The Fort

by Bernard Cornwell

  Calef watched the general limp uphill, then called to him. “General McLean!”

  “Sir?” McLean turned.

  “You don’t imagine the rebels are going to let you stay here, do you?”

  McLean appeared to consider the question for a few seconds, almost as though he had never thought about it before. “I would think not,” he said mildly.

  “They’ll come for you,” Calef warned him. “Soon as they know you’re here, General, they’ll come for you.”

  “Do you know?” McLean said. “I rather think they will.” He touched his hat again. “Good day, Doctor. I’m glad about Mrs. Perkins.”

  “Damn Mrs. Perkins,” the doctor said, but too softly for the general to hear, then he turned and stared southwards down the long bay, past Long Island, to where the river disappeared on its way to the far off sea, and he wondered how long before a rebel fleet appeared in that channel.

  That fleet would appear, he was sure. Boston would learn of McLean’s presence, and Boston would want to scour this place free of redcoats. And Calef knew Boston. He had been a member of the General Assembly there, a Massachusetts legislator, but he was also a stubborn loyalist who had been driven from his home after the British left Boston. Now he lived here, at Majabigwaduce, and the rebels were coming for him again. He knew it, he feared their coming, and he feared that a general who cared about a woman and her baby was a man too soft to do the necessary job. “Just kill them all,” he growled to himself, “just kill them all.”

  Six days after Brigadier-General Wadsworth had paraded the children, and after Brigadier-General McLean had sailed into Majabigwaduce’s snug haven, a captain paced the quarter-deck of his ship, the Continental Navy frigate Warren. It was a warm Boston morning. There was fog over the harbor islands, and a humid southwest wind bringing a promise of afternoon thunder.

  “The glass?” the captain asked brusquely.

  “Dropping, sir,” a midshipman answered.

  “As I thought,” Captain Dudley Saltonstall said, “as I thought.” He paced larboard to starboard and starboard to larboard beneath the mizzen’s neatly furled spanker on its long boom. His long-chinned face was shadowed by the forrard peak of his cocked hat, beneath which his dark eyes looked sharply from the multitude of ships anchored in the roads to his crew who, though short-handed, were swarming over the frigate’s deck, sides, and rigging to give the ship her morning scrub. Saltonstall was newly appointed to the Warren and he was determined she should be a neat ship.

  “As I thought,” Saltonstall said again. The midshipman, standing respectfully beside the larboard aft gun, braced his leg against the gun’s carriage and said nothing. The wind was fresh enough to jerk the Warren on her anchor cables and make her shudder to the small waves that flickered white across the harbor. The Warren, like the two nearby vessels that also belonged to the Continental Navy, flew the red-and-white-striped flag on which a snake surmounted the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” Many of the other ships in the crowded harbor flew the bold new flag of the United States, striped and starred, but two smart brigs, both armed with fourteen six-pounder cannons and both anchored close to the Warren, flew the Massachusetts Navy flag, which showed a green pine tree on a white field and bore the words “An Appeal to Heaven.”

  “An appeal to nonsense,” Saltonstall growled.

  “Sir?” the midshipman asked nervously.

  “If our cause is just, Mister Coningsby, why need we appeal to heaven? Let us rather appeal to force, to justice, to reason.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” the midshipman said, unsettled by the captain’s habit of looking past the man he spoke to.

  “Appeal to heaven!” Saltonstall sneered, still gazing past the midshipman’s ear towards the offending flag. “In war, Mister Coningsby, one might do better to appeal to hell.”

  The ensigns of other vessels were more picaresque. One low-slung ship, her masts raked sharply aft and her gun ports painted black, had a coiled rattlesnake emblazoned on her ensign, while a second flew the skull and crossbones, and a third showed King George of England losing his crown to a cheerful-looking Yankee wielding a spiked club. Captain Saltonstall disapproved of all such homemade flags. They made for untidiness. A dozen other ships had British flags, but all those flags were being flown beneath American colors to show they had been captured, and Captain Saltonstall disapproved of that too. It was not that the British merchantmen had been captured, that was plainly a good thing, nor that the flags proclaimed the victories because that too was desirable, but rather that the captured ships were now presumed to be private property. Not the property of the United States, but of the privateers like the low-slung, raked-masted, rattlesnake-decorated sloop.

  “They are pirates, Mister Coningsby,” Saltonstall growled.

  “Aye aye, sir,” Midshipman Fanning replied. Midshipman Coningsby had died of the fever a week previously, but all Fanning’s nervous attempts to correct his captain had failed and he had abandoned any hope of being called by his real name.

  Saltonstall was still frowning at the privateers. “How can we find decent crew when piracy beckons?” Saltonstall complained, “tell me that, Mister Coningsby!”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “We cannot, Mister Coningsby, we cannot,” Saltonstall said, shuddering at the injustice of the law. It was true that the privateers were patriotic pirates who were fierce as wolves in battle, but they fought for private gain, and that made it impossible for a Continental warship like the Warren to find good crew. What young man of Boston would serve his country for pennies when he could join a privateer and earn a share of the plunder? No wonder the Warren was short-handed! She carried thirty-two guns and was as fine a frigate as any on the American seaboard, but Saltonstall had only men enough to fight half his weapons, while the privateers were all fully manned. “It is an abomination, Mister Coningsby!”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Midshipman Fanning said.

  “Look at that!” Saltonstall checked his pacing to point a finger at the Ariadne, a fat British merchantman that had been captured by a privateer. “You know what she was carrying, Mister Coningsby?”

  “Black walnut from New York to London, sir?”

  “And she carried six cannon, Mister Coningsby! Nine-pounder guns! Six of them. Good long nine-pounders! Newly made! And where are those guns now?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “For sale in Boston!” Saltonstall spat the words. “For sale, Mister Coningsby, in Boston, when our country has desperate need of cannon! It makes me angry, Mister Coningsby, it makes me angry indeed.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Those cannon will be melted down for gew-gaws. For gew-gaws! It makes me angry, upon my soul, it does.” Captain Saltonstall carried his anger to the starboard rail where he paused to watch a small cutter approach from the north. Its dark sails first appeared as a patch in the fog, then the patch took shape and hardened into a single-masted vessel about forty feet long. She was not a fishing boat, she was too narrow for such work, but her gunwales were pierced with tholes showing that she could ship a dozen oars and so be rowed on calm days and Saltonstall recognized her as one of the fast messenger boats used by the government of Massachusetts. A man was standing amidships with cupped hands, evidently shouting his news to the moored vessels through which the cutter slid. Saltonstall would dearly have liked to know what the man shouted, but he considered it beneath his dignity as a Continental Navy captain to make vulgar inquiries, and so he turned away just as a schooner, her gunwales punctuated by gunports, gathered way to pass the Warren. The schooner was a black-hulled privateer with the name King-Killer prominent in white paint at her waist. Her dirt-streaked sails were sheeted in hard to beat her way out of the harbor. She carried a dozen deck guns, enough to batter most British merchantmen into quick surrender, and she was built for speed so that she could escape any warship of the British navy. Her deck was crowded with men while at her mizzen gaff was a blue flag with the word “Liberty
” embroidered in white letters. Saltonstall waited for that flag to be lowered in salute to his own ensign, but as the black schooner passed she offered no sign of recognition. A man at her taffrail looked at Saltonstall, then spat into the sea and the Warren’s captain bridled, suspecting an insult. He watched her go towards the fog. The King-Killer was off hunting, going across the bay, around the northern hook of Cape Cod, and out into the Atlantic where the fat British cargo ships wallowed on their westward runs from Halifax to New York.

  “Gew-gaws,” Saltonstall growled.

  A stub-masted open barge, painted white with a black stripe around its gunwale, pushed off from the Castle Island quay. A dozen men manned the oars, pulling hard against the small waves, and the sight of the barge made Captain Saltonstall fish a watch from his pocket. He clicked open the lid and saw that it was ten minutes past eight in the morning. The barge was precisely on time, and within an hour he would see it return from Boston, this time carrying the commander of the Castle Island garrison, a man who preferred to sleep in the city. Saltonstall approved of the Castle Island barge. She was smartly painted and her crew, if not in real uniform, wore matching blue shirts. There was an attempt at order there, at discipline, at propriety.

  The captain resumed his pacing, larboard to starboard, starboard to larboard.

  The King-Killer vanished in the fog.

  The Castle Island barge threaded the anchorage. A church bell began to toll.

  Boston harbor, a warm morning, June 23rd, 1779.

  * * *

  The paymaster of His Majesty’s 82nd Regiment of Foot strode west along Majabigwaduce’s ridge. From behind him came the sound of axes striking trees, while all around him was fog. A thick fog. Every morning since the fleet had arrived there had been fog. “It will burn off,” the paymaster said cheerfully.

  “Aye, sir,” Sergeant McClure answered dully. The sergeant had a picquet of six men from the 82nd Foot, the Duke of Hamilton’s regiment and so known as the Hamiltons. McClure was thirty, older by far than his men and twelve years older than the paymaster, a lieutenant, who led the picquet at a fast, enthusiastic pace. His orders were to establish a sentry post at the peninsula’s western heights from where a lookout could be kept on the wide Penobscot Bay. If any enemy was to come, then the bay was their likeliest approach. The picquet was in thick woodland now, dwarfed by tall, dark, fog-shrouded trees. “The brigadier, sir,” Sergeant McClure ventured, “said there might be rebels here.”

  “Nonsense! There are no rebels here! They have all fled, Sergeant!”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “I do say so,” the young officer said enthusiastically, then stopped suddenly and pointed into the underbrush. “There!”

  “A rebel, sir?” McClure asked dutifully, seeing nothing worthy of note among the pines.

  “Is it a thrush?”

  “Ah,” McClure saw what had interested the paymaster and looked more closely, “it’s a bird, sir.”

  “Strangely, Sergeant, I was apprised of that fact,” the lieutenant said happily. “Note the breast, Sergeant.”

  Sergeant McClure dutifully noted the bird’s breast. “Red, sir?”

  “Red indeed. I congratulate you, Sergeant, and does it not put you in mind of our native robin? But this fellow is larger, much larger! Handsome fellow, isn’t he?”

  “Want me to shoot him, sir?” McClure asked.

  “No, Sergeant, I merely wish you to admire his plumage. A thrush is wearing his majesty’s red coat, would you not consider that an omen of good-fortune?”

  “Oh, aye, sir, I would.”

  “I detect in you, Sergeant, a lack of zeal.” The eighteen-year-old lieutenant smiled to show he was not serious. He was a tall lad, a full head above the stocky sergeant, and had a round, eager, and mobile face, a smile quick as lightning, and shrewdly observant eyes. His coat was cut from expensive scarlet cloth, faced with black and bright with buttons that were rumored to be made of the finest gold. Lieutenant John Moore was not wealthy, he was a doctor’s son, but everyone knew he was a friend of the young duke’s, and the duke was said to be richer than the next ten richest men in all Scotland, and a rich friend, as everyone also knew, was the next best thing to being wealthy oneself. The Duke of Hamilton was so rich that he had paid all the expenses of raising the 82nd Regiment of Foot, buying them uniforms, muskets, and bayonets, and rumor said his grace could probably afford to raise another ten such regiments without even noticing the expense. “Onwards,” Moore said, “onwards, ever onwards!”

  The six privates, all from the Lowlands of Scotland, did not move. They just gazed at Lieutenant Moore as though he were a strange species from some far-off heathen country.

  “Onwards!” Moore called again, striding fast once more through the trees. The fog muffled the harsh sound of the axes coming from where Brigadier McLean’s men were clearing the ridge so that their planned fort would have open fields of fire. The 82nd’s picquet, meanwhile, was climbing a gentle slope which leveled onto a wide plateau of thick undergrowth and dark firs. Moore trampled through the brush, then again stopped abruptly. “There,” he said, pointing, “Thalassa, Thalassa.”

  “The lassie?” McClure asked.

  “You have not read Xenophon’s Anabasis, Sergeant?” Moore asked in mock horror.

  “Is that the one after Leviticus, sir?”

  Moore smiled. “Thalassa, Sergeant, Thalassa,” he said in mock reproof, “was the cry of the ten thousand when at last, after their long march, and after their dark ordeals, they came to the sea. That’s what it means! The sea! The sea! And they shouted for joy because they saw their safety in the gentle heaves of its bosom.”

  “Its bosom, sir,” McClure echoed, peering down a sudden steep bluff, thick with trees, to glimpse the cold sea through the foliage and beneath the drifting fog. “It’s not very bosomy, sir.”

  “And it is across that water, Sergeant, from their lair in the black lands of Boston, that the enemy will come. They will arrive in their hundreds and in their thousands, they will prowl like the dark hordes of Midian, they will descend upon us like the Assyrian!”

  “Not if this fog lasts, sir,” McClure said. “The buggers will get lost, sir.”

  Moore, for once, said nothing. He was gazing down the bluff. It was not quite a cliff, but no man could climb it easily. An attacker would need to drag himself up the two hundred feet by pulling on the straggly saplings, and a man using his hands to keep his footing could not use his musket. The beach, just visible, was brief and stony.

  “But are the buggers coming, sir?” McClure asked.

  “We cannot say,” Moore said distractedly.

  “But the brigadier thinks so, sir?” McClure asked anxiously. The privates listened, glancing nervously from the short sergeant to the tall officer.

  “We must assume, Sergeant,” Moore said airily, “that the wretched creatures will resent our presence. We make life difficult for them. By establishing ourselves in this land of soured milk and bitter honey we deny their privateers the harbors they require for their foul depredations. We are a thorn in their side, we are inconvenient, we are a challenge to their quietude.”

  McClure frowned and scratched his forehead. “So you’re saying the buggers will come, sir?”

  “I bloody hope so,” Moore said with sudden vehemence.

  “Not here, sir,” McClure said confidently. “Too steep.”

  “They’ll want to land somewhere in range of their ships’ cannons,” Moore said.

  “Cannons, sir?”

  “Big metal tubes which expel balls, Sergeant.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir. I was wondering, sir,” McClure said with a smile.

  Moore tried and failed to suppress a smile. “We shall be plied with shot, Sergeant, have no doubt of that. And I’ve no doubt ships could spatter this slope with cannon-fire, but how would men climb it into our musket-fire? Yet even so, let’s hope they land here. No troops could climb this slope if we’re waiting at the top, e
h? By God, Sergeant, we’ll make a fine cull of the rebellious bastards!”

  “And so we will, sir,” McClure said loyally, though in his sixteen years of service he had become used to brash young officers whose confidence exceeded their experience. Lieutenant John Moore, the sergeant decided, was another such, yet McClure liked him. The paymaster possessed an easy authority, rare in a man so young, and he was reckoned to be a fair officer who cared about his troops. Even so, McClure thought, John Moore would have to learn some sense or else die young.

  “We shall slaughter them,” Moore said enthusiastically, then held out his hand. “Your musket, Sergeant.”

  McClure handed the officer his musket and watched as Moore laid a guinea on the ground. “The soldier who can fire faster than me will be rewarded with the guinea,” Moore said. “Your mark is that half-rotted tree canted on the slope, you see it?”

  “Aim at the dead bent tree,” McClure explained to the privates. “Sir?”

  “Sergeant?”

  “Won’t the sound of muskets alarm the camp, sir?”

  “I warned the brigadier we’d be shooting. Sergeant, your cartridge box, if you please.”

  “Be quick, lads,” McClure encouraged his men. “Let’s take the officer’s money!”

  “You may load and prime,” Moore said. “I propose to fire five shots. If any of you manage five before me, then you will take the guinea. Imagine, gentlemen, that a horde of malodorous rebels are climbing the bluff, then do the king’s work and send the wretches to hell.”

  The muskets were loaded; the powder, wadding, and shot were rammed down the barrels, the locks were primed and the frizzens closed. The clicks of the flints being cocked seemed oddly loud in the fog-shrouded morning.

  “Gentlemen of the 82nd,” Moore demanded grandly, “are you ready?”

  “The buggers are ready, sir,” McClure said.

  “Present!” Moore ordered. “Fire!”

  Seven muskets coughed, blasting evil-smelling powder smoke that was far thicker than the swirling fog. The smoke lingered as birds fled through the thick trees and gulls called from the water. Through the echo of the shots McClure heard the balls ripping through leaves and clattering on the stones of the small beach. The men were tearing open their next cartridges with their teeth, but Lieutenant Moore was already ahead. He had primed the musket, closed the frizzen, and now dropped the heavy stock to the ground and poured in the powder. He pushed the cartridge paper and ball into the muzzle, whipped the ramrod up, slid it down hard, pulled it free with the ringing sound of metal on metal, then jammed the ramrod into the turf, tossed the gun up to his shoulder, cocked, and fired.