Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  Andre could not help laughing at Vane’s distress. Britain was on the brink of losing a battle, perhaps losing thirteen colonies, and all Vane could worry about was a horse and a watch. Then Andre saw he had offended Vane and was immediately penitent. “I’m sorry, Kit, truly.”

  “Not as sorry as I am. And I didn’t get breakfast!”

  “We can remedy that, at least.” The gunners had a mess of lentils and salt pork standing on a limber and, in return for Andre’s silver, happily allowed the two officers to spoon their fill from the lukewarm pot. Somewhere to the west troops moved indistinctly through the whiteness; British troops moving forward, hurrying to block the place where the rebel forces were expected at any second and in overwhelming force. From behind came the sound of hooves and Vane and Andre turned to see a mud-spattered Lord Robert Massedene gallop from the mist.

  Massedene spoke with Sir William, then trotted back to his fellow aides. He slid stiffly off his horse. “We’re bringing every spare man from the city. God knows if they’ll be in time. Is that food?”

  Andre offered his lordship a bow. “Good morning, Robert.”

  “Morning, John.” Massedene nodded curtly at Vane. “You look as if you’ve been in the wars, Vane?”

  Vane’s reply was checked by a sudden eruption of sound from the north. Cannons and musketry combined in a hellish crescendo, yet their murderous work was hidden by the fog. It was the noise of carnage, but who died and who won was impossible to say.

  Massedene, who had been sent in urgent summons for reinforcements from the city’s garrison, turned to stare into the fog out of which came the sound of cannonade and musket fire. “My God, is it that bad?”

  “I rather think Mister Washington has wrong-footed us.” Andre spoke very quietly. “It’s going to be mildly desperate, I think.”

  Massedene stared northwards. “How many of them?”

  “God knows.” Vane, determined not to show any tremor of concern in front of Massedene, imitated Andre’s insouciance. “They’re as thick as penny whores round a barracks’ gate.”

  “I never lingered in such places,” Massedene said carelessly, “but I’ll take your word for it.”

  Vane, knowing he had been slighted, looked angrily away and saw that the sun had become a pale disc. The mist was clearing, and the rebels held the war’s outcome in the palms of their powder-stained hands.

  And all the despised George Washington needed to do was squeeze.

  Fourteen

  The horse, empty stirrups flapping, trotted jauntily out of the fog.

  It was a young horse; a black stallion with a distinctive white blaze and three white socks. It saw the prisoners and swerved away with its handsome head tossing in mane-swirling elegance. One of the guards whooped and ran towards the stallion. The beast avoided him easily. Other guards, seeing the value of the fine, glossy horse, ran to help. Sam thought they were like children playing a boisterous game.

  “They’re Virginians,” Jonathon said. He grinned as the stallion thudded northwards into the fog to escape the loud and clumsy pursuit. “I’m not. I’m from Philadelphia.”

  The ebullient guards, their prize lost, wandered back to the prisoners. The wounded American with the bullet in his groin lay curled on his side with blood seeping down his trouser legs. “Nothing I can do for him,” Nate said helplessly. Musket fire still sounded through the fog. The prisoners sat silent.

  “Are you from London?” Jonathon asked Sam.

  “No.”

  “There was a time when I dreamed of nothing else but going to London.” Jonathon suddenly hissed with a stab of pain.

  “I’ve never been to London,” Sam said. “Wanted to, but never did.” Jonathon turned his head to stare with some amazement at an Englishman who had never been to London, but Sam just shrugged. “Long way from my village.” Sam wondered how long it would be before he saw home again, if ever he would. He was thinking of all the tales he had heard around camp fires; tales that told of dreadful prison camps where the British starved and died of the fever or bloody flux. “What happens to us now?”

  “I don’t know.” Jonathon gave a rueful shrug. “I’ve only been in the army eleven days.”

  “That was clever of you,” Nate said, but not unkindly.

  Sam turned as a new bout of firing erupted in the south, then another in the west. It was impossible to tell what was happening, but he had an idea that the fog was slowly clearing. He could just see the black stallion, head erect, perhaps seventy yards to the north. He guessed the animal was frightened and wanted reassurance, but then a thicker waft of fog hid the horse again.

  “Jesus!” A lance of pain streaked up into Jonathon’s groin and belly. He shifted. Sam had bandaged the wound with a dead man’s torn shirt, then released the tourniquet. Jonathon, feeling the throb of the torn flesh, hissed in agony. “I’m going to lose the leg.”

  Sam scorned such pessimism. “No! You’ll be dancing again!”

  Jonathon tried to laugh and sobbed with pain instead. “Do I look like someone who ever danced?”

  “So what’s wrong with having a hobble?” Sam looked at the leather-clad clubfoot. “Has it always been like that?”

  Jonathon felt oddly complimented that Sam’s acceptance of his foot was so matter-of-fact. “From birth.”

  “Must be bloody useful for kicking the lights out of people you don’t like.” Sam saw that the pain was still flickering up from Jonathon’s wound and, because he had nothing better to offer, he uncorked the canteen of water. “Pity it isn’t good ale, eh? I miss the ale. Good, thick ale.”

  Jonathon wanted distraction from the pain. “Go on.”

  So Sam found himself talking about home. About Parson Harvey who shot rooks from the church tower with a blunderbuss, and about the sound of the hunting horn drifting over cold fields in winter, and about Plough Monday when there was a great feast up at the Hall.

  “Did you have a school?” Jonathon asked.

  “Parson’s wife made us learn letters, but not much.” Sam had learned the really useful things from his father. How to shoe a horse and how to stop an earth so a dog fox, coming home with a full belly on a January morning, would be up and about for the gentry to hunt. How to spot a steel-trap, set to snatch a man’s leg in a pheasant wood, and how to take a cock pheasant with a throwing stick. How to loop a pike, or lime a singing bird for the London market, and how to spot a good ratting terrier in a litter. “I had a rare terrier,” Sam said wistfully. “Could take a dozen rats in an eye-blink!”

  “And girls?” Jonathon asked.

  “He never snapped at girls,” Sam grinned. “We had girls. Summer nights! Back of the wheatfields.” His homesickness made his voice plaintive.

  “Why did you join the army?” Jonathon asked in some astonishment.

  “My daft brother dared me to.” Sam punched Nate’s shoulder. He remembered how Nate had come running home with news of the bright gold the army was offering to recruits. “The sergeant showed me, he did.” Nate had said. “Guineas! I bit one! And in a year you can be an officer. There was a captain there, all glittery, and he was only a farm boy a year back! The sergeant said so!”

  Nate and Sam had been seventeen then, and they knew with all the certainty of youthful hope that there would be gold, and Sam was sure there would be more than gold, that he would strut through a market place with silver loops hanging from a braided jacket and with a pretty girl on his arm. Such a future seemed better than the bawling, echoing stables where in winter the ice made a skim on the stones and in summer the flies filled the air like a midden.

  “This bloody fool dared me,” Sam said wistfully to Jonathon. Nate had offered the dare, and so the twins had run to the town and taken the King’s Shilling and discovered the promised bounty was spent on boots, brushes, stockings and flour to the hair. “It bloody hurt, that!” Sam laughed.

  “What hurt?” Jonathon asked.

  “Your hair, see?” Sam turned to show the American boy the th
ick pigtail that hung stiff behind his head. “You have to grow it first, then they pull it back. Christ, but they pull! You can’t close your eyes, it’s so tight! Honest! Then they smear it with tallow, twist it round a leather pad, and fill it with flour. It’s called a queue.”

  “Called other things too,” Nate grinned, and Jonathon, seeing the thick, plump shaft of whitened hair, laughed.

  “The stock was the worst,” Nate said with the perverse pride of a man describing a hardship endured. He tapped the stiff leather collar. “It put scars on your neck in the beginning, it did.” Their first lesson as soldiers had been how to stand straight and unmoving as the leather stock abraded the skin under the chin into two bloody welts that slowly calloused into hard, white ridges. Then they had learned to march in the high-knee, boot-thumping step, how to fire their big, clumsy muskets, and how to stand in the battle line while death whipped at them.

  They slept two in a bed, head to toe, and the barrack rats would chew their flour-stiffened queues at night. They ate the slops the King gave them. They were beaten, whipped, snarled at; they spent their small money in alehouses that no decent man would dare enter and were expected to take their pleasure on whores that no other man would touch, and they knew it was for ever, for the only escape was through wounding or death. Sam had broken his mother’s heart. If he had not been a fool, his mother said, and if he had kept his wits about him, he could have become the Squire’s chief coachman and worn the triple-caped coat. Instead he had thrown it all away for a dare. He shrugged now. “Why did you join?” he asked Jonathon.

  “Because I want our side to win,” Jonadion said. “Because tyrants in London will make us slaves.”

  “You’re as daft as him!” Sam gestured at his brother. “No one’s enslaving you! I’ve never heard such gammon! Slaves! You’re the buggers with slaves, not us. No cuffy slaves in England, no white ones neither! Us enslave you? You’re daft as lights!”

  “You should go and tell George Washington!” Nate grinned at his brother. “He’d probably stop fighting if you had a quick mutter. What do you know about it, Sam?”

  “I’m English, and I’m bloody proud of it,” Sam said belligerently.

  “So’m I,” muttered Nate, “but I’m still buggering off.” He looked towards the rebel guards who, bored with their duty, now sat on the ground and stared southwards.

  “Don’t,” Sam said. He could not bear to think of losing his brother. “Please, Nate.”

  “Maggie, Sam, Maggie.” Nate’s answer was laconic. “I promised. She’s waiting for me, and I’m going whether you like it or not! Better than being a bloody prisoner, Sam!”

  “You want to desert?” Jonathon had been listening to the conversation.

  Nate grinned. “It is my ambition, my good Yankee, to find somewhere to live in America. My loyal brother here is nervous, but not me. Nathaniel Gilpin has had enough of King George’s army, and if you asks me, Sam, we should both now, very formally, resign our red coats and run like hell.”

  Jonathon laughed. “You should.”

  “Well, Sam?” Nate asked.

  “And you get liberty!” Jonathon said with the true passion of a young revolutionary.

  “I’ve got liberty!” Sam said in blithe disregard of his predicament. “And he ain’t interested in liberty. He’s got a girl.”

  “A Yankee girl,” Nate said to Jonathon with sudden enthusiasm. “She’s waiting in a spinney over there. She’s pretty as a picture!”

  “So’s mine,” Jonathon said warmly. “She’s called Caroline.” There was a sudden burst of musket fire to the south, where the Virginian regiments had marched, and the fire rose to a continuous splintering sound that suggested hard and brutal fighting. Men were dying in the thinning fog. Somewhere to the west a house was burning, its flames made pale by the mist.

  The black stallion had come closer again. “If you get me on that horse,” Jonathon said to Nate, “I’ll come with you. I promise I can get you past our lines.”

  Sam turned to see the stallion quivering just forty yards away. Its nostrils were dilated and its eyes showed white. It was the stance of an animal ready to flee at the smallest provocation.

  Nate looked at his brother. “You could catch it, Sam. He can do anything with horses!” This last was to Jonathon. “I’m not half as good.” Nate turned back to Sam. “You can do it, Sam! Will you?”

  “Just so you can run away?” Sam was scornful.

  “Sam, please.” Nate was suddenly serious. “I can’t take it, Sam. Scammy kicks the lights out of Maggie, he’s going to kill her. And I want her, Sam. I want to be with her! She’s gone over there.” He pointed to the east where, in the shifting pearl skeins of fog, the far woods were a dark blur. “And I can find her!”

  “I’ll help you!” Jonathon said forcefully. “I only need a horse.”

  Sam stared at his brother. “Nate …”

  “It’s my life, Sam!” Nate was suddenly angry. “We ain’t tied by chains, you and I. You be a soldier, Sam! You be the best goddamned soldier you can ever be, but let me be what I want to be!” Nate’s eyes were glistening. “Sam, please!”

  Sam hesitated. Jonathon, who had watched the brothers as they argued, pulled back his jacket to reveal, next to his brass-hilted pistol, a purse hanging from leather straps. “I need a horse,” he said to Sam. “And I’ll pay you if you fetch it.”

  “I thought you were wounded,” Sam said.

  “I can ride, even if I can’t walk.” Jonathon frowned. “Please, Sam?”

  “You’re both mad,” Sam said, but he stood and, ignored by the guards, ducked through the fence rails.

  “You need help?” Nate asked.

  “Not with horses,” Sam said scathingly.

  He walked very slowly towards the handsome black horse. It was scared. Its muscles twitched beneath the glossy, mud-flecked skin. Sam immediately recognized the value of this high-strung, well-bred beast that must have cost some officer a small fortune.

  “Easy, boy! Easy!” Sam stopped twenty paces from the stallion. It must have belonged to a British officer for it had the royal cipher embroidered on the tail of its dark blue saddle cloth. “It’s all right, boy, all right. Nothing to fret about. Only Sam coming for you.” Sam talked the soothing nonsense as he walked closer and closer to the trembling, white-eyed stallion. Its ears pricked and its front right hoof pawed at the ground. “Haven’t seen a horse like you for years! Good boy, now, good boy. Easy. Easy. Easy.” Sam plucked a handful of grass and, still talking, held it out to the beast. He let the stallion smell him. “Good boy, now, good boy.” The horse, still quivering, stepped towards Sam who, very gently, reached with his free hand for a ring of the bit. He took it, then let the horse take the grass. “Easy, boy, easy, easy.”

  He soothed the stallion, rubbing its flanks and letting the nervousness flow out of it. It had been lost in the fog, terrified by cannon and musket fire, and now it trembled as Sam rubbed it down. “All right, boy. Let’s see how you go, shall we?” Sam took the saddle horn in his left hand and pulled himself on to the stallion’s back. The horse shivered, its ears pricked back again, but Sam knew how to soothe nervous animals. “Good boy, good boy. Easy now.” He touched its flanks with his heels and the stallion, obedient to his touch, walked forwards.

  The noise of battle seemed to be all around Sam now, louder than it had been all day, but he was riding this magnificent horse and, for a few seconds, he forgot his predicament. There was just a pure pleasure in being in the saddle.

  “Sam!” Nate called. The rebel guards were watching Sam now and one of them put a musket to his shoulder, but the range was too great to try a shot. Sam kicked his heels back. He could ride back to his own lines. He could forget Nate’s madness and go back where he belonged. No prison camp; instead, merely by riding southwards, Sam could regain the battalion’s warmth and comradeship.

  He turned the horse southwards.

  A miracle was coming from the mist.

  Red
coats.

  Lines of Redcoats. Redcoats marching beneath their colours to take victory where they had tasted defeat.

  Sam stared.

  Ahead of the advancing line were the skirmishers and Sam recognized Sergeant Scammell at their fore. Sam grinned. The handful of prisoners had also seen their salvation. They stood and cheered as their guards fled.

  “Sam!” Nate’s scream was despairing, frantic.

  “You’re too late!” Sam shouted. He stood in the stirrups and waved at the advancing battalion. Some of the skirmishers fired at the fleeing guards and one of the Americans span in the field, fell to his knees, then pitched forwards. A bagpipe skirled suddenly, fierce and blazoning, revealing a Highland regiment on the road’s flank.

  “Sam!” Nate was leaning on the fence, frantically gesturing for Sam to bring him the horse. “Sam!”

  “We’ve won, Nate! We’ve won!” Sam’s exhilaration soared. “We’ve bloody won!”

  Sergeant Scammell was waving now, shouting incomprehensibly at Sam, and the sight of his hated enemy made Nate turn and run. He ran northwards, running away from the Redcoats, running to the freedom that had haunted his dreams in the weeks since the army had come ashore in Chesapeake Bay.

  “Nate!” Sam shouted, then twisted the stallion’s head round. “Nate!”

  But Nate was fleeing. Nate had tasted a moment’s freedom and he wanted more. He took off his red coat as he ran and threw the heavy woollen garment down as though it would slow his bid to reach the paradise he sought.

  “Private Gilpin! Halt!” Scammell, leading the skirmishers and far ahead of the battalion, shouted at Nate.

  Nate, boots sticky in the thick mud, floundered on.

  Sergeant Scammell pulled back the cock of his musket. He put the brass butt to his shoulder and aimed down the crude sights.

  “Put it down!” Jonathon Becket, lying by the roadside fifteen yards from Scammell, aimed his pistol.

  But Sergeant Michael Scammell feared no wounded rebel boy. “Stop!” he shouted.

  “Sergeant!” Sam shouted the word.