sir.”

“As things are,” Lovell had admitted with bleak honesty, “we’re not ready to assault the fort, but if the militia’s confidence is restored, if their patriotic fervor is aroused, then I believe there is nothing they cannot achieve.”

Peleg Wadsworth hoped that was true. A letter had arrived from Boston warning that a fleet of British warships had left New York harbor and it was presumed, no one could say for certain, that the fleet’s destination was Penobscot Bay. Time was short. It was possible that the enemy fleet was sailing elsewhere, to Halifax or maybe down the coast towards the Carolinas, but Wadsworth worried that any day now he would see topsails appear above the seaward islands in the Penobscot River. Some men were already urging abandonment of the siege, but Lovell was unwilling to contemplate failure, instead he wanted his militia to win a small victory that would lead to the greater triumph.

And so this ambush had been devised. McCobb was to take his men down to the concealment of the cornfield from where he would send a small patrol to occupy the deserted battery. Those men would carry picks and spades so that they appeared to be making a new rampart to face the British, a defiance that Lovell was certain would provoke a response from Fort George. McLean would send men to drive the small patrol away and the ambush would be sprung. As the British attacked the men heightening the earthwork, so McCobb’s men would erupt from the cornfield and assault the enemy’s flank. “You’ll give them a volley,” Lovell had encouraged McCobb the night before, “then drive them away at the point of bayonets. Balls and bayonets! That’ll do the job.”

General Lovell now appeared in the dawn fog. “Good morning, Colonel!” the general cried cheerfully.

“Good morning, sir,” McCobb answered.

“Good morning, good morning, good morning!” Lovell called to the assembled men who mostly ignored him. One or two returned the greeting, though none with any enthusiasm. “Your men are in good heart?” the general asked McCobb.

“Ready and raring for the day, sir,” McCobb answered, though in truth his men looked ragged, sullen, and dispirited. Days of camping in the woods had left them dirty and the rain had rotted their shoe leathers, though their weapons were clean enough. McCobb had inspected the weapons, tugging at flints, drawing bayonets from sheaths or running a finger inside a barrel to make certain no powder residue clung to the metal. “They’ll do us proud, sir,” McCobb said.

“Let us hope the enemy plays his part!” Lovell declared. He looked upwards. “Is the fog thinning?”

“A little,” Wadsworth said.

“Then you should go, Colonel,” Lovell said, “but let me say a word or two to the men first?”

Lovell wanted to inspire them. He knew spirits were dangerously low, he heard daily reports of men deserting the lines or else hiding in the woods to evade their duties, and so he stood before McCobb’s men and told them they were Americans, that their children and children’s children would want to hear of their prowess, that they should return home with laurels on their brows. Some men nodded as he spoke, but most listened with expressionless faces as Lovell moved to his carefully prepared climax. “Let after ages say,” he declared with an orator’s flourish, “that there they did stand like men inspired, there did they fight, and fighting some few fell, the rest victorious, firm, inflexible!”

He stopped abruptly, as if expecting a cheer, but the men just gazed blankly at him and Lovell, discomfited, gestured that McCobb should take them down the hill. Wadsworth watched them pass. One man had tied his boot-soles to the uppers with twine. Another man limped. A few were bare-footed, some were gray-headed and others looked absurdly young. He wished Lovell had thought to ask Saltonstall for a company of marines, but the general and the commodore were barely on speaking terms now. They communicated by stiff letters, the commodore insisting that the ships could not be attacked while the fort existed, and the general certain that the fort was impregnable so long as the British ships still floated.

“I think that went very well,” Lovell said to Wadsworth, “don’t you?”

“Your speech, sir? It was rousing.”

“Just a reminder of their duty and our destiny,” Lovell said. He watched the last of the militia disappear into the fog. “When the day clears,” he went on, “you might look to those new batteries?”

“Yes, sir,” Wadsworth said unenthusiastically. Lovell wanted him to establish new gun batteries that could bombard the British ships. Those new batteries, Lovell now insisted, were the key to the army’s success, but the idea made little sense to Wadsworth. Building more batteries would take guns from their primary job of cannonading the fort and, besides, the gunners had already warned Lovell that they were running short of ammunition. The twelve-pounder shot was almost entirely expended, and the eighteen-pounders had fewer than two hundred rounds between them. Colonel Revere was being blamed for that shortage of powder and shot, but in all fairness everyone had expected the British to be defeated within a week of the fleet’s arrival, and now the army had been encamped before Fort George for almost three weeks. There was even a lack of musket cartridges because the spare ammunition had not been properly protected from the rain. General McLean, Wadsworth thought bitterly, would never have allowed his cartridges to deteriorate. He had been unsettled by his meeting with the Scotsman. It was strange to feel such a liking for an enemy and McLean’s air of easy confidence had gnawed at Wadsworth’s hopes.

Lovell had heard the lack of enthusiasm in Wadsworth’s voice. “We must rid ourselves of those ships,” he said energetically. The topmasts of the four British ships were visible above the fog now, and Wadsworth instinctively glanced southwards to where he feared to see enemy reinforcements arriving, but the Penobscot’s long sea-reach was entirely shrouded by the fog. “If we can establish those new batteries,” Lovell went on, still sounding as though he addressed an election meeting rather than confiding in his deputy, “then we can so damage the enemy that the commodore will feel it safe to enter the harbor.”

Wadsworth suddenly wanted to commit murder. The responsibility for capturing the fort was not Saltonstall’s, but Lovell’s, and Lovell was doing anything except fulfill that obligation.

The violent sensation was so strange to Peleg Wadsworth that, for a moment, he said nothing. “Sir,” he finally said, mastering the urge to be bitter, “the ships are incapable’”

“The ships are the key!” Lovell contradicted Wadsworth before the objection was even articulated. “How can I throw my men forward if the ships exist on their flank?” Easily, Wadsworth thought, but knew he would get nowhere by saying so. “And if the commodore won’t rid me of the ships,” Lovell went on, “then we shall have to do the business ourselves. More batteries, Wadsworth, more batteries.” He pushed a finger at his deputy. “That’s your task today, General, to make me cannon emplacements.”

It was clear to Wadsworth that Lovell would do anything rather than assault the fort. He would nibble about the edges, but never bite the center. The older man feared failure in the great endeavor and so sought for smaller successes, and in doing so he risked defeat if British reinforcements arrived before any American troops came. Yet Lovell would not be persuaded to boldness and so Wadsworth waited for the fog to clear, then went down to the beach where he discovered Marine Captain Carnes standing beside two large crates. The guns on the heights had started firing and Wadsworth could hear the more distant sound of the British guns returning the fire. “Twelve-pounder ammunition,” Carnes greeted Wadsworth cheerfully, pointing at the two crates, “courtesy of the Warren.”

“We need it,” Wadsworth said, “and thank you.”

Carnes nodded towards his beached longboat. “My fellows are carrying the first boxes up to the batteries, and I’m guarding the rest to make sure no rascally privateer steals them.” He kicked at the shingle. “I hear your militiamen are planning to surprise the enemy?”

“I hope the enemy haven’t heard that,” Wadsworth said.

“The enemy’s probably content to do nothing,” Carnes said, “while we twiddle our fingers.”

“We do more than that,” Wadsworth said, bridling at the implied criticism which, if he were honest, he would agree with.

“We should be attacking the fort,” Carnes said.

“We should indeed.”

Carnes gave the taller man a shrewd glance. “You reckon the militia can do it, sir?”

“If they’re told the quickest way home is through the fort, yes. But I’d like some marines to lead the way.”

Carnes smiled at that. “And I’d like your artillery to concentrate their fire.”

Wadsworth remembered his close-up look at Fort George’s western wall and knew the marine was right. Worse, Carnes had been a Continental Army artillery officer, so knew what he was talking about. “Have you talked to Colonel Revere about that?” he asked.

“You can’t talk to Colonel Revere, sir,” Carnes said bitterly.

“Maybe we should both talk to him,” Wadsworth said, much as he dreaded such a conversation. Lieutenant-Colonel Revere reacted to criticism with belligerence, yet if the remaining ammunition was to be used wisely then the guns had to be laid skillfully. Wadsworth felt a pang of guilt at his part in appointing Revere to the expedition, then suppressed the rueful thoughts. There was already far too much blame being spread through the expedition. The army was blaming the navy, the navy was scornful of the army, and almost everyone was complaining about the artillery.

“We can talk to him,” Carnes said, “but with respect, sir, you’d be better off just replacing him.”

“Oh, surely not,” Wadsworth said, trying to head off the disparagement he knew was coming.

“He watches the fire a hundred paces away from his guns,” Carnes said, “and he reckons a shot is good if it merely hits the fort. I haven’t seen him correct the aim once! I told him he should be hammering the same length of wall with every damn gun he’s got, but he just told me to stop my impertinence.”

“He can be prickly,” Wadsworth said sympathetically.

“He’s given up hope,” Carnes said bleakly.

“I doubt that,” Wadsworth said loyally. “He detests the British.”

“Then he should damn well kill them,” Carnes said vengefully, “but I hear he votes to abandon the siege in your councils of war?”

“So does your brother,” Wadsworth said with a smile.

Carnes grinned. “John stands to lose his ship, General! He’s not making money at anchor in this river. He wants the Hector out at sea, snapping up British cargoes. What does Colonel Revere have to lose by staying?” He did not wait for an answer, but nodded out to the anchorage where the white-painted Castle Island barge had just left the Samuel. “And talk of the devil,” he said grimly. Lieutenant-Colonel Revere might have obeyed the order to sleep ashore, but he was still visiting the Samuel two or three times a day and now he was evidently being rowed ashore after one such visit. “He goes to the Samuel for his breakfast,” Carnes said.

Wadsworth stayed quiet.

“Then again for his dinner,” Carnes continued relentlessly.

Wadsworth still said nothing.

“And usually for his supper too,” Carnes said.

“I need a boat,” Wadsworth said abruptly, trying to avert yet more carping, “and I’m sure the colonel will oblige me.” There were usually a half dozen longboats on the shingle, their crews dozing above the high-tide line, but the only boat now on the beach was the one that had brought Carnes and the ammunition, and its oarsmen were carrying that ammunition up the bluff and so Wadsworth walked to where Revere’s barge would come ashore. “Good morning, Colonel!” he called as Revere approached. “You have fresh twelve-pounder ammunition!”

“Has McCobb gone?” was Revere’s response.

“He has indeed, an hour and a half since.”

“We should have sent a four-pounder with him,” Revere said. His barge grounded on the shingle and he stepped forward over the rowers’ benches.

“Too late now, I’m afraid,” Wadsworth said and extended a hand to steady Revere as he climbed over the barge’s bows. Revere ignored the gesture. “Are you ashore for a while now?” Wadsworth asked.

“Of course,” Revere said, “I have work here.”

“Then would you be good enough to allow me the use of your boat? I need to visit Cross Island.”

Revere bridled at the request. “This barge is for the artillery!” he said indignantly, “it can’t be spared for other people.”

Wadsworth could scarce believe what he heard. “You won’t lend its use for an hour or so?”

“Not for one minute,” Revere said curtly. “Good day to you.”

Wadsworth watched the colonel walk away. “If this war goes on another twenty years,” he said, his bitterness at last expressing itself, “I will not serve another day with that man!”

“My crew will be back soon,” Captain Carnes said. He was smiling, having overheard Wadsworth’s remark. “You can use my boat. Where are we going?”

“The channel south of Cross Island.”

Carnes’s marines rowed Wadsworth and the captain south into the channel behind Cross Island. That island was one of a necklace of rocks and islets which bounded a cove to the south of Majabigwaduce Harbor. A narrow isthmus separated the cove from the harbor itself and Wadsworth went ashore on its strip of stony beach where he unfolded the crude map James Fletcher had drawn for him. He pointed across the placid waters of Majabigwaduce’s inner harbor towards the thickly wooded eastern shore. “A man called Haney farms land over there,” he told Carnes, “and General Lovell wants a battery there.”

A battery on Haney’s land would hammer the British ships from the east. Wadsworth climbed one of the steep, overgrown hillocks that studded the isthmus and, once at the summit, used Captain Carnes’s powerful telescope to gaze at the enemy. At first he examined the four British ships. The closest vessel was the transport Saint Helena, which dwarfed the smaller sloops, yet those three smaller ships were far more heavily armed. Their east-facing gunports were closed, but Wadsworth reckoned there were no guns hidden behind those blank wooden squares. The rebels had seen British sailors taking cannon ashore, and the verdict had been that Captain Mowat had offered his ships’ portside broadsides to the fort’s defense. If Wadsworth needed any confirmation of that suspicion he gained it from seeing that the sloops were very slightly keeled over to starboard. He gave the telescope to Carnes and asked him to examine the ships. “You’re right, sir,” the marine said, “they are listing.”

“Guns on one side only?”

“That would explain the list.”

So any guns on Haney’s land would have no opposition, at least until Mowat managed to shift some cannon from his west-facing broadsides. Place guns on Haney’s land and the rebels would be just a thousand yards from the sloops, a range at which the eighteen-pounders would be lethal. “But how do we get men and guns there?” Wadsworth wondered aloud.

“Same way we came, sir,” Carnes said. “We carry the boats across this strip of land and relaunch them.”

Wadsworth felt a dull anger at the sheer waste of effort. It would take a hundred men two days to make a battery on Haney’s land, and what then? Even if the British ships were sunk or taken, would it make it any easier to capture the fort? True, the American ships could sail safe into the harbor and their guns could fire up at the fort, but what damage could their broadsides do to a wall so high above them?

Wadsworth trained the telescope on Fort George. At first he misaimed the tubes and was amazed that the fort looked so small, then he took his eye from the glass and saw that a new fort was being constructed and it was that second work he was seeing. The new fort, much smaller than Fort George, lay on the ridge to the east of the larger work. He trained the telescope again and saw blue-coated naval officers while the men digging the soil were not in any kind of uniform. “Sailors,” he said aloud.

“Sailors?”

“They’re making a new redoubt. Why?”

“They’re making a refuge,” Carnes said.

“A refuge?”

“If their ships are defeated the crews will go ashore. That’s where they’ll go.”

“Why not go to the main fort?”

“Because McLean wants an outwork,” Carnes said. “Look at the fort, sir.”

Wadsworth edged the telescope westwards. Trees and houses skidded past the lens, then he steadied the glass to examine Fort George. “Bless me,” he said.

He was gazing at the fort’s eastern wall which was hidden to anyone on the high ground to the west. And that eastern curtain wall was unfinished. It was still low. Wadworth could see no cannon there, only a shallow ridge of earth that he supposed was fronted by a ditch, but the important thing, the thing that made his hopes rise and his heart beat faster, was that the wall was still low enough to be easily scaled. He lowered the glass’s aim, examining the village with its cornfields, thickets, barns, and orchards. If he could reach that low ground then he reckoned he could conceal his men from both the ships and the fort. They could assemble out of sight, then attack that low wall. The impudent flag above the fort might yet be pulled down.

“McLean knows he’s vulnerable from the east,” Carnes said, “and that new redoubt protects him. He’ll put cannon there.”

“Or he will when it’s finished,” Wadsworth said, and it was clear the new redoubt was far from completion. We should attack from the east, he thought, because that was where the British were weak.

Wadsworth aimed the telescope towards Dyce’s Head, but the British ships obstructed his view and he could see nothing of the ambush, if indeed it had been sprung. No powder smoke showed in the sky above the abandoned battery. Wadsworth edged the telescope right again to stare across the low eastern tail of Majabigwaduce’s peninsula. He was looking at the land north of the peninsula. He stared for a long time, then gave the glass back to Carnes. “Look there,” he pointed. “There’s a meadow at the waterside. You can just see a house above it. It’s the only house I can see there.”

Carnes trained the glass. “I can see it.”

“The house belongs to a man called Westcot. General Lovell wants a battery up there too, but will its guns reach the British ships?”

“Eighteen-pounder shot will,” Carnes said, “but it’s too far for anything smaller. Must be a mile and a half, so you’ll need your eighteens.”

“General Lovell insists the ships must be defeated,” Wadsworth explained, “and the only way we can do that is by sinking them with gunfire.”

“Or by taking our ships in,” Carnes said.

“Will that happen?”

Carnes smiled. “The commodore is so high above me, sir, that I never hear a word he says. But if you weaken the British ships? I think in the end he’ll go in.” He swung the glass to examine the sloops. “That shoreward sloop? She hasn’t stopped pumping her bilges from the day we arrived. She’ll sink fast enough.”

“Then we’ll build the batteries,” Wadsworth said, “and hope we can riddle them with round shot.”

“And General Lovell’s right about one thing, sir,” Carnes said. “You do need to get rid of the ships.”

“The ships will surrender if we capture the fort,” Wadsworth said.

“No doubt they will,” Carnes said, “but if a British relief fleet arrives, sir, then we want all our ships inside the harbor.”

Because then the tables would be turned and it would be the British who would have to fight their way through cannon-fire to attack the harbor, but only if the harbor belonged to the rebels, and the only way that the Americans could capture the harbor was by storming the fort.

It was all so simple, Wadsworth thought, so very simple, and yet Lovell and the commodore were making it so complicated.

Wadsworth and Carnes were rowed back to the beach beneath Majabigwaduce’s bluff. As the longboat threaded the anchored warships Wadsworth stared south towards the sea-reach, south to where the reinforcements, either British or American, would arrive.

And the river was empty.

“I do believe,” McLean was staring south through a telescope, “that is my friend, Brigadier Wadsworth.” He was gazing at two men, one in a green coat, who were on the harbor’s southern shore. “I doubt they’re taking the air. You think they’re contemplating new batteries?”

“It would be sensible of them, sir,” Lieutenant Moore answered.

“I’m sure Mowat’s seen them, but I’ll let him know.” McLean lowered the glass and turned westwards. “If the rascals dare to build a battery on the harbor shore we’ll lead them a merry dance. And what steps are those rogues doing?” He pointed down towards the abandoned Half Moon Battery where a score of rebels appeared to be digging a ditch. It was difficult to see, because Jacob Dyce’s house, barn, and cornfield were partly in the way.

“May I, sir?” Moore asked, holding a hand for the telescope.

“Of course. Your eyes are younger than mine.”

Moore stared at the men. “They’re not working particularly hard, sir,” he said, after watching for a while. Six men were digging, the others were lounging amidst the wreckage of the battery.

“So what are they doing?”

“Making the battery defensible, sir?”

“And if they wanted to do that,” McLean asked, “why not send a hundred men? Two hundred! Three! Throw up a wall fast. Why send so few men?”

Moore did not reply because he did not know the answer. McLean took the glass back and used the lieutenant’s shoulder as a rest. He took a swift look at the lackadaisical work-party, then raised the telescope to stare at the trees on Dyce’s Head. “Ah,” he said after a while.

“Ah, sir?”

“There are a score of men on the high ground. They’re not usually there. They’re watching and waiting.” He collapsed the telescope’s tubes. “I do believe, Lieutenant, that our enemy has prepared a trap for us.”

Moore smiled. “Really, sir?”

“What are those fellows watching? They can’t be there to watch a ditch being dug!” McLean frowned as he gazed westwards. A rebel cannon-ball flew overhead. The sound of the guns was now so normal that he scarcely noticed it, though he took careful note of the effect of the rebel gunfire, most of which was wasted and it amused McLean that Captain Fielding was so offended by that. As an artilleryman the English captain expected better of the enemy gunners, though McLean was delighted that the rebel cannoneers were being so wasteful. If they had spent an extra minute laying each gun they could have demolished most of Fort George’s western wall by now, but they seemed content to fire blind. So what were those men doing on Dyce’s Head? They were plainly staring towards the fort, but to see what? And why were there so few men at the Half Moon Battery? “They’re there to draw us out,” McLean decided.

“The ditch-diggers?”

“They want us to attack them,” McLean said, “and why would they want that?”

“Because they have more men there?”

McLean nodded. He reckoned half of warfare was reading the enemy’s mind, a skill that was now ingrained in the Scotsman. He had fought in Flanders and in Portugal, he had spent a lifetime watching his enemies and learning to translate their every small movement, and to translate what he saw in the knowledge that very often those movements were calculated to deceive. At first, when the rebels had arrived, McLean had been puzzled by these enemies. They had so nearly captured the fort, then they had decided on a siege instead of a storm, and he had worried about what cleverness that tactic concealed, but now he was almost certain that there was no cleverness at all. His enemy was simply cautious, and the best way to keep him cautious was to hurt him. “We’re being invited to dance to a rebel tune, Lieutenant.”

“And we decline the honor, sir?”

“Oh good Lord, no, no! Not at all!” McLean said, enjoying himself. “Somewhere down there is a much larger body of the enemy. I think we must take the floor with them!”

“If we do, sir, then might’”

“You want to dance?” McLean interrupted Moore. “Of course, Lieutenant.” It was time to let Moore off the leash, the general decided. The young man still blamed himself, and rightly, for his brave stupidity on the day when the rebels had captured the high ground, but it was time Moore was offered redemption for that mistake. “You’ll go with Captain Caffrae,” McLean said, “and you shall dance.”

Commodore Saltonstall declared he would be responsible for constructing the battery on Haney’s land if General Lovell was prepared to send a pair of eighteen-pounder cannons to the new work. Saltonstall did not communicate directly with Lovell, but sent Hoysteed Hacker, captain of the Continental sloop Providence, with the offer. He carried Lovell’s consent back to the commodore, and so that afternoon eight longboats left the anchored warships and rowed south of Cross Island to land on the narrow isthmus. The boats were manned by over a hundred sailors equipped with spades and picks which they carried, with the boats, across the narrow neck of land. They relaunched the boats and rowed across to the eastern side of Majabigwaduce Harbor. They were led by Commodore Saltonstall, who wanted to site the battery himself.

He discovered the perfect place for a battery, a low headland that pointed like a finger directly at the British ships and with space enough for two guns to pound the enemy sloops. “Dig here,” he ordered. He would raise a rampart round the headland. Eventually, he knew, Mowat would haul guns across the sloops’ decks to return the fire, so the rampart needed to be high and stout enough to protect the gunners.

Mowat was evidently busy because Saltonstall could see boats rowing constantly between the sloops and the shore. A new and smaller fort was being built east of Fort George and Saltonstall suspected it was there to add firepower to the harbor defenses. “We bring our ships in here,” he told his first lieutenant, “and they’ll pour shot down on us.”

“They will, sir,” Lieutenant Fenwick said loyally.

Saltonstall pointed to the new earthwork that the British were making. “They’re putting more guns up there. They can’t wait to have our ships under their cannons. It’s a death trap.”

“Unless Lovell captures the fort, sir.”

“Captures the fort!” Saltonstall said scathingly. “He couldn’t capture a dribble of piss with a chamberpot. The man’s a damned farmer.”

“What are they doing?” Fenwick pointed to the British sloops from which four longboats, each crammed with red-coated Royal Marines, were rowing northeast towards the Majabigwaduce River.

“They’re not coming this way,” Saltonstall said.

“I presume we’ll post marines here, sir?” Fenwick asked.

“We’ll need to.” The new battery was isolated and, if the British had a mind to it, easily attacked. Yet the guns did not have to be here for long. Whenever the rebel fire had become too warm the British ships had moved their position and Saltonstall was convinced that a battery here on Haney’s land and another to the north would drive Mowat away from his present position. The Scotsman would either take his sloops north into the narrow channel of the Majabigwaduce River or else seek refuge in the southernmost reaches of the harbor, but in either place he would be unable to support the fort with his broadsides and, once the sloops had been driven away, Saltonstall could contemplate bringing his ships into the harbor and using their guns to bombard the fort on the ridge. But only if Lovell attacked at the same time. He watched the Royal Marines rowing steadily up the Majabigwaduce River. “Foraging, maybe?” he guessed. The boats vanished behind a distant point of land.

The sailors were having a hard time because the soil was thin. The commodore, feeling restless and bored by the dull work, left Lieutenant Fenwick to supervise the diggers while he walked up a trail towards a farm. It was a miserable farm too, little more than a lichen-covered log cabin with a field-stone chimney, a ramshackle barn, some cornfields, and a stony pasture with two thin cows, all of it hacked out of the forest. The log pile was bigger than the house and the dungheap even bigger. Smoke seeped from the chimney, suggesting someone was home, but Saltonstall had no wish to engage in a conversation with some dirt-poor peasant and so he avoided the house, walking instead around the margin of the cow pasture and climbing towards the summit of the hill east of the house, from where, he thought, he might get a fine view of the new enemy fort.

He knew Solomon Lovell was blaming him for not attacking the British ships and Saltonstall despised Lovell for that blame. The man was a Massachusetts farmer, not a soldier, and he had no conception whatever of naval matters. To Solomon Lovell it all seemed so easy. The American ships should sail boldly through the harbor entrance and use their broadsides to shatter the enemy ships, but Saltonstall knew what would happen if he attempted that maneuver. The wind and tide would carry the Warren slowly, and her bows would be exposed to all Mowat’s guns, and the cannon from the fort would pour their heavy shot down into her hull and the scuppers would be dripping blood by the time he hauled into the wind to bring his own broadside to bear. Then, true enough, he might batter one of the sloops into submission, and the larger rebel ships would be there to help, but even if all the British ships were taken the fort would still be hammering shot down the slope. And probably heated shot. McLean was no fool and by now he must surely have built a furnace to heat shot red, and such shot, lodged in a frigate’s timbers, could start a fire to reach the magazine and then the Warren would explode, scattering her precious timbers all across the harbor.

So Saltonstall was not minded to attack, not unless the fort was being distracted by a land assault at the same time and General Lovell showed no appetite for such a storm. And no wonder, the commodore thought, because in his opinion Lovell’s militia was little more than a rabble. Perhaps, if real soldiers arrived, the assault would be possible, but until such a miracle happened Saltonstall would keep his precious fleet well outside the range of enemy cannons. By now the commodore had reached the hill’s low summit where he took the telescope from his tail-pocket. He wanted to count the guns in Fort George and look for the telltale shimmer of heat coming from a shot-furnace.

He steadied the glass against a spruce. It took a moment to bring the lenses into focus, then he saw redcoats leaving the fort and straggling down the track into the village. He lifted the tubes to bring the fort into view. The glass was powerful, giving Saltonstall a close-up glimpse of a cannon firing. He saw the carriage jump and slam back, saw the eruption of smoke and watched the gunners close on the weapon to ready it for the next shot. He waited for the sound to reach him.

And heard musket-fire instead.

* * *

Captain Caffrae’s men had not left the fort together, but instead had gone down to the village in small groups so that no rebel watching from the western heights would be forewarned that the company was deploying.

Caffrae assembled them by the Perkins house where the newborn Temperance was crying. He inspected weapons, told his two drummers and three fifers to keep their instruments quiet, then led the company westwards. They kept to the paths that were hidden from the heights and so reached Aaron Banks’s house where a large barn offered concealment. “Take a picquet into the corn,” Caffrae ordered Lieutenant Moore, “and I want no heroics, Mister Moore!”

“We’re just there to watch,” John Moore said.

“To watch,” Caffrae confirmed, “and to pray if you like, but not with your eyes closed.”

Moore took six men. They went past the barn and through a small turnip patch beside the house. Aaron Banks’s two pretty daughters, Olive and Esther, stared wide-eyed from a window and Moore, seeing them, put a finger to his lips. Olive grinned and Esther nodded.

The picquet went into the concealing corn. “No smoking,” Moore told his men because he did not want the telltale wisps of pipe smoke to reveal their presence. The men crouched and slid forward, trying their best not to disturb the tall stalks. Once at the field’s western edge they lay still. Their job was to watch for any rebel movement that might threaten Caffrae’s concealed men, though for now the rebels showed no sign of energy. Moore could clearly see sixteen militiamen at the Half Moon Battery. What enthusiasm they had shown for trenching had dissipated and they now sat in a group inside the old earthwork. A couple were fast asleep.

To Moore’s left was Jacob Dyce’s house, while to his right, a hundred paces higher up the slope, was the Dutchman’s cornfield. In front of him the long hill climbed to the distant bluff. There were men at the very top, evidently waiting to watch whatever drama occurred at the battery. The rebel guns were hidden among the trees beyond the skyline, but their noise pounded the afternoon and their smoke whitened the sky.

After a while Jacob Dyce came out of his house. He was a squat, middle-aged man with a prophet’s beard. He carried a hoe that he now used to weed some beans. He worked slowly, gradually getting nearer and nearer to his neighbor’s cornfield. “De rascals are in my corn,” he suddenly spoke without looking up from his work. He stooped to tug at a weed. “Lots of rascals hiding there. You hear me?” He still did not look towards Moore and his men.

“I hear you,” Moore said quietly, “how many?”

“Lots,” the Dutchman said. He chopped the hoe’s blade savagely. “Lots! They are de duivelsgebroed!” He glanced briefly towards where Moore was hiding. “De duivelsgebroed!” he said again, then ambled back to his house.

Moore sent Corporal MacRae, a reliable man, to tell Caffrae that the devil’s brood were indeed hiding uphill. Moore peered at the Dutchman’s cornfield and thought he saw the stalks moving, but he could not be sure. Caffrae himself came to join Moore and peered up at the maize. “The bastards want to take us in the flank,” he said.

“If we advance,” Moore said.

“Oh, we must advance,” Caffrae said wolfishly, “why else did we come here?”

“There could be three hundred men hidden there,” Moore warned.

“Probably no more than a hundred who need a good thrashing.”

That was Brigadier McLean’s tactic. Whenever the rebels attempted a maneuver they had to be slapped so hard that their morale fell even lower. McLean knew he was mostly opposed by militiamen and he had drummed that fact into his officers. “You’re professionals, you’re soldiers,” he said repeatedly, “and they’re not. Make them scared of you! Think of them as fencibles.” The fencibles were the civilian soldiers in Britain, enthusiastic amateurs who, in McLean’s view, merely played at soldiering. “They may have their marines,” Moore warned now.

“Then we thrash them too,” Caffrae said confidently, “or rather you will.”

“I will?”

“I’ll bring the company forward and you command it. Advance on the battery, but watch your right. If they’re there, they’re going to charge you, so wheel when you’re ready, give them a volley and countercharge.”

Moore’s heart gave a leap. He knew McLean must have suggested that Caffrae allow him to command the company, and he knew too that this was his chance for redemption. Do this right and he would be forgiven for his sins on the day the rebels landed.

“We’ll do it noisily,” Caffrae said, “with drums and squeals. Let ’em know we’re the cocks on this dunghill.”

So what could go wrong? Moore supposed that it would be a disaster if the enemy did number a couple of hundred men, but what McLean would be watching for was evidence that Moore demonstrated good sense. His job was to smack the enemy, not win the war. “Drums and squeals,” he said.

“And bayonets,” Caffrae said with a smile. “And enjoy yourself, Lieutenant. I’ll fetch the hounds, and you can flush the covert.”

It was time to dance.

The muskets were close, so close that Saltonstall involuntarily jumped in shock. He almost dropped the telescope.

At the foot of the hill, between him and the harbor, were redcoats. They were running in loose order. They had evidently fired a volley because the smoke lingered behind them. They had not stopped to reload, but now followed that volley with a bayonet charge, and Saltonstall understood that these men had to be the Royal Marines he had seen vanishing up the Majabigwaduce River. He had thought they must be foraging to the north, but instead they had landed on the river’s bank then worked their way southwards through the woods and now they drove off the men who had been making the battery on Haney’s land. They were cheering. Sunlight glinted off their long bayonets. Saltonstall had a glimpse of his men running southwards, then the closest British marines saw the commodore at the hill’s top and a half dozen of them turned towards him. A musket banged and the ball skittered through the leaves.

Saltonstall ran. He went east down the hill, leaping the steeper sections, blundering through brush, pelting as fast as he could. A white-scutted deer ran ahead of him, alarmed by the shouts and shots. Saltonstall stumbled through a stream, cut southwards and kept running until he found a thick patch of undergrowth. There was a stitch in his left side, he was panting, and he crouched among the dark leaves and tried to calm himself.

His pursuers were silent. Or else they had abandoned the hunt. More muskets sounded, their distinctive crackling an unmistakable noise, but they seemed far away now, a wicked descant to the deeper bass rhythm of the big cannons beyond the harbor.

Saltonstall did not dare move till the light faded. Then, alone except for the cloud of mosquitoes, he worked his cautious way westwards. He went very slowly, ever alert to an enemy, though when he reached the harbor shore he saw that the redcoats were all gone.

And so were his longboats. He could see them. Every one had been captured and taken back to the enemy sloops. The British had not even bothered to slight the new earthworks of the battery Saltonstall’s men had thrown up. They knew they could recapture it whenever they wished and leaving the low wall was an invitation to the rebels to return and be chased away again.

Saltonstall was stranded now. The enemy-filled harbor lay between him and his fleet, and no rescue would be coming. There was no choice but to walk. He recalled the chart in his cabin on board the Warren and knew that if he followed the harbor’s shore he must eventually come back to the Penobscot River. Five miles? Maybe six, and the light was almost gone and the mosquitoes were feasting and the commodore was unhappy.

He started walking.

To the north, beyond the neck, Peleg Wadsworth had found a shelf of pastureland in Westcot’s farm. He had not needed to make any earthworks to defend the shelf because it was edged by a sudden steep slope that was defense enough. Fifty militiamen, goaded and commanded by Captain Carnes of the marines, had manhandled one of Colonel Revere’s eighteen-pounder cannon onto a lighter that had been rowed northwards. The gun was landed, then dragged over a mile through the woods until it reached the farm. There had been a few moments of worry when, shortly after Wadsworth and Carnes had discovered the site, four longboats filled with British marines had rowed up the Majabigwaduce River and Wadsworth had feared they would land close by, but instead they had gone to the farther bank of the river where they offered no threat to the big cannon which, at last, was dragged onto the pastureland. The militiamen had carried thirty rounds for the gun which Carnes laid in the fading light. “The barrel’s cold,” he told the gun’s crew, “so she’ll shoot a little low.”

The range looked much too long to Peleg Wadsworth’s untutored eye. In front of him was a strip of shallow water and then the low marshy tail of Majabigwaduce’s peninsula. The cannon was pointed across that tail at the British ships just visible in the harbor beyond. Carnes was aiming at the central sloop, HMS Albany, though Wadsworth doubted he could be sure of hitting any of the ships at such a distance.

Peleg Wadsworth walked a long way to the east until he was far enough from the big cannon to be sure that its smoke would not blot his view. He had borrowed Captain Carnes’s good telescope again and now he sat on the damp ground and propped his elbows on his knees to hold the long tubes steady. He saw a large group of empty longboats tethered to the Albany and a sailor leaning on the rail above. The sloop quivered every time she fired one of her cannon at the battery on Cross Island which still kept up its harassing fire. The splintering sound of musket-fire sounded far away, but Wadsworth resisted the temptation to swing the glass. If that was Lovell’s ambush it would be hidden from him by the loom of the ridge. He kept watching the enemy sloop.

Carnes took a long time aiming the cannon, but at last he was satisfied. He had brought wooden pegs with him and he pushed three into the turf, one beside each wheel, and the third next to the gun’s trail. “If it’s aimed right,” he told the crew, “those pegs will guide us back. If it’s wrong, we know where to start our corrections.” He warned the crew to step back and cover their ears. He blew on the tip of the linstock to brighten the glowing fuse, then leaned over to touch fire to the powder-filled reed thrust down the touchhole.

The gun leaped back. Its thunder cracked the sky. Smoke jetted out beyond the shelf to spread across the nearer water. A flame curled and vanished inside the smoke. The noise was so sudden and loud that Wadsworth jumped and momentarily lost his focus, then he steadied the glass and found the Albany and saw a sailor smoking a pipe at the rail, and then, to his astonishment and joy, he saw the sailor leap back as a bright gouge of newly shattered timber showed in the sloop’s hull just above the waterline. “A direct hit!” he shouted. “Captain! Well done! A direct hit!”

“Reload and run back!” Carnes shouted.

He was a marine. He did not miss.

Solomon Lovell thought his careful ambush must have failed. He waited and waited, and morning passed into afternoon, and the afternoon melded into the early evening, and still the British offered no challenge to the men who had occupied the deserted battery close to the harbor shore. A small crowd had gathered on the eastward side of Dyce’s Head, many of them skippers of the anchored ships who had heard that the British were about to be given a thorough trouncing and so had rowed ashore to enjoy the spectacle. Commodore Saltonstall was not present, he had evidently gone to make a new battery on the harbor’s farther shore and Peleg Wadsworth was similarly employed north and east of the neck. “New batteries!” Lovell exulted to Major Todd, “and a victory today! We shall be in a fine position tomorrow.”

Todd glanced south to where new ships might appear, but nothing showed in the river’s seaward reach. “General Wadsworth sent for an eighteen-pounder,” he told Lovell. “It should have reached him by now.”

“Already?” Lovell asked, delighted. He felt that the whole expedition had turned a corner and hope was renewed. “Now we only need McLean to snap at our bait,” Lovell said anxiously. He gazed down at the battery where the militiamen who were supposed to be pretending to raise a defensive rampart were instead sitting in the fading sunlight.

“He won’t take the bait if we’re all watching,” a harsh voice said.

Lovell turned to see Colonel Revere had come to the bluff. “Colonel,” he said in wary greeting.

“You’ve got a crowd gawping up here like Boston nobs watching the town on Pope Night,” Revere said. He pointedly ignored Todd!

“Let us hope the destruction equals Pope Night,” Lovell responded genially. Every November 5th the townsfolk of Boston made giant effigies of the Pope which were paraded through the streets. The supporters of the rival effigies fought each other, a superb brawl that left bones broken and skulls bloodied, and at the end the effigies were burned into the night as the erstwhile foes drank themselves insensible.

“McLean’s not a fool,” Revere said. “He’ll know something’s amiss with this crowd up here!”

Lovell feared his artillery commander was right, indeed the thought had already occurred to him that the presence of so many spectators might signal something extraordinary to the British, but he wanted these men to witness the success of the ambush. He needed word to spread through the army and the fleet that McLean’s redcoats could be thrashed. The men seemed to have forgotten their great victory in taking the bluff, the whole expedition had become mired in pessimism and it needed to be whipped into enthusiasm again.

“So McLean’s no fool, is he?” Todd asked caustically.

Because at the foot of the hill, between a barn and a cornfield, the redcoats had appeared.

And Solomon Lovell had his ambush.

“They’re all yours, Mister Moore!” Captain Caffrae called.

Fifty men, two drummer boys, and three fifers were now Moore’s responsibility. The company had formed just north of Jacob Dyce’s house. They were in three ranks with the musicians behind. Caffrae, before leading his men from concealment, had ordered them to load their muskets and fix their bayonets. “Let’s hear the ‘British Grenadier’!” Moore called. “Smartly now!”

The drums gave a roll, the fifers found the rhythm and began the sprightly tune. “No man is to fire until I give the command!” Moore said to the company. He walked along the short front rank, then turned to see that the rebels in the Half Moon Battery had scrambled to their feet. They were watching him. He drew his sword and his heart gave a lurch as he heard the long blade scrape in the scabbard’s throat. He was nervous and he was excited and he was frightened and he was elated. Captain Caffrae had positioned himself beside the musicians, ready no doubt to take over command of the company if Moore did the wrong thing. Or if he died, Moore thought, and felt a lump in his throat. He suddenly needed to piss very badly. Oh God, he thought, let me not wet my breeches. He walked towards the company’s right- hand side. “We’re going to drive those scoundrels away,” he said, trying to sound casual. He took post at the right and sloped his sword blade over his shoulder. “Company will advance! By the right! March!”

The fifes played, the drums rattled and the redcoats went at a steady pace to trample down Jacob Dyce’s newly weeded bean patch. The front rank held their muskets low, their bayonets making a line of glinting oiled steel. Guns boomed on the ridge above and other cannons crashed their sound across the harbor, but those conflicts seemed far away. Moore deliberately did not look to his right because he did not want to give the hidden rebels any hint that he knew they were present. He walked towards the Half Moon Battery and the handful of rebels there watched him come. One leveled a musket and fired, the ball flying high. “You’ll hold your fire!” Moore called to his men. “Just drive them away with steel!”

The few rebels backed away. They were outnumbered by the advancing company and their orders were to draw the redcoats on till they could be trapped by McCobb’s two hundred men hidden in the corn and so they retreated across the semicircular rampart and up the slope beyond.

“Steady!” Moore called. He could not resist a quick glance to his right, but nothing moved on that higher ground. Had the rebels abandoned the idea of an ambush? Maybe the Dutchman had been wrong and there were no rebels hidden in the corn. A gun bellowed at the ridgetop to make a sudden cloud of smoke above which white gulls flew like paper scraps in a gale. Moore’s mind was skittering like the gulls. What if there were two hundred rebels? Three hundred? What if the green-coated marines were there?

Then there was a shout from the right, the corn was being trampled, there were more shouts and Lieutenant Moore felt a strange calm. “Company will halt!” he heard himself call. “halt!” He turned his back on the enemy to look at his redcoats. They had kept their dressing and their ranks were orderly and tight. “By the right!” he commanded loudly. “Right wheel! Half!” He stood motionless while the three short ranks swung about like a gate until they faced northwards. Moore turned to look up the slope where, from out of the high corn, a horde of enemies was appearing. Dear God, Moore thought, but there were far more than he had expected. “I want to hear the drum and fifes!” he shouted. “Company will advance! By the right! March!”

And now go straight for them, he thought. No hesitation. If he hesitated then the enemy must smell his fear and that would give them courage. So just march with leveled bayonets and the “British Grenadier” filling the air with its defiance, and the enemy was in no order, just a mass of men appearing from the corn and too far away for a volley to have any effect and so Moore just marched up the slope towards them and the thought flickered through his mind that the enemy was far too numerous and his duty now was to retreat. Was that what McLean would want? Caffrae was offering no advice, and Moore sensed that he did not need to retreat. The enemy had begun to fire their muskets, but the range was still too long. A ball flicked through the grass beside Moore, another whipped overhead. One rebel shot his ramrod by mistake, the long rod circling in the air to fall on the grass. The enemy was obscured by patches of powder smoke that drifted back into the trampled maize, but Moore could see their disorganization. The rebels glanced left and right, looking to see what their friends did before they obeyed their officers’ shrill cries. One man had white hair falling almost to his waist, another was white-bearded, and some looked like schoolboys given muskets. They were plainly nervous.

And suddenly Moore understood that the discipline of his men was a weapon in itself. The rebels, tired and hungry after a long day in the cornfield, were frightened. They did not see fifty equally nervous young men, they saw a red-coated killing machine. They saw confidence. And though they had burst out of the corn they had not charged down the hill, but were now being chivvied into ranks by officers and sergeants. They had made a mistake, Moore thought. They should have charged. Instead he was attacking and they were on the defensive, and it was time to frighten them even more. But not too close, Moore thought. He decided he would not wait till the enemy was inside easy musket range. Get too close and the enemy might realize just how easily his fifty men could be overwhelmed and so, when he gauged he was about eighty paces from the rebels, he called a halt.

“Front rank, kneel!” Moore shouted.

A man in the rear rank fell backwards, his face a sudden blossom of red where a musket-ball had struck his cheek. “Close ranks!” Caffrae called.

“Company!” Moore drew out the last syllable. He was watching the enemy. “Take aim!” The muskets were leveled. The muzzles wavered slightly because the men were not accustomed to aiming while the heavy bayonets hung from the barrels. “Fire!” Moore shouted.

The muskets flamed and smoked. Wadding, shot from the barrels, started small fires in the grass. The volley crashed into rebels and corn. “Company will advance at the double!”

Moore would not waste time reloading. “March!” There were bodies at the corn’s edge. Blood in the evening. A man was crawling back into the high stalks to leave a trickle of blood on the grass. Smoke was thick as fog.

“Bayonets!” Moore shouted. It was not an order, for his men already had fixed bayonets, but rather a word to frighten an already frightened enemy. “Scotland forever!” he shouted, and his men cheered and hurried through the remnants of their own powder smoke. They were driven by drums, defiance, and pride, and the rebels were running. The enemy militia were running back towards the bluff. All of them, like men running a race. Some even threw away their muskets so that they could run faster. No green uniforms, Moore noted. His Scotsmen were whooping, losing cohesion, and Moore wanted them to keep their discipline. “Company will halt,” he shouted, “halt!” His sharp voice checked the redcoats. “Sergeant Mackenzie! Dress the ranks if you please. Let’s at least try to look like His Majesty’s soldiers, and not like His Majesty’s royal ragamuffins!” Moore sounded stern, but he was grinning. He could not help it. His men were grinning too. They knew they had done well and the more experienced among them knew they had been well led. Moore waited for the ranks to be properly formed. “Company will wheel to the left!” he called. “By the left, left wheel, half!”

The Scotsmen were still grinning as they marched about to face the spectators who watched from Dyce’s Head. Distant cheers sounded from Fort George. The slope ahead of Moore was full of rebels who ran, limped, or walked away. The rebel dead or wounded, four men, lay sprawled on the grass. Moore put the point of his sword into the scabbard and thrust the blade home. He gazed up the slope. You bastards want our fort, he thought, then you just bloody well come and take it.

“Congratulations, Moore,” Caffrae said, but for once the courteous Moore did not offer a polite reply. He was in urgent need of something else and so he went to the edge of the Dutchman’s corn, unbuttoned the flap of his breeches and pissed long and hard. The company laughed, and Moore felt happier than he had ever felt. He was a soldier.

Excerpts from General Solomon Lovell’s Proclamation to his troops, August 12th, 1779:We have now a Portion of our Enterprise to compleat, in which if we are successful, and I am confident we must be, being in superior numbers and having that Liberal Characteristic “Sons of Liberty and Virtue” I again repeat, we must ride triumphant over the rough diabolical Torrent of Slavery, and the Monsters sent to rivet its Chains. . . . Is there a man able to bear Arms in this camp? that would hide his Face in the day of Battle; is there an American of this Character? is there a man so destitute of Honor? . . . Let each man stand by his Officer, and each Officer animated, press forward to the Object in view, then shall we daunt the vaunting Enemy, who wishes to intimidate us by a little Parade, then shall we strike Terror to the Pride of Britain.

From a Despatch to Commodore Saltonstall from the Continental Navy Department, August 12th, 1779:Our Apprehensions of your danger have ever been from a Reinforcement to the Enemy. You can’t expect to remain much longer without one. . . . It is therefore our orders that as soon as you receive this you take the Most Effectual Measures for the Capture or Destruction of the Enemies Ships and with the greatest dispatch the nature and Situation of things will Admit of.

From an Order In Council, Boston, August 8th, 1779:Ordered that Thomas Cushing and Samuel Adams Esqrs be a Committee to wait upon the Capt of the French Frigate to know of him whether he should be willing to proceed to Penobscot with his Ship for the purpose of reinforcing the American fleet – who reported that they had waited upon his Excellency the Chevalier De la Luzerne who informed them that he would speak with the Capt of said Frigate and if possible influence his proceeding to Penobscot.

From a report received in Boston, August 9th, 1779:Gilbert Richmond first Mate, of the Argo – declares that on the 6th Instant, off Marthas Vineyard – he fell in with eight sail of Vessels – supposed to be of force – steering So Et with a view of weathering the S. Shoal of Nantucket – The Commodore carried a poop light. The informant thinks – they were about 40 Miles So of the West end of the Vineyard.

Chapter Twelve

And, suddenly, there was hope.

After the disappointment of the previous day, after the ignominious flight of the militia from an enemy force scarce a quarter its size, there was suddenly a new spirit, a second chance, an expectation of success.

Hoysteed Hacker was the cause. Captain Hacker was the tall naval captain who had captured HMS Diligent, and he was rowed ashore at first light and climbed to the clearing in the woods that served as Lovell’s headquarters. “The commodore has vanished,” he told Lovell who was taking breakfast at a trestle table.

“Vanished?” Lovell gazed up at the naval captain. “How do you mean? Vanished?”

“Gone,” Hacker said in his expressionless, deep voice, “vanished. He was with the sailors who were attacked yesterday, and I suppose he was captured.” Hacker paused. “Maybe killed.” He shrugged as if he did not much care.

“Sit down, Captain. Have you eaten?”

“I’ve eaten.”

“Have some tea, at least. Wadsworth, did you hear this news?”

“I just did, sir.”

“Sit, do,” Lovell said. “Filmer? A cup for Captain Hacker.” Wadsworth and Todd were sharing the bench opposite Lovell. Hacker sat beside the general who gazed at the big, impassive naval officer as if he were Gabriel bringing news from heaven. Fog drifted through the high trees. “Dear me,” Lovell finally comprehended the news, “so the commodore is captured?” He did not sound in the least dismayed.

“Or killed,” Hacker said.

“Does that make you the senior naval officer?” Lovell asked.

“It does, sir.”

“How did it happen?” Wadsworth asked, and listened as Hacker described the unexpected attack by the British marines who had driven the sailors southwards from the battery on Haney’s land. The commodore had been separated from the rest who had all made it safely back to the river’s bank south of Cross Island. “So no casualties?” Wadsworth asked.

“None, sir, except perhaps the commodore. He might have been hurt.”

“Or worse,” Lovell said, then added hastily, “pray God it isn’t so.”

“Pray God,” Hacker said equally dutifully.

Lovell flinched as he bit into some twice-baked bread. “But you,” he asked, “you are now in command of the fleet?”

“I reckon so, sir.”

“You’ve taken command of the Warren?” Wadsworth asked.

“Not formally, sir, no, but I’m the senior naval officer now, so I’ll move to the Warren this morning.”

“Well, if you commmand the fleet,” Lovell said sternly, “I must make a request of you.”

“Sir?” Hacker asked.

“I must ask you, Captain, to attack the enemy shipping.”

“That’s why I came here,” Hacker said stolidly.

“You did?” Lovell seemed surprised.

“Seems to me, sir, we should attack soon. Today.” Hacker pulled a ragged piece of paper from his pocket and spread it on the table. “Can I suggest a method, sir?”

“Please,” Lovell said.

The paper was a pencil-drawn chart of the harbor which marked the enemy’s four ships, though Hacker had put a cross over the hull of the Saint Helena, the transport which lay at the southern end of Mowat’s line. She was only there to stop the Americans sailing around Mowat’s flank and her armament of six small guns was too light to be a cause of concern. “We have to attack the three sloops,” Hacker said, “so I propose taking the Warren in to attack the Albany.” He tapped the chart, indicating the central sloop of Mowat’s three warships. “I’ll be supported by the General Putnam and the Hampden. They’ll anchor abreast of the North and Nautilus, sir, and give them fire. The General Putnam and Hampden will be hit hard, sir, it’s unavoidable, but I believe the Warren will crush the Albany quickly enough and then we can use our heavy guns to force the surrender of the other two sloops.” Hacker spoke in an expressionless tone which gave the impression of a slow mind, an impression that Wadsworth realized was quite false. Hacker had given the problem a great deal of impressive thought. “Now, sir,” the naval captain continued, “the commodore’s concern was always the fort and its guns. They can plunge shot down into our ships and for all we know they might have heated shot, sir.”

“Heated?” Lovell asked.

“Not a pleasant thought, sir,” Hacker said. “If a red-hot shot lodges in a ship’s timber, sir, it can start a fire. Ships and fire aren’t the best of friends, so I want to keep the enemy’s shots away from the leading ships as far as that’s possible. “I’m proposing that the Sally, Vengeance, Black Prince, Hector, Monmouth, Sky Rocket, and Hunter should follow us into the harbor and make a line of battle here.” He indicated a dotted line which he had drawn parallel to the harbor’s northern shore. “They can shoot up at the fort, sir. They’ll do little enough damage, but they should distract the enemy gunners, sir, and draw their fire away from the Warren, the General Putnam, and Hampden.”

“This is feasible?” Lovell asked, scarcely daring to believe what he was hearing.

“Tide’s right this afternoon,” Hacker said in a very matter-of-fact voice. “I reckon it will taken an hour and a half to get the first three ships into position and an hour’s work to destroy their sloops. But I’m worried that we’ll have the best part of our fleet in the harbor, sir, and even after we’ve taken the enemy vessels we’ll still be under the cannons in their fort.”

“So you want us to attack the fort?” Wadsworth guessed.

“I think that’s advisable, sir,” Hacker said respectfully, “and I plan to put one hundred marines ashore, sir, to aid your endeavor. Might I suggest they occupy the lower ground with some of your militia?” He put a broad, tar-stained finger on the map, indicating the land between the fort and the British ships.

“Why that ground?” Lovell asked.

“To prevent the enemy’s marines coming ashore from the defeated ships,” Hacker explained, “and if our marines assault the fort from the south, sir, then the rest of your forces can attack from the west.”

“Yes,” Peleg Wadsworth said enthusiastically, “yes!”

Lovell was silent. The fog was too thick to allow any gunner to shoot accurately so the cannons of both sides were quiet. A gull called. Lovell was remembering the shame of the previous day, the sight of McCobb’s militia running away. He flinched at the memory.

“It will be different this time,” Wadsworth said. He had been watching Lovell’s face and had divined the general’s thoughts.

“In what manner?” Lovell asked.

“We’ve never used all our men to attack the fort, sir,” Wadsworth said. “We’ve only attacked the enemy piecemeal. This time we use all our strength! How many cannon will we take into the harbor?” This question was put to Hoysteed Hacker.

“Those ships,” Hacker put a tar-stained finger on his chart, “will carry over two hundred cannon, sir, so say a hundred guns in broadside.”

“A hundred cannon, sir,” Wadsworth said to Lovell. “A hundred cannon filling the harbor! The noise alone will distract the enemy. And the marines, sir, leading the way. We hurl a thousand men against the enemy, all at once!”

“It should get the business done,” Hacker said in much the same tone he might have used to describe striking down a topmast or shifting a ton of ballast.

“A hundred marines,” Lovell said in a plaintive voice that made it clear he would have preferred to have all the marines ashore.

“I need some to board the enemy ships,” Hacker said.

“Of course, of course,” Lovell conceded.

“But the marines are begging for a good fight,” Hacker growled. “They can’t wait to prove themselves. And just as soon as the enemy ships are taken or destroyed, sir, I’ll order the rest of the marines and every sailor I can spare to join your assault.”

“Ships and men, sir,” Wadsworth said, “fighting as one.”

Lovell’s gaze flicked uncertainly between Wadsworth and Hacker. “And you think it can be done?” he asked the naval captain.

“Soon as the tide floods,” Hacker, said, “which it will this afternoon.”

“Then let it be done!” Lovell decided. He planted both fists on the table. “Let us finish the job! Let us take our victory!”

“Sir? Captain Hacker, sir?” A midshipman appeared at the edge of the clearing. “Sir?”

“Boy!” Hacker acknowledged the breathless lad. “What is it?”

“Commodore Saltonstall’s compliments, sir, and will you return to the Providence, sir.”

The men at the table all stared at the boy. “Commodore Saltonstall?” Lovell eventually broke the silence.

“He was discovered this morning, sir.”

“Discovered?” Lovell asked in a hollow voice.

“On the riverbank, sir!” The midshipman appeared to believe he had brought good news. “He’s safe on board the Warren, sir.”

“Tell him . . .” Lovell said, then could not think what he wanted to say to Saltonstall.

“Sir?”

“Nothing, lad, nothing.”

Hoysteed Hacker slowly crumpled the hand-drawn chart and tossed it onto the campfire. The first gun of the new day fired.

Lieutenant John Moore, paymaster to His Majesty’s 82nd Regiment of Foot, knocked nervously on the house door. A cat watched him from the log pile. Three chickens, carefully penned by laced withies, clucked at him. In the garden of the next door house, the one nearer the harbor, a woman beat a rug that was hanging from a line suspended between two trees. She watched him as suspiciously as the cat. Moore raised his hat to the woman, but she turned away from the courtesy and beat dust from the rug even more energetically. A gun fired from the fort, its sound muffled by the trees surrounding the small log houses.

Bethany Fletcher opened the door. She was wearing a shabby brown dress beneath a white apron on which she wiped her hands, which were red from scrubbing clothes. Her hair was disarrayed and John Moore thought she was beautiful. “Lieutenant,” she said in surprise, blinking in the daylight.

“Miss Fletcher,” Moore said, bowing and removing his hat.

“You bring news?” Beth asked, suddenly anxious.

“No,” Moore said, “no news. I brought you this.” He held a basket towards her. “It’s from General McLean, with his compliments.” The basket contained a ham, a small bag of salt, and a bottle of wine.

“Why?” Beth asked, without taking the gift.

“The general is fond of you,” Moore said. He had discovered the courage to face four times as many rebels as the men he led, but he had no courage to add “as am I.” “He knows life is hard for you and your mother, Miss Fletcher,” he explained instead, “especially with your brother absent.”

“Yes,” Beth said, but still did not take the proffered gift. She had never refused the simpler rations offered by the garrison to the inhabitants of Majabigwaduce, the flour, salted beef, dried peas, rice, and spruce beer, but McLean’s generosity embarrassed her. She walked a few paces further from the house so that her neighbor could see her clearly. She wanted to give no excuse for any gossip.

“The wine is port wine,” Moore said. “Have you ever tasted port wine?”

“No,” Beth said, flustered.

“It is stronger than claret,” Moore said, “and sweeter. The general is fond of it. He served in Portugal and acquired a taste for the wine which is said to be a tonic. My father is a doctor and he frequently prescribes port wine. Can I put it here?” Moore placed the basket on the threshold of the house. Inside, beyond an open inner door, he had a glimpse of Beth’s mother. Her face was sunken, still and white, her open mouth dark, and her hair straggling white on a pillow. She looked like a corpse and Moore turned away quickly. “There,” he said, for lack of anything else to say.

Beth shook her head. “I cannot accept the gift, Lieutenant,” she said.

“Of course you can, Miss Fletcher,” Moore said with a smile.

“The general would not . . .” Beth began, then evidently thought better of whatever she had been about to say and checked herself. She brushed away a stray lock of hair and tucked it under her cap. She looked anywhere but at Moore.

“General McLean would be hurt if you refused the gift,” Moore said.

“I’m grateful to him,” Beth said, “but . . .” Again she fell silent. She took a thimble from the pocket of her apron and turned it in her fingers. She shrugged. “But . . .” she said again, still not looking at Moore.

“But your brother fights for the rebels,” Moore said.

She turned her eyes on him, and those eyes widened with surprise. Blue eyes, Moore noted, blue eyes of extraordinary vitality. “The general knows?” she asked.

“That your brother fights for the rebels? Yes, of course he knows,” Moore said with a reassuring smile. He stooped and recovered the thimble which had fallen from her hands. He held it out to her, but Beth made no move to take it and so, very deliberately, he placed it in the basket. Beth turned to look at the harbor through the trees. The fog was gone and Majabigwaduce’s water sparkled beneath a summer sun. She stayed silent. “Miss Fletcher’” Moore began.

“No!” she interrupted him. “No, I can’t accept.”

“It is a gift,” Moore said, “nothing more, nothing less.”

Beth bit her lower lip, then turned defiantly back to the red-coated lieutenant. “I wanted James to join the rebels,” she said, “I encouraged him! I carried news of your guns and men to Captain Brewer! I betrayed you! Do you think the general would offer me a gift if he knew I’d done all that? Do you?”

“Yes,” Moore said.

That answer startled her. She seemed to crumple and crossed to the log pile where she sat and absentmindedly stroked the cat. “I didn’t know what to think when you all came here,” she said. “It was exciting at first.” She paused, thinking. “It was new and different, but then there were just too many uniforms here. This is our home, not yours. You took our home away from us.” She looked at him for the first time since she had sat down. “You took our home away from us,” she said again.

“I’m sorry,” Moore said, not knowing what else to say.

She nodded.

“Take the gift,” Moore said, “please.”

“Why?”

“Because the general is a decent man, Miss Fletcher. Because he offers it as a token of friendship. Because he wants you to know that you can depend on his protection whatever your opinion. Because I don’t want to carry the basket back to the fort.” Beth smiled at that last reason and Moore stood, waiting. He could have added that the gift had been given because McLean was as vulnerable as any other man to a fair-haired girl with an enchanting smile, but instead he just shrugged. “Because,” he finished.

“Because?”

“Please accept it,” Moore said.

Beth nodded again, then wiped her eyes with a corner of the apron. “Thank the general from me.”

“I will.”

She stood and crossed to the door where she turned. “Goodbye, Lieutenant,” she said, then picked up the basket and was gone inside.

“Goodbye, Miss Fletcher,” Moore said to the closed door.

He walked slowly back to the fort and felt defeated.

The three ships dipped to the wind, they swooped on the long waves, the seas broke white at their cutwaters, their sails were taut and the wind was brisk at their sterns. Away to port was Cape Anne where the breakers fretted at the rocks. “We must stay inshore,” Captain Abraham Burroughs told Colonel Henry Jackson.

“Why?”

“Because the bastards are out there somewhere,” the captain said, nodding to starboard where the fog bank had retreated southeastwards to lie like a long dun cloud over the endless ocean. “We run into a British frigate, Colonel, and you can say goodbye to your regiment. If I see a frigate out there I run for port.” He waved a hand at the other two ships. “We ain’t men-of-war, we’re three transports.”

But the three transport ships carried Henry Jackson’s regiment, as fine a regiment as any in the world, and it was on its way to Majabigwaduce.

And in the distant fog, out to sea, in a place where there were no marks, a fishing boat from Cape Cod watched other ships loom from the whiteness. The fishermen feared the big vessels would capture them, or at least steal their catch, but not one of the British ships bothered with the small gaff-rigged fishing boat. One by one the great ships slid past, the bright paint on their figureheads and the gilding on their sterns dulled by the fog. They all flew blue ensigns.

The vast Raisonable led, followed by five frigates; the Virginia, the Blonde, the Grayhound, the Galatea, and the Camille. The last of the relief fleet, the diminutive Otter, had lost touch and was somewhere to the south and east, but her absence scarcely diminished the raw power of Sir George Collier’s warships. The fishermen watched in silence as the blunt-bowed battleship and her five frigates ghosted past. They could smell the stench of the fleet and the stink of hundreds of men crammed into the cannon-freighted hulls. One hundred and ninety-six cannon, some of them ship-slaughtering thirty-two-pounders, were on their way to Majabigwaduce.

“Sons of goddamned bastard bitches,” the fishing boat’s captain spat when the Camille’s gilded stern gallery had been swallowed by the fog.

And the ocean was empty again.

The rebels had been in Penobscot Bay for nineteen days, and in possession of the high ground for sixteen of those days. There had been more than twenty councils of war, some just for the naval captains, some for the senior army officers, and a few for both. Votes had been taken, motions had been passed, and still the enemy was neither captivated nor killed.

The resurrection and return of the commodore had dampened Lovell’s spirits. Of late he and Saltonstall had only communicated by letter, but Lovell thought it incumbent on him to visit the Warren and congratulate Saltonstall on his survival, though the commodore, whose long face was blotched red with mosquito bites, did not appear grateful for the general’s concern. “It is a providence of God that you were spared capture or worse,” Lovell said awkwardly.

Saltonstall grunted.

Lovell nervously broached the subject of entering the harbor. “Captain Hacker was hopeful’” he began.

“I am aware of Hacker’s sentiments,” Saltonstall interrupted.

“He thought the maneuver feasible,” Lovell said.

“He may think what he damn well likes,” Saltonstall said hotly, “but I’m not taking my ships into that damned hole.”

“And unless the ships are taken,” Lovell forged on anyway, “I do not think the fort can be attacked with any hope of success.”

“You may depend upon one thing, General,” Saltonstall said, “which is that my ships cannot be risked in the harbor while the fort remains in enemy hands.”

The two men stared at each other. The guns were at work again, though the rebel rate of fire was much slower now because of the shortage of ammunition. There was powder smoke at Cross Island, and on the heights of Majabigwaduce and across the inlet north of the peninsula. Even more smoke rose from the low ground close to the Half Moon Battery. Lovell, angered that Banks’s house and barn had provided cover for the Scottish troops that had driven his men away so ignominiously, had ordered that the buildings should be burned as a punishment. “And the Dutchman’s house too,” he had insisted, and so forty men had gone downhill at first light and set fire to the houses and barns. They had not lingered on the low ground, fearing a counterattack by McLean’s men, but had just set the fires and retreated again.

“I shall present the circumstances to my officers,” Lovell now said stiffly, “and we shall discuss the feasibility of an attack on the fort. You may depend upon it that I shall convey their decision to you promptly.”

Saltonstall nodded. “My compliments, General.”

That afternoon Lovell went to the Hazard, one of the ships belonging to the Massachusetts Navy and from where he summoned his brigade majors, the commanders of the militia, Colonel Revere, and General Wadsworth. The council of war would be held in the comfort of the brig’s stern cabin where gawking soldiers could not linger nearby to overhear the discussions. Captain John Williams, the Hazard’s commanding officer, had been invited to attend as a courtesy and Lovell asked him to explain the navy’s reluctance to enter the harbor. “Not everyone’s reluctant,” Williams said, thinking of his own first lieutenant, George Little, who was ready to mutiny if that meant he could sail the diminutive brig into Majabigwaduce’s harbor and take on the British. “But the commodore is being prudent.”

“In what way?” Wadsworth asked.

“You can get a ship in easy enough,” Williams said, “but it would be a devilish business to get her out again.”

“The object,” Wadsworth pointed out quietly, “is to stay in the harbor. To occupy it.”

“Which means you have to destroy those guns in the fort,” Williams said, “and there’s another thing. The fleet is running short of men.”

“We impressed men in Boston!” Lovell complained.

“And they’re deserting, sir,” Williams said. “And the privateer captains? They’re not happy. Every day they spend here is a day they can’t capture prizes at sea. They’re talking of leaving.”

“Why did we bring all these ships?” Wadsworth asked. He had put the question to Williams, who just shrugged. “We brought a fleet of warships and we don’t use them?” Wadsworth asked more heatedly.

“You must put that question to the commodore,” Williams said evenly. There was silence, broken only by the endless clanking of the Hazard’s pump. The damage the brig had taken when Lieutenant Little had sailed her so close to Mowat’s sloops was still not properly repaired. The brig would need to be hauled ashore for those timbers to be replaced, caulked, and made tight, but the pump was keeping her afloat easily enough.

“So we must capture the fort,” Peleg Wadsworth said, breaking the gloomy silence, and then overrode the chorus of voices which complained that such a feat was impossible. “We must take men to the rear of the fort,” he explained, “and assault from the south and east. The walls there are unfinished and the eastern rampart, so far as I can see, has no cannon.”

“Your men won’t attack,” Revere said scornfully. For a week now, in every council of war, Lieutenant-Colonel Revere had urged abandonment of the siege, and now he pressed the point. “The men won’t face the enemy! We saw that yesterday. Three quarters of the small-arms cartridges have gone and half the men are hiding in the woods!”

“So you’d run away?” Wadsworth asked.

“No one accuses me of running away!”

“Then, damn it, stay and fight!” Wadsworth’s anger at last exploded and his use of a swear word alone was sufficient to silence the whole cabin. “Goddamn it!” he shouted the words and hammered Captain Williams’s table so hard that a pewter candlestick fell over. Men stared at him in astonishment, and Wadsworth surprised even himself by his sudden vehemence and coarse language. He tried to calm his temper, but it was still running high. “Why are we here?” he demanded. “Not to build batteries or shoot at ships! We’re here to capture their fort!”

“But’” Lovell began.

“We demand marines of the commodore,” Wadsworth overrode his commanding officer, “and we assemble every man, and we attack! We attack!” He looked around the cabin, seeing the scepticism on too many faces. Those who favored abandonment of the expedition, led by Colonel Revere, were fervent in their view, while those still willing to prosecute the siege were at best lukewarm. “The commodore,” Wadsworth went on, “is unwilling to enter the harbor while the guns are there to harass his shipping. So we assure him that we will silence the guns. We will take men to the rear of the enemy’s work and we shall attack! And the commodore will support us.”

“The commodore’” Lovell began

Wadsworth again interrupted him. “We have never offered the commodore our wholehearted support,” he said emphatically. “We’ve asked him to destroy the ships before we attack and he has asked us to destroy the fort before the attacks. Then why not make a compromise? We both attack. If he knows our land force is making an assault then he will have no choice but to support us!”

“Perhaps the regular troops will arrive,” McCobb put in.

“The Diligent has sent no word,” Lovell said. The Diligent, the fast Continental Navy brig captured from the British, had been posted at the mouth of the Penobscot River to serve as a guard boat that could give warning of the approach of any shipping, but her captain, Philip Brown, had sent no messages which suggested to Lovell that any reinforcements, for either side, were at least a day away.

“We can’t wait to see if Boston sends us troops,” Wadsworth insisted, “and besides, British reinforcements are just as likely! We were sent here to perform a task, so for God’s sake, let us do it! And do it now before the enemy is strengthened.”

“I doubt we can do it now,” Lovell said, “tomorrow, maybe?”

“Then tomorrow!” Wadsworth said, exasperated. “But let us do it! Let us do what we came here to do, to do what our country expects of us! Let us do it!”

There was silence, broken by Lovell who looked brightly about the cabin. “We certainly have something to discuss,” he said.

“And let us not discuss it,” Wadsworth said harshly, “but make a decision.”

Lovell looked startled at his deputy’s forcefulness. For a moment it seemed as if he would try to wrest back the command of the cabin, but Wadsworth’s face was grim and Lovell acceded to the demand. “Very well,” he said stiffly, “we shall make a decision. Would all those in favor of General Wadsworth’s proposal please so indicate now?” Wadsworth’s hand shot up. Lovell hesitated, then raised his own hand. Other men followed Lovell’s lead, even those who usually supported an end to the siege. All but one.

“And those opposed?” Lovell asked. Lieutenant-Colonel Revere raised his hand.

“I declare the motion carried,” Lovell said, “and we shall beg the commodore to support us in an attack tomorrow.”

The next day would be Friday, August the thirteenth.

Friday the thirteenth dawned fair. The wind was light and there was no fog, which meant the rebel battery on Cross Island opened fire at first light, as did the more distant eighteen-pounder on the northern shore beyond the peninsula. The balls slammed hard into the hulls of the British sloops.

Captain Mowat was resigned to the bombardment. He had moved his ships twice, but there was no other anchorage to which he could retreat now, not unless he moved the sloops far away from the fort. The pumps on all three sloops worked continually, manned by sailors who chanted shanties as they drove the great handles up and down. The Albany’s carpenter was patching the hull as well as he was able, but the big eighteen-pounder shots tore up the oak planking with savage force. “I’ll keep her afloat, sir,” the carpenter promised Mowat at dawn. He had plugged three horrible gashes at the sloop’s waterline, but a proper repair would have to wait till the sloop could be beached or docked.

“Luckily they’re still shooting high,” Mowat said.

“Pray God they go on doing that, sir.”

“I hope you are bloody praying!” Mowat said.

“Day and night, sir, night and day.” The carpenter was a Methodist and kept a well-thumbed copy of the Bible in his carpenter’s apron. He frowned as a rebel ball struck the taffrail and showered splinters across the afterdeck. “I’ll mend the topsides when we’ve done the lower strakes, sir.”

“Topsides can wait,” Mowat said. He did not care how ragged his ship looked so long as she floated and could carry her guns. Those guns were silent for now. Mowat reckoned his nine-pounders could do little damage to the battery on Cross Island and none of his guns was powerful enough to reach the new battery to the north, and so he did not waste powder and shot on the rebels. One of Captain Fielding’s twelve-pounders, up at the fort, slammed shots into Cross Island, a fire that merely served to keep the rebels hidden deep among the trees. A crackle of muskets sounded ashore. In the last few days that noise had been constant as McLean’s men infiltrated the trees by the neck or else hunted through the fields and barns of the settlement in search of rebel patrols. They were doing it without orders and McLean, though he approved the sentiments behind such rebel hunting, had commanded that it be stopped. Mowat guessed that the flurry of shots came from Captain Caffrae’s Light Company, which had kept up its harassment of the enemy lines.

“Deck ahoy!” a lookout called from the foremast. “Swimmer!”

“Do we have a man overboard?” Mowat demanded of the officer of the watch.

“No, sir.”

Mowat went forrard to see that a man was indeed swimming towards the Albany from the direction of the harbor mouth. He looked exhausted. He swam a few strokes, then trod water before feebly trying to swim again, and Mowat shouted at the bosun to heave the man a line. It took a moment for the man to find the line, then he was hauled to the sloop’s side and dragged up on deck. He was a seaman with a long pigtail hanging down his bare back and pictures of whales and anchors tattooed onto his chest and forearms. He stood dripping and then, exhausted and shivering, sat on one of the nine-pounder trucks. “What’s your name, sailor?” Mowat asked.

“Freeman, sir, Malachi Freeman.”

“Fetch him a blanket,” Mowat ordered, “and some tea. Put a tot of rum in the tea. Where are you from, Freeman?”

“Nantucket, sir.”

“A fine place,” Mowat said. “So what brought you here?”

“I was pressed, sir. Pressed in Boston.”

“Onto what vessel?”

“The Warren, sir.”

Freeman was a young man, scarce twenty years old Mowat judged, and he had swum from the Warren in the night’s dark. He had reached the beach beneath Dyce’s Head where he had shivered and waited for the guard boats to retreat in the dawn. Then he had swum for the sloops.

“What are you, Freeman?” Mowat asked. He saw how Freeman’s hands were stained black from continually climbing tarred rigging. “A topman?”

“Aye aye, sir, four years now.”

“His Majesty always appreciates a good topman,” Mowat said, “and are you willing to serve His Majesty?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“We’ll swear you in.” Mowat said, then waited as a blanket was draped about the deserter’s shoulders and a can of hot rum-laced tea thrust into his hands. “Drink that first.”

“They’re coming for you, sir,” Freeman said, his teeth chattering.

“Coming for me?”

“The commodore is, sir. He’s coming today, sir. They told us last night. And he’s making bulwarks on the Warren’s bow, sir.”

“Bulwarks?”

“They’re strengtherning the bows, sir, and putting three layers of logs across the fo’c’sle, sir, to protect the marines.”

Mowat looked at the shivering man. He played with the idea that the rebels had sent Freeman with deliberately misleading information, but that made little sense. If Saltonstall wished to mislead Mowat he would surely pretend he was withdrawing, not attacking. So the rebels were coming at last? Mowat gazed westwards to where he could just see the anchored warships beyond Dyce’s Head. “How many ships will come?” he asked.

“Don’t know, sir.”

“I don’t suppose you do,” Mowat said. He walked to the main shrouds and propped a glass on one of the ratlines. Sure enough he could see men working on the bows of the Warren. They appeared to be roving new lines to the bowsprit, while others were hauling logs up from a longboat. So, at long last, they were coming? “It won’t be till the afternoon flood,” he said to his first lieutenant.

“That gives us most of the day to get ready, sir.”

“Aye, it does.” Mowt collapsed the glass and looked up at the sky. “The glass?” he asked.

“Still falling, sir.”

“So there’s dirty weather coming as well, then,” Mowat said. The sky was pellucid now, but he reckoned there would be clouds, fog, and rain before nightfall by when, he knew, he would either be dead or captured. He was under no illusions. His small flotilla could do grievous damage to the American ships, but he could not defeat them. Once the Warren turned her broadside onto the sloops she could pound them with guns that were twice as heavy as the British cannon, and defeat was inevitable. The Warren would be hurt, but the Albany would die. That was unavoidable, so the most Mowat could hope for was to hurt the Warren badly, then get his men safe on land where they could help McLean defend the fort. “All marines are to be brought back aboard,” he told his first lieutenant, “and all guns double-shotted. Sand the decks. Tell the surgeon to sharpen his damn knives. We’ll go down snarling, but by God, they’ll know they’ve been fighting against the Royal Navy.”

Then he sent a message to McLean.

The rebels are coming.

Peleg Wadsworth asked for volunteers. The militia, in truth, had been disappointing and, except for the first day ashore when they had climbed the bluff to throw back the strong enemy picquet, they had not fought with spirit. But that did not mean there were no brave men among them, and Wadsworth only wanted the brave. He walked around the woods and talked to groups of men, he spoke to the picquets manning the earthworks that edged the woods, and he told all of them what he planned. “We’re going along the harbor shore,” he said, “and once we’re behind the enemy, between him and his ships, we shall make an assault. We won’t be alone. The commodore will enter the harbor and fight the enemy, and his ships will bombard the fort while we attack. I need men willing to make that attack, men willing to climb the hill with me and storm the enemy ramparts. I need brave men.”

Four hundred and forty-four men volunteered. They assembled among the trees at the top of Dyce’s Head where Lieutenant Downs and fifty marines waited, and where Wadsworth divided the militia volunteers into four companies. The Indian braves formed their own small company. It was early afternoon. The day had dawned so bright, but now the sky clouded and a late fog drifted up the sea-reach.

“The fog will help hide us,” Wadsworth remarked.

“So God is an American,” Lieutenant Downs said, making Wadsworth smile, then the marine lieutenant looked past Wadsworth. “General Lovell coming, sir,” he said softly.

Wadsworth turned to see Solomon Lovell and Major Todd approaching. Was this bad news? Had Commodore Saltonstall changed his mind? “Sir,” he greeted the general cautiously.

Lovell looked pale and drawn. “I have decided,” he said slowly, “that I should go with you.”

Wadsworth hesitated. He had thought to lead this attack and that Lovell would make a separate advance with the remaining men along the ridge’s spine, but something in Lovell’s face told him to accept the older man’s decision. Lovell wanted to be in this assault because he needed to prove to himself he had done all that he could. Or perhaps, Wadsworth thought less generously, Lovell had an eye to posterity and knew that fame would attend the man who led the successful assault on Fort George. “Of course, sir,” he said.

Lovell looked heartbroken. “I just ordered the big guns off the heights,” he said, gesturing north towards the woods where Revere’s cannon had been emplaced.

“You ordered’” Wadsworth began in puzzlement.

“There’s no ammunition,” Lovell interrupted him bleakly.

Wadsworth was about to point out that more ammunition could be supplied, if not from Boston then perhaps from the Warren’s magazine, then he understood why Lovell had given the apparently defeatist order to remove the guns. It was because the general at last understood that this was the rebels’ final chance. If this attack failed then nothing else would work, at least not till American reinforcements arrived, and until that day, there would be no more need of heavy guns. “Colonel McCobb and Colonel Mitchell will lead the attack along the ridge,” Lovell went on. Neither Lovell nor Wadsworth expected much from the second attack, which would be made by the men who had not volunteered, yet their visible presence on the ridge must keep some British defenders on the western side of their fort, and that was why the second attack was planned.

“We’re honored you’re here, sir,” Wadsworth said generously.

“I won’t interfere with your deployments,” Lovell promised.

Wadsworth smiled. “We’re all at God’s mercy now, sir.”

And if God was merciful the rebels would go down the long hill in full sight of the fort and under the fire of its cannons. They would pass the smoking remnants of the burned houses and barns, then make their way through cornfields and orchards, and through the small yards where vegetables grew. Once sheltered by the village they would make for a group of houses that lay between the fort and the British ships, and there Wadsworth would wait until the commodore’s attack diverted the fort’s defenders and filled the harbor with noise, smoke, and flame.

With the marines and Indians added to his force Wadsworth now led five hundred men. The best men. Was it enough? McLean had at least seven hundred in the fort, but the troops led by Colonel McCobb and Colonel Mitchell would keep some of those defenders facing west, and once the British ships were taken or sunk the rest of the American marines would come ashore. The numbers would be about equal, Wadsworth thought, then decided that he could not win this battle by an exercise of mental arithmetic. He could plan his moves as far as the harbor’s edge, but after that the devil would roll his dice and it would be smoke and flame, screams and steel, the chaos of anger and terror, and what use was mathematics then? If Wadsworth’s grandchildren were to learn of this day and of this victory they must learn of courage and of men doing a great deed. And if the deed was not great it would not be memorable. So at some point he must let go of calculation and throw himself on anger and resolve. There was no easy way. Both Lovell and Saltonstall had shirked the fight because they sought a sure solution, and no such easy answer existed. The expedition would only succeed when it rose above prudence and challenged men to perform great deeds. So yes, he thought, five hundred men was enough, because that was all he had to do this thing, and this thing had to be done in the name of American liberty. “James?” he spoke to Fletcher. “Let’s go.”

Forty of the volunteers were manning drag-ropes attached to two of the four-pounder cannons that, so far, had scarcely been used. They were too small to be effective at anything except close range, but on this day they might be battle-winners. Lieutenant Marett, one of Revere’s officers, commanded the two pieces, which had an ample supply of round shot, though Captain Carnes, before returning to the General Putnam, had insisted that the two small guns were also equipped with grape. He had made the missiles himself, collecting stones from the beach that the General Putnam’s sailors had sewn into rough bags of sail canvas. The bags could be rammed on top of a round shot so that when the guns were fired the stones would spread like lethal duckshot. Lieutenant Marett had nervously protested that the stones would ruin the guns’ barrels, but had fallen silent under Carnes’s baleful stare. “Damn the barrels,” Carnes had said, “it’s the ruin they’ll do to British guts that matters.”

The first tendrils of fog curled over the slope as the men went down to the shore. They went in open order, hurrying across the meadows and through the scattered trees. A round shot fired from Fort George gouged a scar across grassland. A second gun fired, then a third, but all the balls ricocheted harmlessly from the ground. That was a good omen, Wadsworth thought, and was surprised that he sought omens. He had prayed in the dawn. He liked to think that faith and prayer were sufficient to themselves, and that he was now in God’s hands, but he found himself watching every phenomena for any sign that this attack would succeed. The British sloops, though their guns would bear on the harbor shore, did not fire and that was surely the hand of provi-dence. The smoke from the burning houses was blown towards Fort George and, though Wadsworth’s rational mind told him that was merely because the wind persisted from the southwest, he wanted to believe it was a sign that God desired to blind and choke the enemy. He saw six of the Indians crouching beside the cornfield where he had ordered the men to gather. They formed a circle, their dark heads close together, and he wondered what God they prayed to. He remembered a man named Eliphalet Jenkins who had founded a mission to the Wampanoag tribe and whose body, gutted empty by knives and blanched pale by the sea, had been washed ashore at Fairhaven. Why was he remembering that old tale? And then he thought of the story James Fletcher had told him about a man and boy, both English, who many years before had been gelded then burned alive by the Indians of Majabigwaduce. Was that another omen?

The two guns arrived safely. Each was attached to a caisson that held their ammunition and on the nearer of those wagons was painted a slogan, “Liberty or Death.” That was easily said, Wadsworth thought, but death seemed more imminent now. Imminent and immanent. The words batted in his head. Why did the enemy sloops not fire? Were they asleep? A shell from the fort landed in the smoldering remnants of Jacob Dyce’s house and exploded harmlessly with a dull, impotent boom and an eruption of ash and smoldering timbers. Imminent, immanent, and impotent. For some reason Wadsworth thought of a text that had been the foundation of a sermon that the Reverend Jonathan Murray had preached on the first Sunday after the expedition had landed, “where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” The worm, Murray said, was the evil of British tyranny and the fire the righteous anger of men who fought for liberty. But why did we burn these houses, Wadsworth wondered, and how many men of Majabigwaduce had been enraged by that arson and, even now, manned the ramparts of the fort? “The worm will shrivel,” Murray had promised, “it will shrivel and hiss as it burns!” Yet the scripture, Wadsworth thought, did not promise that punishment, only that the worm dieth not. Was that an omen?

“Do we go on, sir?” Fletcher asked.

“Yes, yes.”

“You look as if you’re dreaming, sir,” Fletcher said, grinning.

“I was wondering how many civilians will be helping the garrison.”

“Oh, some will,” Fletcher said dismissively. “Old Jacob for one, but he can’t shoot straight. Doctor Calef, of course.”

“I knew Calef in Boston,” Wadsworth said.

“He’s not a bad fellow. A bit pompous. But he’ll be doctoring, not soldiering.”

“On we go,” Wadsworth said, and it seemed unreal now. The ships still did not fire and the bombardment from the fort fell silent because the Americans were on the low ground and protected from the guns on the fort’s southern wall by a shoulder of land that ran parallel to the ridge. They were concealed too by houses, cornfields, and trees. Lilies blossomed in yards. A woman hurriedly took in some drying washing because the sky was still darkening and promised rain. The marines, in a double file, advanced on the left ready to turn and oppose any sally by the fort’s garrison, but McLean sent none. A chained dog barked at the passing soldiers until a woman called for it to be silent. Wadsworth looked up to his left, but all he could see of the fort was the slow-stirring flag at the top of its pole. He crossed the newly made track which led from the beach to the fort’s gate. If I were McLean, Wadsworth thought, I would send men down to fight, but the Scotsman did no such thing, nor did Mowat fire from his sloops, though he must be seeing the rebels file through the settlement. “He’s not going to waste shot on us,” Lieutenant Downs suggested when Wadsworth expressed surprise that the British ships had been silent.

“Because we can’t hurt him?”

“Because he’s double-shotted his guns to welcome our ships. That’s all he’s worried about, sir, the ships.”

“He can’t know they’re planning to attack him,” Wadsworth pointed out.

“If they saw our fo’c’sle’s being strengthened,” Downs said, “they’ll have guessed.”

And suppose the ships did not come? Saltonstall had very reluctantly agreed to make an attack, and suppose he changed his mind? Wadsworth’s men were now in line with the ships, meaning they were between Mowat and McLean, and Wadsworth could see the red uniforms of the Royal Marines on the deck of HMS North. The fog was thickening and a first slow spatter of rain fell.

Then a fair-haired girl came running from a house to throw her arms round James Fletcher’s neck, and Wadsworth knew they had arrived. He ordered the two guns to face the harbor, their job to open fire if any Royal Marines came from the ships. The rest of his men crouched in yards and orchards. They were a quarter mile from the fort’s southeastern bastion and hidden from it by a large cornfield. They were in place. They were ready. If McLean could see them he took no apparent heed because none of the fort’s guns fired, while the sloops’ broadsides were now facing well away from the rebels. We go uphill from here, Wadsworth thought. Through the cornfield and across the open ground and over the ditch and up the wall and so to victory, and that sounded easy, but there would be round shot and grapeshot, screams and blood, smoke and volleys, death squirming in agony, men shrieking, steel slithering in guts, shit-soiled breeches, and the devil laughing as he rattled his dice.

“They know we’re here,” Solomon Lovell had not spoken since they left the high ground, but now, looking up at the flag flying above the fort, he sounded nervous.

“They know,” Wadsworth said. “Captain Burke!” William Burke, the skipper of the privateer Sky Rocket, had come with the soldiers and his duty now was to return and tell Commodore Saltonstall that the assault force was in position. Saltonstall had insisted that a seaman carry him that news, an insistence that amused Wadsworth because it suggested the naval officer did not trust the army. “Are you satisfied we’re in position, Mister Burke?” Wadsworth asked.

“I’m well satisfied, General.”

“Then pray tell the commodore we shall attack as soon as he opens fire.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Burke said, and set off westwards, escorted by four militiamen. A longboat waited for him beneath Dyce’s Head. It would take an hour, Wadsworth thought, for the message to be delivered. It began to rain harder. Fog and rain on Friday the thirteenth, but at least Wadsworth was confident that, at long last, the ships would come.

And the fort, with God’s good help, would fall.

“We do nothing, of course,” McLean said.

“Nothing?” John Moore asked.

“We could have a late luncheon, I suppose? I’m told there’s oxtail soup.”

Moore gazed down from the fort’s southeastern bastion. The rebels, at least four hundred of them, were hidden somewhere close to the Fletcher house. “We could send two companies to rout them, sir,” the lieutenant suggested.

“They have a company of marines,” McLean said, “you saw that.”

“Then four companies, sir.”

“Which is exactly what they want us to do,” McLean said. Rainwater dripped from the peaks of his cocked hat. “They want us to weaken the garrison.”

“Because then they’ll attack from the heights?”

“I must assume so,” McLean said. “I do like an oxtail soup, especially seasoned with a little sherry wine.” McLean went cautiously down the short flight of steps from the bastion, helping himself with the blackthorn stick. “You’ll serve with Captain Caffrae,” he told Moore, “but do remember your other duty if the rebels should break through.”

“To destroy the oaths, sir?”

“Exactly that,” McLean said, “but I assure you they won’t break through.”

“No?” Moore asked with a smile.

“Our enemies have made a mistake,” McLean said, “and divided their force, and I dare believe that neither of their contingents has the strength to break through our defense.” He shook his head. “I do like it when the enemy does my work. They’re not soldiers, John, they’re not soldiers, but that doesn’t mean the fight will be easy. They have a cause, and they’re ready to die for it. We’ll win, but it will be hard work.”

The brigadier knew that the crisis had come and was just grateful that it had taken so long to arrive. Captain Mowat’s message had said that the rebel ships were at last determined to enter the harbor, and McLean now knew that the naval assault would be accompanied by a land attack. He expected the main body of the rebels to come from the heights, and so he had posted the majority of his men on the western side of the fort, while three companies of the 82nd were placed to defend against the attack by the men who had worked their way along the shore to conceal themselves in the low ground. Those three companies were reinforced by naval cannon already loaded with grapeshot that could turn the ditch beyond the low eastern wall into a trench slopping with blood. And it would be bloody. In another hour or two McLean knew that Majabigwaduce would be besieged by noise, by the smoke of cannon and by the spite of musket-fire. Mowat’s sloops would put up a stalwart defense, but they would surely be destroyed or taken, and that was sad, yet their loss would not mean defeat. The important thing was to hold the fort and that McLean was determined to do, and so, though his officers yearned to make a sally and attack the concealed rebels, he would keep his redcoats inside Fort George’s walls and let the rebels come to die on his guns and bayonets.

Because that was why he had built Fort George, to kill the king’s enemies, and now those enemies were obliging him. And so he waited.

It began to rain harder, a steady rain, pelting down almost vertically because the wind was so light. The fog moved in bands, thick sometimes, then thinning, and at times whole swathes of the river were clear of the fog to reveal a sullen gray water being dimpled by rain. The rainwater dripped from yards and rigging to darken the warships’ decks.

“You trust the army, Mister Burke?” Saltonstall asked.

“They’re in position, Commodore, and ready to go. Yes, sir, I trust them.”

“Then I suppose we must indulge them.”

Five rebel ships would sail into Majabigwaduce Harbor. The General Putnam would lead the attack, closely followed by the Warren and the New Hampshire ship, Hampden. The Charming Sally and the Black Prince would come behind those three leading vessels.

It had been Saltonstall’s idea to send the General Putnam first. She was a large, well-built ship that carried a score of nine-pounder cannons, and her orders were to sail directly at Mowat’s line and then turn upwind to anchor opposite the southernmost sloop, the Nautilus. Once anchored, the General Putnam would hammer the Nautilus with her broadside while the Warren, with her much larger guns, came into line opposite the British flagship, the Albany. The Hampden, with her mix of nine-pounder and six-pounder cannon, would then take on the North while the two remaining ships would use their broadsides to pound the fort.

“He wants us dead,” Thomas Reardon, first lieutenant of the General Putnam, commented.

“But it makes sense to send us in first,” Daniel Waters, the skipper, said bleakly.

“To kill us?”

“The Warren’s our most powerful ship. No point in having her half-beaten to death before she opens fire.”

“So we’re to be half-beaten to death instead?”

“Yes,” Waters said, “because that’s our duty. Hands to the capstan.”

“He’s saving his skin, that’s the only sense it makes.”

“That’s enough! Capstan!”

Capstans creaked as the anchors were hauled. The topgallantsails were released first, showering water onto the decks, which had been scattered with sand to give the gunners firm footing on planks that would become slippery with blood. The guns were double-shotted. The three leading vessels all carried marines whose muskets would harry the enemy gunners.

The crews of the other ships cheered as the five attacking vessels got under way. Commodore Saltonstall watched approvingly as his flying jib was raised and backed to turn the Warren away from the wind, then as the jib and foretopmast staysail were hoisted and sheeted hard home. The topgallants caught the small wind, and Lieutenant Fenwick ordered the other topsails released. Men slid down rigging, ran along yards, and fought with rain-tightened bindings to loose the big sails that scattered more gallons of rainwater that had been trapped within the canvas folds. “Sheet them hard!” Fenwick called.

And the Warren was moving. She even heeled slightly to the fitful wind. At her stern the snake ensign flew from the mizzen gaff, while the Stars and Stripes were unfurled at her maintop, the proud colors bright in the drab rain and drifts of fog. Israel Trask, the boy fifer, played on the frigate’s forecastle. He began with the “Rogue’s March” because it was a jaunty tune, a melody to make men dance or fight. The gunners had scarves tied about their ears to dull the sound of the cannon and most, even though it was a chill day, were stripped to the waist. If they were wounded they did not want a musket-ball or timber splinter to drive cloth into the flesh, for every man knew that invited gangrene. The cannon were black in the rain. Saltonstall liked a spick-and-span ship, but he had nevertheless permitted the gunners to chalk the guns’ barrels. “Death to Kings,” one said, “Liberty forever” was written on another, while a third, somewhat mysteriously, just said “Damn the Pope,” a sentiment which seemed irrelevant to the day’s business, but which so accorded with the commodore’s own prejudices that he had allowed the slogan to stay.

“A point to starboard,” Saltonstall said to the helmsman.

“Aye aye, sir, point to starboard it is,” the helmsman said, and made no correction. He knew what he was doing, and he knew too that the commodore was nervous, and nervous officers were prone to give unnecessary orders. The helmsman would keep the Warren behind the General Putnam, close behind, so close that the frigate’s jib-boom almost touched the smaller ship’s ensign. The harbor entrance was now a quarter mile away. Men were waving from the top of Dyce’s Head. Other men watched from Cross Island where the American flag flew. No guns fired. A rift of fog drifted across the harbor center, half-shrouding the British ships. The fort was not visible yet. There was a whisper of wind, just enough so that the ships picked up speed and the sea at the Warren’s cutwater made a small splashing noise. Two knots, maybe two and a half, Saltonstall thought, and one nautical mile to go before the wheel spun to lay the frigate’s broadside opposite the Albany. The forecastle of the Warren looked ugly because the marines had erected barricades of logs to protect themselves against the enemy’s fire. And that fire would begin as soon as the frigate passed Dyce’s Head, but most of it would be aimed at the General Putnam and for half a nautical mile the General Putnam must endure that fire without being able to answer it. At two knots that half nautical mile would be covered in fifteen minutes. Each British gun would fire six or seven shots in that time. So at least three hundred shots would beat the General Putnam’s bows, which Captain Waters had reinforced with heavy timbers. Saltonstall knew that some men despised him for letting the General Putnam take that beating, but what sense did it make to sacrifice the largest ship in the fleet? The Warren was the monarch of this bay, the only frigate and the only ship with eighteen-pounder cannons, and it would be foolish to let the enemy cripple her with three hundred round shot before she was capable of unleashing her terrifying broadside.

And what good would this attack do anyway? Saltonstall felt a pulse of anger that he was being asked to do this thing. Lovell should have attacked and taken the fort days ago! The Continental Navy was having to do the Massachusetts Militia’s job, and Lovell, damn him, must have complained to his masters in Boston who had persuaded the Navy Board there to send Saltonstall a reprimand. What did they know? They were not here! The task was to capture the fort, not sink three sloops, which, once the fort was taken, were doomed anyway. So good marines and fine sailors must die because Lovell was a nervous idiot. “He’s not fitted to be elected town Hog Reeve,” Saltonstall sneered.

“Sir?” the helmsman asked.

“Nothing,” the commodore snapped.

“By the mark three!” a seaman called from the beakhead, casting a lead-weighted line to discover the depth.

“We’ve plenty of water, sir,” the helmsman said encouragingly. “I remember from the last time we poked our nose in.”

“Quiet, damn your eyes,” Saltonstall snapped

“Quiet it is, sir.”

The General Putnam was almost abreast of Dyce Head now. The wind faltered, though the ships kept their way. On board the British ships the gunners would be crouching behind their barrels to make sure their aim was true.

“Commodore, sir!” Midshipman Ferraby shouted from the taffrail.

“What is it?”

“Signal from the Diligent, sir. Strange sail in sight.”

Saltonstall turned. There, far to the south, just emerging from a band of fog which half-obscured Long Island, was his guard ship, the Diligent, with signal flags bright at a yardarm. “Ask how many sail,” he ordered.

“It says three ships, sir.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say so the first time, you damned fool? What ships are they?”

“He doesn’t know, sir.”

“Then send an order telling him to find out!” Saltonstall barked, then took the speaking trumpet from its hook on the binnacle. He put the trumpet to his mouth. “Wear ship!” he bellowed, then turned back to the signal midshipman. “Mister Ferraby, you damned fool, make a signal to the other attack ships that they are to return to the anchorage!”

“We’re going back, sir?” Lieutenant Fenwick was driven to ask.

“Don’t you be a damned fool as well. Of course we’re going back! We do nothing till we know who these strangers are!”

And so the attack was suspended. The rebel ships turned away, their sails flapping like monstrous wet wings. Three strange ships were in sight, which meant reinforcements had arrived.

But reinforcements for whom?

From Lieutenant George Little’s deposition to the Massachusetts Court of Inquiry, sworn on September 25th, 1779.:By order of Capt Williams I went with 50 Men on Board the Hamden to man her as I suppos’d to grand Attack the Enem’y About the Same time the Comodore Boats being Imploy’d In Bringing off Loggs to Build a Brest Work on his fore Castle – I have Offten Herd Capt Williams say that from the first Counsell of war that the Comodore being always preaching Terro Against going in the Harbor to Attack the Enemeys Shiping.

From Brigadier-General Lovell’s despatch to Jeremiah Powell, President of the Council Board of the State of Massachusetts Bay, dated August 13th, 1779:I receiv’d your favor of Augt 6th this day wherein you mention your want of intelligence of the State of the army under my Command. . . . The Situation of my Army at present I cannot but say is very critical. . . . Many of my Officers and Soldiers are dissatisfied with the Service tho’ there are some who deserve the greatest credit for their Alacrity and Soldier like conduct. . . . Inclosed you have the Proceedings of five Councils of War, You may Judge my Situation when the most important Ship in the Fleet and almost all the private property Ships are against the Seige.

Chapter Thirteen

A Royal Marine at the taffrail of HMS North fired his musket at the small group of Americans who had gathered at the top of the beach. The musket-ball fluttered close above their heads to bury itself in the trunk of a spruce. None of the Americans seemed to notice, but kept gazing fixedly towards the harbor entrance. A marine sergeant shouted at the man to save his ammunition. “The range is too long, you stupid bastard.”

“Just saying hello to them, Sergeant.”

“They’ll be saying hello to you soon enough.”

Captain Selby, the commanding officer of HMS North, was watching the approaching rebel ships. His view was veiled by wisps of fog and sheets of rain, but he recognized the meaning of the enemy’s furled mainsails. The rebels wanted a clear view forrard, they were ready for battle. He walked along the sloop’s deck, talking to his gunners. “You’ll hit them hard, lads. Make every shot count. Aim at their waterline, sink the bastards before they can board us! That’s the way to beat them!” Selby doubted the three sloops could sink an enemy warship, at least not before the rebels opened fire. It was astonishing how much punishment a ship could take before it began to sink, but it was his duty to sound confident. He could see five enemy ships approaching the harbor entrance and all of them looked bigger than his sloop. He reckoned the enemy would try to board and capture the North and so he had readied the boarding pikes, axes, and cutlasses with which his crew would fight the attackers.

He stopped at the North’s bows beside a great samson post which held one of the seventeen-inch hawsers linking his sloop to the Albany. He could see Captain Mowat at the Albany’s stern, but he resisted the temptation to make small talk across the gap. A fiddler was playing aboard Mowat’s sloop and the crew was singing, and his own men took up the song.We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors,We’ll range and we’ll roam over all the salt seas,Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old EnglandFrom Ushant to Scilly ´tis thirty-five leagues.

Was it thirty-five leagues, he wondered? He remembered the last time he had beat up northwards from Ushant, the sea a gray monster and the Atlantic gale singing in the shrouds. It had seemed further than thirty-five leagues. He watched the enemy and distracted himself by converting thirty-five land leagues to nautical miles. The numbers fluttered in his head and he forced himself to concentrate. A touch under ninety-one and a quarter nautical miles, say an easy dawn-to-dusk run in a sloop-of-war given a fresh wind and a clean hull. Would he ever see Ushant again? Or would he die here, in this fog-haunted, rain-drenched, godforsaken harbor on a rebel coast? He still watched the enemy. A fine dark-hulled ship led them, and close behind her was the larger bulk and taller masts of the Warren. The thought of that frigate’s big guns gave Selby a sudden empty feeling in his belly and, to disguise his nervousness, he leveled his glass towards the approaching ships. He saw green-jacketed marines in the frigate’s fighting tops and he thought of the musket-fire that would rain onto his deck and then, inexplicably, he saw some of the enemy’s sails flutter and begin to turn away from view. He lowered the glass, still staring. “Good God,” he said.

The American frigate was turning. Had she lost her rudder? Selby gazed in puzzlement and then saw that all the rebel ships were following the frigate’s example. They were falling off the wind, their sails shivering as the crews loosened sheets. “They surely aren’t going to open fire from there?” he wondered aloud. He watched, half-expecting to see the hull of the leading ship vanish in a sudden cloud of powder smoke, but none showed. She just turned sluggishly and kept on turning.

“The bastards are running away!” Henry Mowat called from the Albany. The singing on the sloops faltered and died as men stared at their enemy turning away. “They’ve got no belly for the fight!” Mowat shouted.

“Dear God,” Selby said in astonishment. His telescope showed him the name on the stern of the ship that had been leading the attack, and which was now the rearmost vessel of the retreating fleet. “General Putnam,” he read aloud. “And who the devil is General Putnam?” he asked. But whoever he was, the ship named for General Putnam was now sailing away from the harbor, as was the rebel frigate and the three other ships. They were all stemming the flooding tide to return to their anchorage. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Selby said, collapsing his glass.

On board the North and on board the Albany and on the sanded deck of the Nautilus the seamen cheered. Their enemy had run away without firing a shot. Mowat, usually so grim and purposeful, was laughing. And Captain Selby ordered an immediate extra issue of rum.

Because it seemed he might see Ushant again.

The Americans on the beach were Generals Lovell and Wadsworth, Lieutenant Downs of the Continental Marines, and the four majors who would lead the militia companies uphill. Only now it seemed there was not going to be any attack because Commodore Saltonstall’s ships were turning away. General Lovell stared openmouthed as the ships slowly wore around just beyond the harbor entrance. “No,” he protested to no one in particular.

Wadsworth said nothing. He just stared through his telescope.

“He’s turned away!” Lovell said in apparent disbelief.

“Attack now, sir,” Downs urged.

“Now?” Lovell asked, bemused.

“The British will be watching the harbor mouth,” Downs said.

“No,” Lovell said, “no, no, no.” He sounded heartbroken.

“Attack, please!” Downs pleaded. He looked from Lovell to Wadsworth. “Avenge Captain Welch, attack!”

“No,” Peleg Wadsworth supported Lovell’s decision. He closed the telescope and stared bleakly at the harbor mouth. He could hear the British crews cheering aboard the sloops.

“Sir,” Downs began to appeal.

“We need every man to attack,” Wadsworth explained, “we need men attacking along the ridge and we need cannon-fire from the harbor.” The signal for Colonel Mitchell and Colonel McCobb to begin their advance was the sight of the American ships engaging the British and it seemed that signal was not going to be sent now. “If we attack alone, Captain,” Wadsworth went on, “then McLean can concentrate his whole force against us.” There was a time for heroics, a time for the desperate throw that would write bright glory on a new page of American history, but that time was not now. To attack now would be to kill men for nothing and give McLean another victory.

“We must go back to the heights,” Lovell said.

“We must go back,” Wadsworth echoed.

It began to rain even harder.

* * *

It took over two hours to get the men and the pair of four-pounder cannons back to the heights by which time dark had fallen. The rain persisted. Lovell sheltered under the sail-canvas tent that had replaced his earlier shelter. “There must be an explanation!” he complained, but no news had come from the fleet. Saltonstall had sailed towards the enemy and then, at the last moment, had turned away. Rumor said that strange ships had been sighted on the river’s sea-reach, but no one had confirmed that report. Lovell waited for an explanation, but the commodore sent none and so Major William Todd was sent in search of the answer. A longboat was hailed from the nearest transport and Todd was rowed southwards to where the lanterns of the warships glimmered through the wet dark. “Warren ahoy!” the steersman called from the longboat, which banged against the frigate’s hull. Hands reached down from the gunwale to help Major Todd aboard.

“Wait for me,” Todd ordered the longboat’s crew, then he followed Lieutenant Fenwick down the frigate’s deck, past the big guns that still bore their chalked inscriptions, and so to the commodore’s cabin. Water dripped from Todd’s coat and hat, and his boots squelched on the checkered canvas carpet.

“Major Todd,” Saltonstall greeted Todd’s arrival. The commodore was seated at his table with a glass of wine. Four spermaceti candles in fine silver sticks lit a book he was reading.

“General Lovell sends his compliments, sir,” Todd began with the politic lie, “and asks why the attack did not take place?”

Saltonstall evidently thought the question brusque, because he jerked his head back defiantly. “I sent a message,” he said, looking just past Todd’s shoulder at the paneled door.

“I regret to say none arrived, sir.”

Saltonstall marked his place in the book with a strip of silk, then turned his attention back to the cabin door. “Strange ships were sighted,” he said. “You could hardly expect me to engage the enemy with strange ships at my rearward.”

“Ships, sir?” Todd asked and hoped that they were the reinforcements from Boston. He wanted to see a regiment of trained soldiers with their flags flying and drums beating, a regiment that could assault the fort and wipe it from the face of Massachusetts.

“Enemy ships,” Saltonstall said bleakly.

There was a short silence. Rain pattered on the deck above and a boxed chronometer made an almost indiscernible ticking. “Enemy ships?” Todd repeated feebly.

“Three frigates in their van,” Saltonstall went on relentlessly, “and a ship of the line with two more frigates coming behind.” He turned back to his book, removing the silk marker.

“You’re sure?” Todd asked.

Saltonstall spared him a pitying glance. “Captain Brown of the Diligent is capable of recognizing enemy colors, Major.”

“So what . . . ?” Todd began, then thought that there was no use in asking the commodore what should happen now.

“We retreat, of course,” Saltonstall divined the unasked question. “We have no choice, Major. The enemy has anchored for the night, but in the morning? In the morning we must go upriver to find a defensible place.”

“Yes, sir.” Todd hesitated. “You’ll forgive me, sir, I must report back to General Lovell.”

“Yes, you must. Goodnight,” Saltonstall said, turning a page.

Todd was rowed back to the beach. He stumbled up the slippery path in the darkness, falling twice so that when he appeared in Lovell’s makeshift tent he was muddied as well as wet. His face told Lovell the news, news that Todd related anyway. Rain beat on the canvas and hissed in the fire outside as the major told of the newly arrived British fleet that was anchored to the south. “It seems they’ve come in force, sir,” Todd said, “and the commodore believes we must retreat.”

“Retreat,” Lovell said bleakly.

“In the morning,” Todd said, “if there’s wind enough, the enemy will come here, sir.”

“A fleet?”

“Five frigates and a ship-of-the-line, sir.”

“Dear God.”

“He seems to have abandoned us, sir.”

Lovell looked as if he had been slapped, but suddenly he straightened. “Every man, every gun, every musket, every tent, every scrap of supply, everything! On the ships tonight! Call General Wadsworth and Colonel Revere. Tell them we will leave the enemy nothing. Order the guns evacuated from Cross Island. You hear me? We will leave the enemy nothing! Nothing!”

There was an army to be saved.

It rained. The night was windless and so the rain fell hard and straight, turning the rough track which zigzagged up the northern end of the bluff into a chute of mud. There was no moonlight, but Colonel Revere had the idea to light fires at the track’s edge, and by their light the supplies were carried down to the beach where more fires revealed the longboats nuzzling the shingle.

The guns had to be manhandled down the track. Fifty men were needed for each eighteen-pounder. Teams hauled on drag-ropes to stop the huge guns running away, while other men wrenched at the huge carriage wheels to guide the weapons down to the beach where lighters waited to take the artillery back to the Samuel. Lights glimmered wet from the ships. The rain seethed. Tents, musket cartridges, barrels of flour, boxes of candles, picks, spades, weapons, everything was carried down to the beach where sailors loaded their boats and rowed out to the transports.

Peleg Wadsworth blundered through the dark wet trees to make sure everything was gone. He carried a lantern, but its light was feeble. He slipped once and fell heavily into a deserted trench at the edge of the woods. He picked up the lantern, which, miraculously, had stayed alight, and gazed east into the darkness which surrounded Fort George. A few tiny rain-diffused splinters of light showed from the houses below the fort, but McLean’s defenses were invisible until a cannon fired and its sudden flame lit the whole ridge before fading. The cannon-ball plowed through trees. The British fired a few guns every night, not in hope of killing rebels, but rather to disturb their sleep.

“General? General?” It was James Fletcher’s voice.

“I’m here, James.”

“General Lovell wants to know if the guns are taken off Cross Island, sir.”

“I told Colonel Revere to do that,” Wadsworth said. Why had Lovell not asked Revere directly? He walked along the trench and saw that it was empty. “Help me out, James,” he said, holding up a hand.

They went back through the trees. General Lovell’s table was being carried away, and men were pulling down the shelter under which Wadsworth had slept so many nights. Two militiamen were piling the shelter’s brush and branches onto the campfire, which blazed bright in a billow of smoke. All the campfires were being fed fuel so the British would not guess the rebels were leaving.

The rain eased towards dawn. Somehow, despite the darkness and the weather, the rebels had managed to rescue everything from the heights, though there was a sudden alarm when McCobb realized the Lincoln County militia’s twelve-pounder gun was still at Dyce’s Head. Men were sent to retrieve it as Wadsworth went carefully down the rain-slicked track. “We’ve left them nothing,” Major Todd greeted him on the beach. Wadsworth nodded wearily. It had been a considerable achievement, he knew, but he could not help wonder at the enthusiasm men had shown to rescue the expedition’s weapons and supplies, an enthusiasm that had not been evident when they had been asked to fight. “Did you see the pay chest?” Todd asked anxiously.

“Wasn’t it in the general’s tent?”

“It must be with the tent, I suppose,” Todd said.

The rain stopped altogether and a gray, watery dawn lit the eastern sky. “Time to go,” Wadsworth said. But where? He looked southwards, but the seaward reach of Penobscot Bay was shrouded by a mist that hid the enemy ships. A lighter waited to take away the missing twelve-pounder, but the only other boat on the beach was there to carry Todd and Wadsworth to the Sally. “Time to go,” Wadsworth said again. He stepped into the boat and left Majabigwaduce to the British.

No guns fired in the dawn. The night’s rain had stopped, the clouds had cleared, the sky was limpid, the air was still and no fog obscured Majabigwaduce’s ridge. Yet no guns fired from the rebel batteries and there was not even the smaller sound of rebel picquets clearing night-dampened powder from their muskets. Brigadier McLean stared at the heights through his glass. Every few moments he swung the glass southwards, but mist still veiled the lower river and it was impossible to tell what ships lay there. The garrison had seen the strange ships appear in the twilight, but no one was certain whether they were British or American. McLean looked back to the woods. “They’re very quiet,” he said.

“Buggered off, maybe,” Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell, commanding officer of the 74th, suggested.

“If those ships are ours?”

“Then our enemies will have their tails between their legs,” Campbell said, “and they’ll be scampering for the hills.”

“My goodness, and maybe you’re right.” McLean lowered the glass. “Lieutenant Moore?”

“Sir?”

“My compliments to Captain Caffrae, and ask him to be so good as to take his company for a look at the enemy lines.”

“Yes, sir, and, sir?”

“And yes, you may accompany him, Lieutenant,” McLean said.

The fifty men filed through the abatis and went west along the ridge, keeping close to the northern side where the trees were dark from the previous day’s rain. To their left were the stumps of the felled pines, many scarred by cannon shot that had fallen short. About halfway between the fort and the rebel trenches Caffrae led the company into the trees. They went cautiously now, still going westwards, but slowly, always alert for rebel picquets among the leaves. Moore wished he wore a green coat like the enemy marines. He stopped once, his heart pounding because of a sudden noise to his right, but it was only a squirrel scrabbling up a trunk. “I think they’ve gone,” Caffrae said softly.

“Or perhaps they’re being clever,” Moore suggested.

“Clever?

“Luring us into an ambush?”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Caffrae said. He peered ahead. These woods had been his playground where he came to alarm the rebels, but he had rarely advanced this far down the ridge. He listened, but heard nothing untoward. “Staying here won’t put gravy on the beefsteak, will it?” he said. “Let’s move on.”

They threaded the wet trees, still going at a snail’s pace. Caffrae now edged back to the left so he could see the cleared ground and he realized he had advanced well beyond the rebels’ foremost trenches, and those trenches were empty. If this was an ambush then it would surely have been sprung by now. “They’ve gone,” he said, trying to convince himself.

They went faster now, advancing ten or fifteen paces at a time, then came to a clearing that had plainly been a rebel encampment. Felled logs surrounded the wet ashes of three campfires, rough shelters of branches and sod stood at the clearing’s edges, and a latrine pit stank in the woods behind. Men peered into the shelters, but found nothing, then followed Caffrae along a track which led towards the river. Moore saw a piece of paper caught in the undergrowth and fished it out with his sword. The paper was wet and disintegrating, but he could still see that someone had written a girl’s name in pencil. Adelaide Rebecah. The name was written again and again in a round and childish hand. Adelaide Rebecah.

“Anything interesting?” Caffrae asked.

“Just mis-spelt love.” Moore said and threw the paper away.

At the side of the path between two of the encampments was a row of graves, each marked with a wooden cross and heaped with stones to stop animals clawing up the corpses. Names were written in charcoal on the crosses. Isaac Fulsome, Nehemiah Eldredge, Thomas Snow, John Reardon. There were seventeen names and seventeen crosses. Someone had written the words “for Liberty” after Thomas Snow’s name, except they had run out of space and the “y” was awkwardly cramped into a corner of the crosspiece.

“Sir!” Sergeant Logie called. “Sir!” Caffrae ran to the sergeant. “Listen, sir,” Logie said.

For a moment all Caffrae could hear was the water dripping from the leaves and the small susurration of feeble waves on the bluff’s beach, but then he heard voices. So the rebels were not gone? The voices appeared to come from the foot of the bluff and Caffrae led his men that way to discover a road hacked into the steep face. The road was rutted by wheels because this was how the guns had been hauled to the heights and then hauled down again, and one gun was still on shore. Caffrae, reaching the bluff’s edge, saw a boat on the shingle and saw men struggling with a cannon at the road’s end. “We’ll have that gun, lads,” he said, “so come on!”

A dozen rebels were manhandling the twelve-pounder onto the beach, but the ruts in the road were waterlogged and the gun was heavy, and the men were tired. Then they heard the noises above them and saw the redcoats bright among the trees. “Lift the barrel!” the rebel officer ordered. They gathered round the gun and lifted the heavy barrel out of its carriage and staggered with their burden across the shingle. The redcoats were whooping and running. The rebels almost swamped the lighter as they dumped the barrel on its stern, but the boat stayed afloat and they clambered aboard and the sailors pulled on the oars as the first Scotsmen arrived on the beach. One rebel stumbled as he tried to shove the boat offshore. He lost his footing and fell full-length into the water just as the oars bit and carried the craft away. His companions stretched arms towards him as he waded and thrashed his way towards the receding boat, but it pulled further away and a Scottish voice ordered the man back to the beach. He was a prisoner, but the cannon barrel was saved. The lighter was rowed still further offshore as the remainder of Caffrae’s men streamed onto the shingle where one of them, a corporal, raised his musket. “No!” Caffrae called sharply. “Let them be!” That was not mercy but caution because some of the transport ships carried small cannon and the beach was well inside their range. To fire a musket was to invite the reply of a grape-loaded cannon. The musket dropped.

Moore stopped by the abandoned gun carriage. Ahead of him was Penobscot Bay and the rebel fleet. There was no wind so the fleet was still anchored. The sun was well above the horizon now and the day was crystal clear. The dawn mist had vanished so that Moore could now see the second fleet, a smaller fleet, which lay far to the south, and at the heart of that smaller fleet was a big ship, a ship with two decks of guns, a ship far bigger than anything the rebels possessed, and Moore knew from the size of the ship that the Royal Navy had arrived.

And the rebels were gone from Majabigwaduce.

* * *

Peleg Wadsworth had pleaded with General Lovell to prepare themselves for just this emergency. He had wanted to take men upriver and find a point of land where gun batteries could be prepared and then, if the British did send a fleet, the rebels could withdraw behind their new defenses and pound the pursuing ships with gunfire, but Lovell had refused every such plea.

Now Lovell wanted exactly what Wadsworth had asked for so often. James Fletcher was summoned to the Sally’s stern-deck and asked what lay upriver. “There’s about six, seven mile of bay, General,” Fletcher told Lovell, “then it’s a narrow river after that. She goes twenty mile before you can go no further.”

“And the river winds over those twenty miles?” Lovell asked.

“In places she does,” James said. “There’s some straight channels and there are twists as tight as Satan’s tail.”

“The banks are hilly?”

“All the way, sir.”

“Then our objective,” Lovell said, “is to find a bend in the river that we can fortify.” The rebel fleet could shelter upriver of the bend, and every gun that could be carried ashore would be dug into the high ground to shatter the pursuing British ships. The fleet would thus be saved and the army preserved. Lovell gave Wadsworth a rueful smile. “Don’t chide me, Wadsworth,” he said, “I know you foresaw this might happen.”

“I hoped it would not, sir.”

“But all will be well,” Lovell said with sublime confidence. “Some energy and application will preserve us.”

Little could be done while there was no wind to move the ships. Yet Lovell was pleased with the night’s work. Everything that could be saved from the heights, all except for one gun carriage, had been embarked and that achievement, in a night of rain and chaos, had been remarkable. It boded well for the army’s survival. “We have all our guns,” Lovell said, “all our men and all our supplies!”

“Almost all our guns,” Major Todd corrected the general.

“Almost?” Lovell asked indignantly.

“The cannon were not recovered from Cross Island,” Major Todd said.

“Not recovered! But I gave distinct orders that they were to be withdrawn!”

“Colonel Revere claimed he was too busy, sir.”

Lovell stared at the major. “Busy?”

“Colonel Revere also claimed, sir,” Todd went on, taking some pleasure in describing the failings of his enemy, “that your orders no longer applied to him.”

Lovell gaped at his brigade major. “He said what?”

“He averred that the siege had been abandoned, sir, and that therefore he was no longer obliged to accept your orders.”

“Not obliged to accept my orders?” Lovell asked in disbelief.

“That is what he claimed, sir,” Todd said icily. “So I fear those guns are lost, sir, unless we have time to retrieve them this morning. I also regret to tell you, sir, that the pay chest is missing.”

“It’ll turn up,” Lovell said dismissively, still brooding over Lieutenant-Colonel Revere’s brazen insolence. Not obliged to accept orders? Who did Revere think he was?

“We need the pay chest,” Todd insisted.

“It will be found, I’m sure,” Lovell said testily. There had been chaos in the dark and it was inevitable that some items would have been carried to the wrong transport ship, but that could all be sorted out once a safe anchorage was discovered and protected. “But first we must haul those guns off Cross Island,” Lovell insisted, “I will leave nothing for the British. You hear me? Nothing!”

But there was no time to rescue the cannon. The first catspaws of wind had just begun to ruffle the bay and the British fleet was already hauling its anchors and loosing sails. The rebel fleet had to move and one by one the anchors were raised, the sails released and the ships, assisted by the flood tide, retreated northwards. The wind was weak and fickle, scarce enough to stir the fleet, so some smaller ships used their long ash oars to help their progress while others were towed by longboats.

The cannon on Cross Island were abandoned, but everything else was saved. All the rebel guns and supplies had been carried down the muddy track in the rainy dark, then rowed out to the transport ships, and now those ships edged northwards, northwards to the river narrows, and northwards to safety.

And behind them, between the transport ships and Sir George Collier’s flotilla, the rebel warships cleared for action and spread slowly across the bay. If the transports were sheep then Saltonstall’s warships were the dogs.

And the wolves were coming.

Redcoats gathered at Dyce’s Head to watch the unfolding drama. Brigadier McLean’s servant had thoughtfully brought a milking stool all the way to the bluff and McLean thanked the man and sat down to watch the unfolding battle. It would be a privileged view of a rare sight, McLean thought. Seventeen rebel warships waited for six Royal Navy vessels. Three British frigates led the way, while the big two-decker and the remaining two frigates came on more slowly. “I do believe that’s the Blonde,” McLean said, staring at the nearest frigate through his telescope. “It’s our old friend Captain Barkley!” Off to McLean’s right the nineteen rebel transports were inching northwards. From this distance it looked as if their sails hung limp and powerless, but minute by minute they drew further away.

The Blonde fired her bow-chasers. To the watchers ashore it looked as if her bowsprit was blotted out by blossoming smoke. A moment later the sound of the two guns pounded the bluff. A pair of white fountains showed where the round shots had splashed well short of the Warren, which lay at the center of the rebel line. The smoke thinned and drifted ahead of the British ships.

“Look at that!” Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell exclaimed. He was pointing at the harbor mouth where Mowat’s three sloops had appeared. They were kedging out of the harbor against the prevailing wind. Ever since he had heard that the rebels had abandoned the siege Mowat had been retrieving his ships’ guns from their shore emplacements. His men had worked hard and fast, desperate to join the promised fight in the bay, and now, with their portside broadsides restored, the three sloops were on their way to join Sir George’s flotilla. Longboats took turns to carry anchors far forrard of the sloops’ bows, the anchors were dropped, then the sloops were hauled forward on the anchor rode as a second anchor was rowed still further ahead for the next leg of the journey. They leapfrogged anchor by anchor out of the harbor and the North’s pumps still clattered and spurted, and all three ships showed damage to their hulls from the long rebel bombardment, but their guns were loaded and their tired crews eager. The Blonde fired again, and once again the shots dropped short of the rebel ships.

“They do say,” McLean remarked, “that firing the guns brings on the wind.”

“I thought it was the other way round,” Campbell said, “that gunfire stills the wind?”

“Well, it’s one or the other,” McLean said happily, “or maybe neither? But I do remember a nautical fellow assuring me of it.” And perhaps firing the two chasers on HMS Blonde had brought on a small wind because the British ships seemed to be making better speed as they approached the rebel fleet. “It will be bloody work,” McLean said. The foremost three frigates would be far outgunned by the rebels, though the big Raisonable was not that far behind and her massive lower guns were sufficient to blow each of the rebel warships out of the water with a single broadside. Even the Warren, with her eighteen-pounders, would be far outmatched by the two-decker’s thirty-two-pounders. “Mind you,” McLean went on, “sailors do tell us the strangest things! I had a skipper on the Portugal run who swore blind the world was flat. He claimed to have seen the rainbows at its edge!”

“The fellow who took us to Halifax,” Campbell said, “told us tales of mermaids. He said they flocked together like sheep, and that down in the southern seas it’s tits and tails from horizon to horizon.”

“Really?” Major Dunlop asked eagerly.

“That’s what he said! Tits and tails!”

“Dear me,” McLean said, “I see I must sail south.” He straightened on the stool, watching the three sloops. “Oh, well done, Mowat!” he said enthusiastically. The three sloops had laboriously used their anchors to haul themselves out of the harbor and now loosed their sails.

“And what does that signify?” Major Dunlop asked. His question had been prompted by a string of bright signal flags that had appeared at the Warren’s mizzen mast. The flags meant nothing to the watchers on the bluff who had now been joined by most of Majabigwaduce’s inhabitants, curious to watch an event that would surely make their village famous.

“He’s taking them into battle, I suppose,” Campbell suggested.

“I suppose he must be,” McLean agreed, though he did not see what the rebels could do other than what they were already doing. Commodore Saltonstall’s seventeen ships were in a line with all their broadsides pointing at the oncoming ships, and that gave the rebels a huge advantage. They could shoot and shoot, secure in the knowledge that only the bow-chasers on the three leading frigates could return the fire. The Royal Navy, the brigadier thought, must take some grievous casualties before the big two-decker battleship could demolish the American defiance.

Except the Americans were not defiant. “What on earth?” McLean asked.

“Bless me,” Campbell said, equally astonished.

Because the meaning of Saltonstall’s signal was suddenly clear. There would be no fight, at least no fight of the commodore’s making because, one by one, the rebel warships were turning away. They had loosed their sheets and were running before the small wind. Running northwards. Running away. Running for the safety of the river narrows.

Six ships and three sloops chased thirty-seven vessels.

All running away.

Three rebel ships decided to make a break for the open sea. The Hampden, with her twenty guns, was the largest, while the Hunter had eighteen guns and the Defence just fourteen. The commodore’s orders had required every ship to do its best to evade the enemy, and so the three ships tacked westwards across the bay, aiming to take the less used western channel past Long Island and so downriver to the ocean, which lay twenty-six nautical miles to the south. The Hunter was a new ship and reputed to be the fastest sailor on the coast, while Nathan Brown, her captain, was a canny man who knew how to coax every last scrap of speed from his ship’s hull. There was precious little wind, not nearly as much as Brown would have liked, yet even so his sleek hull moved perceptibly faster than the Hampden, which, being larger, should have been the quicker vessel.

Signal flags fluttered from a yardarm on HMS Raisonable. For a time it was hard to tell what those flags portended, because nothing seemed to change in the British fleet, then Brown saw the two rearmost British frigates turn slowly westwards. “Bastards want a race,” he said.

It was an unequal race. The two smaller rebel ships might be quick and nimble sailors, but they had the disadvantage of sailing closer to the wind and the two frigates easily closed the gap through which the rebels needed to tack. Two guns fired from HMS Galatea were warning enough. The shots were fired at long range, and both blew past the Defence’s bows, but the message of the two near misses was clear. Try to sail through the gap and your small ships will receive the full broadsides of two frigates, and to escape past those frigates the rebels needed to tack through the channel where the frigates waited. They would be forced to sail within pistol shot and John Edmunds, the Defence’s captain, had an image of his two masts falling, of his deck slicked with blood, and of his hull quivering under the relentlessly heavy blows. His guns were mere four-pounders and what could four-pounders do against a frigate’s full broadside? He might as well throw bread crusts at the enemy. “But I’ll be damned before the bastards take my ship,” he said.

He knew his attempt to sail the Defence past the frigates had failed and so he let his brig’s bows fall off the wind and then drove her, all sails standing, straight towards the Penobscot’s western shore. “Joshua!” he called to the first mate. “We’re going to burn her! Break open the powder barrels.”

The Defence ran ashore. Her masts bowed forrard as the bows grated on the shingle beach. Edmunds thought the masts would surely fall, but the backstays held and the sails slatted and banged on the yards. Edmunds took the flag from her stern and folded it. His crew was spilling powder and splashing oil on the decks. “Get ashore, boys,” Edmunds called, and he went forrard, past his useless guns, and paused in the bows. He wanted to weep. The Defence was a lovely ship. Her home was the open ocean where she should have been living up to her martial name by chasing down fat British merchantmen to make her owners rich, but instead she was caught in an enclosed seaway and it was time to bid her farewell.

He struck flint on steel and spilled the burning linen from his tinderbox onto a powder trail. Then he climbed over the gunwale and dropped down to the beach. His eyes were wet when he turned to watch his ship burn. It took a long time. There was more smoke than fire at first, but then the flames flickered up the tarred rigging and the sails caught the blaze, and the masts and yards were outlined by fire so that the Defence looked like the devil’s own vessel, a flame-rigged brigantine, a defiant fighting-ship sailing her way into hell. “Oh God damn the bastards,” Edmunds said, brokenhearted, “the sons of goddamned bitch bastards!”

The Hunter sought shelter in a narrow cove. Nathan Brown, her skipper, ran her gently aground in the tight space and ordered an anchor lowered and the sails furled and, once the ship was secure, he told his crew to find shelter ashore. The Hunter might be a quick ship, but even she could not outsail the broadsides of the two enemy frigates, and her four-pounder cannon were no match for the British guns, yet Nathan Brown could not bring himself to burn the ship. It would have been like murdering his wife. The Hunter had magic in her timbers, she was fast and nimble, a charmed ship, and Nathan Brown dared to hope that the British would ignore her. He prayed that the pursuers would continue north and that once the Royal Navy ships had passed he might extricate the Hunter from the narrow cove and sail her back to Boston, but that hope died when he saw two longboats crammed with sailors leave the British frigates.

Brown had ordered his men ashore in case the British tried to destroy the Hunter with cannon-fire, but now it seemed the enemy was intent on capture rather than destruction. The crowded longboats drew nearer. At least half the Hunter’s crew of a hundred and thirty men were armed with muskets and they began shooting as the longboats approached the grounded ship. Water spouted around the oarsmen as musket balls struck, and at least one British sailor was hit and the boat’s oars momentarily tangled, but then the longboats vanished behind the Hunter’s counter. A moment later the enemy sailors were aboard the ship and attaching towlines to her stern. The treacherous tide lifted her off the shingle and a strange flag, the hated flag, broke at her mizzen gaff’s peak as she was towed back to the river. She was now His Majesty’s ship, the Hunter. Just to the south, hidden from Brown’s crew by a shoulder of wooded land, the powder magazine in the Defence exploded, sending a dark smoke cloud boiling above the land and a shower of burning timbers that fell to hiss in the bay and start small fires ashore.

The Hampden was the largest of the three ships that tried to reach the sea, and she saw the fate of the Hunter and Defence and so her captain, Titus Salter, turned back to make the safety of the river narrows. The Hampden had been donated by the State of New Hampshire and she was well-found, well-manned, and expensively equipped, yet she was not a fast sailor and late in the afternoon HMS Blonde came within range of her and opened fire. Titus Salter turned the Hampden so that her portside broadside of ten guns faced the enemy and he returned the fire. Six nine-pounder cannon and four six-pounders spat at the much larger Blonde, which hammered back with twelve and eighteen-pounders. HMS Virginia came behind the Blonde and added her broadside. The guns boomed across the bay as dense smoke rose to shroud the lower rigging. Fire twisted from the cannon barrels. Men sweated and hauled on guns, they swabbed and rammed and ran the guns out and the gunners touched linstocks to portfires and the great guns leaped back and the round shot slammed remorselessly into the Hampden’s hull. The shots shattered the timbers and drove wicked-edged splinters into men’s bodies. Blood spilled along the deck seams. Chain shot whistled in the smoke, severing shrouds, stays, and lines. The sails twitched and tore as bar shot shredded the canvas. The foremast went first, toppling across the Hampden’s bows to smother ripped sails across the forrard cannon, but still the American flag flew and still the British pounded the smaller ship. The frigates drifted closer to their helpless prey. Their biggest guns were concentrated on the rebel hull and the smoke from their eighteen-pounders shrouded the Hampden. The rebel fire became slower and slower as men were killed or wounded. A rib cage, shattered by an eighteen-pounder shot, was scattered across the deck. A man’s severed hand lay in the scuppers. A cabin boy was trying not to cry as a seaman tightened a tourniquet around his bloody, ragged thigh. The rest of his leg was ten feet away, reduced to a pulp by twelve pounds of round shot. Another eighteen-pounder ball hit a nine-pounder cannon and the noise, like a great bell, was heard on Majabigwaduce’s distant bluff, and the barrel was struck clean off its carriage to fall onto a gunner who lay screaming, both legs crushed, and another ball slammed through the gunwale and struck the mainmast, which first swayed, then fell towards the stern, the sound splintering and creaking, stays and shrouds parting, men screaming a warning, and still the relentless shots came.

Fifteen minutes after the Blonde had begun the fight Titus Salter ended it. He pulled down his flag and the guns went silent and the smoke drifted across the sun-dappled water and a prize crew came from the Blonde to board the Hampden.

The remainder of the rebel fleet still sailed north.

Towards the river narrows.

The rebels had occupied no buildings in Majabigwaduce and Doctor Eliphalet Downer, the expedition’s Surgeon General, had complained about keeping badly wounded men in makeshift shelters constructed from branches and sailcloth, and so the rebels had established their hospital in what remained of the buildings of Fort Pownall at Wasaumkeag Point, which lay some five miles upriver and on the opposite bank from Majabigwaduce. Now, as the guns boomed flat across the bay, Peleg Wadsworth took forty men to evacuate the patients to the sloop Sparrow, which lay just offshore. The men, most with bandaged stumps, either walked or were carried on stretchers made from oars and coats. Doctor Downer stood next to Wadsworth and watched the distant frigates pound the Hampden. “So what now?” he asked bleakly.

“We go upriver,” Wadsworth said.

“To the wilderness?”

“You take the Sparrow as far north as you can,” Wadsworth said, “and find a suitable house for the hospital.”

“These arrangements should have been made two weeks ago,” Downer said angrily.

“I agree,” Wadsworth said. He had tried to persuade Lovell to make those arrangements, but the general had regarded any preparations for a retreat as defeatism. “But they weren’t made,” he went on firmly, “so now we must all do the best we can.” He turned and pointed at the small pasture. “Those cows must be slaughtered or driven away,” he said.

“I’ll make sure it’s done,” Downer said. The cows were there to give the patients fresh milk, but Wadsworth wanted to leave nothing that could be useful to the enemy. “So I become a herdsman and a slaughterer,” Downer said bitterly, “then find a house upstream and wait for the British to find me?”

“It’s my intention to make a stronghold,” Wadsworth explained patiently, “and so keep the enemy to the lower river.”

“If you’re as successful at that as you’ve been at everything else in the last three weeks,” Downer said vengefully, “we might as well all shoot ourselves now.”

“Just obey orders, Doctor,” Wadsworth said testily. He had snatched a couple of hours’ sleep as the Sally drifted northwards, but he was tired. “I’m sorry,” he apologized.

“I’ll see you upriver,” Downing said, his tone indicating regret for the words he had spoken before. “Go and do your work, General.”

The transport ships were in the northern part of the bay now. Most had anchored during the ebb tide and now used the evening flood and the small wind to crawl towards the river narrows. James Fletcher had explained that the entrance to the narrows was marked by an obstacle, Odom’s Ledge, that lay in the very center of the stream. There were navigable channels to either side of the rock, but the ledge itself was a ship-killer. “It’ll rip the bottom out of a boat,” James had told Wadsworth, “and the British won’t try and get past in the dark. No one could try and pass Odom’s in the dark.”

Wadsworth was using the Sally’s longboat and he and Fletcher were being rowed northwards from Wasaumkeag Point. The oarsmen were silent, as were the enemy frigates’ guns, which meant the Hampden was taken. Wadsworth turned to gaze at the view. It was a summer evening and he was in the middle of the largest fleet the rebels had ever gathered, a huge fleet, their sails beautifully catching the lowering sun, and they were all fleeing from the much smaller fleet. The rebel ships converged towards the ledge. The British frigates fired an occasional bow-chaser, the balls splashing short of the rearmost rebels. The wolves were herding the sheep, Wadsworth thought bitterly, and the Warren, taller and more beautiful than all the surrounding vessels, was running like the rest when her duty, surely, was to turn and fight her way into legend.

“There’s the Samuel, sir,” James Fletcher pointed to the brig which had almost reached the narrows, entrance.

“Get me close to the Samuel,” Wadsworth ordered the boatswain.

The brig was towing both Revere’s barge and a flat-bottomed lighter. Wadsworth stood and cupped his hands as his longboat closed on the Samuel. “Is Colonel Revere on board?”

“I’m here,” a voice boomed back.

“Keep rowing,” Wadsworth said to the boatswain, then cupped his hands again. “Put a cannon on the lighter, Colonel!”

“You want what?”

Wadsworth spoke more distinctly. “Put a cannon on the lighter! I’ll find a place to land it!” Revere shouted something back, but Wadsworth did not catch the words. “Did you hear me, Colonel?” he shouted.

“I heard you!”

“Put a cannon on the lighter! We need to get guns ashore when we find a place to defend!”

Again Revere’s answer was indistinct, but the longboat had now passed the Samuel and Wadsworth was confident that Revere had understood his orders. He sat and watched the broken water above the ledge where the riverbanks, steep and tree-covered, narrowed abruptly. The tide was slackening and the hills robbed the small wind of much of its power. A schooner and a ship had anchored safely upstream of the ledge while, behind them, many of the other ships were still being towed by tired men in longboats.

“What we do,” Wadsworth spoke to himself as much as to the men in his boat, “is discover a place we can defend.” He had been told the river twisted and in his mind’s eye was a sharp turn where he could land guns on the upstream bank. He would begin with one of Revere’s cannon, because once that was emplaced it would mark the new rebel position and as the ships passed upstream they could donate cannons, crewmen, and ammunition so that, by morning, Wadsworth would command a formidable battery of artillery that pointed directly downstream. The approaching British would be forced to sail straight at those guns. The river was far too narrow to allow them to turn and use their broadsides, so instead they must either sail into the furious bombardment or, much more likely, anchor and so refuse the offered fight. The rebel fleet could shelter behind the new fortress while the army could camp ashore and recover its discipline. A road could be hacked westwards through the woods so that new men, new ammunition, and new guns could be brought to renew the assault on Majabigwaduce. As a child Wadsworth had loved the story of Robert the Bruce, the great Scottish hero who had been defeated by his English enemies and who had fled to a cave where he watched a spider try to make a web. The spider failed repeatedly, but repeatedly tried again until at last it was successful, and that spider’s persistence had inspired the Bruce to try again and so achieve his great victory. So now the rebels must play the spider, and try again, and keep trying until at last the British were gone from Massachusetts.

But as the crew rowed him steadily upstream, it seemed to Wadsworth that the river hardly twisted at all. An island, Orphan Island, divided the river into two channels and Odom’s Ledge was in the navigable western branch. Once past Orphan Island the river’s bends seemed gentle. The flooding tide helped the oarsmen. They were now far ahead of the ships, traveling in a summer’s gentle evening up a swirling, silent river edged by tall, dark trees. “Where are these sharp bends?” Wadsworth asked James Fletcher nervously.

“Up ahead,” James Fletcher said. The oar blades dipped, pulled, and dripped, and then, suddenly, there was the perfect place. Ahead of Wadsworth the river twisted abruptly to the east, making almost a right-angled bend, and the slope above the bend was steep enough to deter any attack, but not so steep that guns could not be placed there.

“What’s this place called?” Wadsworth asked.

Fletcher shrugged. “The river bend?”

“It will have a name,” Wadsworth said vehemently, “a name for the history books. Spider Bend.”

“Spider?”

“It’s an old story,” Wadsworth said, but he did not elaborate. He had found the place to make his stand, and now he must gather troops, guns, and resolve. “Back down the river,” he told the crew.

Because Peleg Wadsworth would fight back.

The rebel warships were faster than the transports and they gradually overhauled the slower vessels and passed Odom’s Ledge into the river narrows. All the warships and almost half of the transports passed that bottleneck, but a dozen slower boats were still stranded in the bay, where the tide was slackening, the wind dying, and the enemy approaching. Every sailor knew that there was more wind at the top of a mast than at the bottom, and the masts of the British ships were taller than the transports’ masts, and the frigates were flying all their topgallant sails and so had the benefit of what small breeze remained in the limpid evening. The sun was low now so that the frigates’ hulls were in shadow, but their high sails reflected the bright sun. They crept northwards, ever closer to the transports crammed with men, guns, and supplies, and looming behind them, queen of the river, was the towering Raisonable with her massive cannon.

Just short of Odom’s Ledge, on the western bank, was a cove. It was called Mill Cove because a sawmill had been built where a stream emptied into the cove, though the mill was long gone now, leaving just a skeleton of rafters and a stone chimney overgrown with creepers. The dozen transports, almost becalmed and increasingly threatened by the frigates, turned towards the cove. They were being towed, but the river’s current had now overpowered the last of the flood tide and they could not force their way through the narrow channels either side of the ledge and so they hauled themselves across the current to the shallow waters of Mill Cove and used the last of the wind to drive their bows ashore. Men dropped over the gunwales. They carried their muskets and haversacks, they waded ashore, they gathered disconsolate beside the mill’s ruins and they watched their ships burn.

One by one the transports burst into flames. Each and every ship was valuable. The boat-builders of Massachusetts were famous for their skills and it was said that a ship built in New England could outsail any vessel from the old world, and the British would love to capture these ships. They would be taken to Canada, or perhaps back to Britain, and the ships would be sold at auction and the prize money distributed among the sailors of the ships that had captured them. The warships might be purchased by the Admiralty, as the captured frigate Hancock had been bought, so the Hampden would end its days as the HMS Hampden and HMS Hunter would be using her New England–given speed and her New England– cast guns to chase smugglers in the English channel.

But now the American transport skippers would deny their enemies a similar victory. They would not yield their ships to a British prize court. Instead they burned the transports and the banks of Mill Cove flickered with the light of the flames. Two of the burning hulls drifted towards the river’s center. Their sails and rigging and masts were alight. When a mainmast fell it was a curving collapse of bright fire, sparks exploding into the evening as the lines and yards and spars cascaded into the river.

And the fire did what the Warren and the other warships had failed to do. It stopped the British. No captain would take his ship near a burning hull. Sails, tarred rigging, and wooden hulls were dangerously flammable and a wind-driven spark could turn one of His Majesty’s proud ships into a charred wreck, and so the British fleet dropped anchor as the last of the evening wind died.

Upstream, beyond Odom’s Ledge, the rest of the rebel fleet struggled northwards until the current and the dying light forced them to anchor. At Mill Cove hundreds of men, with no orders and no officers confident of what should be done, started walking westwards. They headed across a wilderness towards their distant homes.

While in Fort George Brigadier-General Francis McLean raised a glass and smiled at the guests who had gathered about his table. “I give you the Royal Navy, gentlemen,” he said, and his officers stood, lifted their glasses of wine and echoed the brigadier’s toast. “The Royal Navy!”

From a letter by General Artemas Ward, commander of the Massachusetts Militia, to Colonel Joseph Ward, September 8th, 1779:The commander of the fleet is cursed, bell, book, and candle. . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere is now under an arrest for disobedience of orders, and unsoldierlike behaviour tending to cowardice.

From Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell’s journal, August 14th, 1779:The British Ships coming up the Soldiers were obliged to take to the Shore, and set fire to their Vessels, to attempt to give a description of this terrible Day is out of my Power it would be a fit Subject for some masterly hand to describe it in its true colors, to see four Ships pursuing seventeen Sail of Armed Vessells nine of which were stout Ships, Transports on fire, Men of War blowing up, Provision of all kinds, and every kind of Stores on Shore (at least in small Quantities) throwing about, and as much confusion as can possibly be conceived.

Excerpt from Brigadier-General Francis McLean’s letter to Lord George Germaine, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the American Colonies, August 1779:It only remains for me to endeavor to do justice to the cheerfulness and spirit with which all ranks of our little garrison underwent the excessive fatigue required to render our post tenable. The work was carried on under the enemy’s fire with a spirit that would have done credit to the oldest soldiers; from the time the enemy opened their trenches, the men’s spirits increased daily, so that our last chief difficulty was in restraining them.

Chapter Fourteen

Peleg Wadsworth slept ashore, or rather he lay awake on the river’s bank and must have dozed, because he twice awoke with a start from vivid dreams. In one he was cornered by the Minotaur, which appeared with Solomon Lovell’s head crowned with a pair of blood-dripping horns out of a nightmare. He finally sat with his back against a tree and a blanket about his shoulders, and watched the dark river swirl slow and silent towards the sea. To his left, to seaward, there was a glow in the sky and he knew that red light was cast by the ships still burning in Mill Cove. It looked like an angry dawn, and it filled him with an immense lassitude, so he closed his eyes and prayed to God that he was given the strength to do what was needed. There was still a fleet and an army to rescue, and an enemy yet to be defied, and long before first light he roused James Fletcher and his other companions. Those companions were now Johnny Feathers and seven of his Indians who possessed two birch-bark canoes. The canoes slipped through the water with much greater ease than the heavy longboats and the Indian had happily agreed to let Wadsworth use the canoes in his attempt to organize a defense. “We must go downriver,” he told Feathers.

The tide was flooding again and the ships were using that tide to escape upriver. Their topsails were set, though no wind powered the vessels, which either floated upstream on the tide or were being towed by longboats. The canoes passed six vessels and Wadsworth shouted to each crew that they should take their ship past the place where the river turned sharply eastwards and then anchor. “We can defend the river there,” he called, and sometimes a captain responded cheerfully, but mostly the sullen crews received his orders in silence.

Wadsworth found the Warren aground where the river widened briefly to resemble a lake. Three other warships were anchored nearby. The frigate was evidently waiting for the tide to float her free of a mud bank.

“You want to go on board?” Johnny Feathers asked.

“No.”

Wadsworth had no stomach for a confrontation with Commodore Saltonstall, which, he suspected, would be fruitless. Saltonstall already knew what his duty was, but Wadsworth reckoned pointing out that duty would merely provoke a sneer and obfuscation. If the fleet and army were to be saved it would be by other men, and Wadsworth was looking for the means of that salvation.

He found it a quarter mile downstream of the Warren where the Samuel, the brig which carried the expedition’s artillery, was being pulled northwards by two longboats. Wadsworth’s canoe went alongside the brig and he scrambled up and across the Samuel’s gunwale. “Is Colonel Revere here?”

“He went away in his barge, sir,” a seaman answered.

“I hope that’s good news,” Wadsworth said, and walked aft to where Captain James Brown stood by his wheel. “Did Colonel Revere ship a cannon onto the lighter?” he asked Brown.

“No,” Brown answered curtly, nodding to the ship’s waist where the cannons were now parked wheel to wheel.

“So where is he?”

“Damned if I know. He took his baggage and left.”

“He took his baggage?” Wadsworth asked.

“Every last box and bundle.”

“And his men?”

“Some are here, some went with him.”

“Oh dear God,” Wadsworth said. He stood irresolute for a moment. The Samuel was inching upstream. The river was so narrow here that branches of trees sometimes brushed against the brig’s lower yards. Wadsworth had hoped that Revere’s one cannon, placed at Spider Bend, would be a marker for the rest of the fleet and the first of many cannon that could hold the British pursuers at bay. “You’ll keep going upstream?” he suggested to Brown.

The Samuel’s captain gave a mirthless bark of laughter. “What else do you suggest I do, General?”

“Ten miles upstream,” Wadsworth said, “the river turns sharply to the right. I need the guns there.”

“We’ll be lucky too make two miles before the tide turns,” Brown said, “or before the damned English catch us up.”

“So where is Colonel Revere?” Wadsworth demanded and received a shrug in answer. He had not passed Revere’s white-painted barge as he descended the river, which meant the colonel and his artillerymen must be further downriver, and that gave Wadsworth a glimmer of hope. Had Revere decided to fortify a place on the Penobscot’s bank? Was he even now finding a place where a battery could hammer the British ships? “Did he give you instructions for the cannon?” Wadsworth asked.

“He asked for his breakfast.”

“The cannon, man! What does he want done with the cannon?”

Brown turned his head slowly, spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the portside scupper, then looked back to Wadsworth. “He didn’t say,” Brown said.

Wadsworth went back to the canoe. He needed Revere! He needed artillery. He wanted a battery of eighteen-pounder cannon, the largest in the rebel army, and he wanted ammunition from the Warren, then he wanted to see the round shot crunching into the bows of the British frigates. He thought briefly of returning to the Warren, which also had the big guns he needed, but first, he decided, he would discover what Colonel Revere planned. “That way, please,” he told Feathers, pointing downstream. He would go to the Warren afterwards and demand that Saltonstall give the artillery all the eighteen-pounder shot they needed.