Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  Scammell fired.

  The flint fell on frizzen, sparked to the pan, and the gun bucked back in its cloud of smoke.

  Sam saw the powder flash in the pan, then the gout of flame-driven smoke from the muzzle and he was turning, shouting, screaming, but Nate was arching his back and in the very centre of his spine a great smear of red spread on his dirty grey shirt.

  “Sam!” It was a scream like a man on the edge of hell. Nate was on his knees now, still trying to go forwards, but falling. “Sam?”

  The range must have been thirty yards. A long shot for a musket. Fifteen yards was no great distance for a pistol, but Jonathon’s shot, fired from an enfeebled hand, went yards wide. Sergeant Scammell walked up to the boy, stared down with eyes like agate, then ground his boot’s heel into Jonathon’s wounded thigh. Jonathon screamed.

  Nate twitched face down on the road. Blood soaked his shirt. His fingers scrabbled for purchase as his head turned towards his brother. “Sam? Sam?”

  “Nate!”

  Sam had kicked the horse onwards. He jumped the fence, reined in, and slid out of the saddle. He let the horse run free. Loyalist cavalry had appeared in the pasture beyond the fence, and some were on the road ahead, but Sam saw none of them. He only saw his brother. “Nate?”

  “Sam.” Nate was crying now. The sobs became great pangs of agony in which Sam could hear the word Mother again and again.

  Sam lifted his brother, turning and cradling him. “Nate?”

  But Nate could not hear. Nate bent his back like a man broken on the wheel and his scream pierced through the fog in terrible agony before the blood, flooding up his windpipe, choked it off. Sam, holding his brother as though he could put his own life and strength into Nate’s body, felt the terrible jerk as the scream ended.

  Blood spilt like water and there was silence. Nate’s eyes glazed. There was no movement, except in the fingers of Nate’s left hand which slowly, slowly curled. He was dead.

  “Nate?” Sam asked. “Nate?”

  His brother’s head was tilted back from Sam’s left arm. Blood trickled down the dead face to mat Nate’s hair.

  “Nate?”

  A shadow fell over Sam. Sergeant Scammell had seized the black horse’s bridle and now, standing above Sam, he looked down on the dead boy. “He was running, Sam.”

  “You murdered him.”

  “He was running!” Scammell snapped the words. “Now get your red coat on before I say you were running, Sam Gilpin!”

  Sam laid his brother in the mud. He stroked Nate’s cheek once, feeling the stickiness of blood, then stood. “You murdered him.”

  “He was running.”

  “You murdered him!”

  Scammell stared coldly into Sam’s eyes. “Be careful, Sam.”

  “Bastard.”

  Scammell’s hand flicked out to strike sense into Sam, but Sam’s world had changed. Everything had changed. “Bastard!” He hit Scammell one huge blow; a blow that snapped Scammell’s face round and made the Sergeant release the horse.

  Sam seized the reins. Scammell had lost his balance, but was trying to unsling the bayonet-tipped musket from his shoulder. Sam kicked the Sergeant in the belly, then, blinded by tears, he pulled himself on to the stallion’s back.

  There was madness and tears and a sorrow fit to fill a world in Sam. He heard shouts. The field was a blur of red coats, of flags, of thinning smoke and tears. He saw his brother’s dead face, and then he kicked back his heels as if he would ride the black stallion to the world’s ending.

  The stallion took Sam away from the smoke and the red coats. Scammell shouted in rage behind, but Sam did not hear, for Nate was dead and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men were like dust in the eye for Sam now. He was a Redcoat, and his brother, with all his dreams of paradise beyond the hills, was dead. And Sam, riding to nowhere, wept.

  Fifteen

  Bands played. The fog was a cacophony of brass and drums, jingling-johnnies and flutes, all punctuated by gunfire and accompanied by the unending musketry.

  The sound jarred Sir William’s ears as he waited for his doom to burst down the village’s main street. The enemy skirmishers, harbingers of British defeat, increased, yet moment succeeded moment and no American columns appeared beneath their lifted banners. Artillery fired, but no roundshot bounded towards Sir William. It almost seemed as though George Washington’s forces conducted a private war in the cloaking whiteness.

  “You don’t think …” Sir William heard himself beginning to express the hope of victory, then checked the tentative words lest he tempted providence.

  The mist thinned and paled to reveal a chaos of men. The wounded dragged themselves for succour, the dead lay where they had fallen, while the living had the wide- and empty-eyed look of those who must still endure death’s lottery. Yet in the chaos, drawn by Sir William’s will, there was the shape of a counterattack ready to advance. Sir William looked at his watch, snapped the lid shut, and nodded. “Put the hounds to work.”

  The colours of three regiments were heaved into the sky. Officers calmed horses and sergeants filled their lungs. “By the right! Quick march!”

  Sticks fell on newly tightened drumskins. The attack, lurching and ponderous, advanced. Trumpets extolled them to victory, galloper guns protected their flanks, and the great fringed squares of silk led them towards the cauldron of noise where the rebel strength lay.

  George Washington had held victory in the palm of his hand, but let it go.

  In the centre of the field, where the rebels could have broken Sir William’s defences, Washington had turned aside to attack the house where Musgrave’s 40th had gone to earth. Rebel cannon-balls bounced from brick and masonry walls to be answered with jeers and musketry. The dead thickened in the garden and orchard, and the dead were all rebels.

  Outside the village, where men marched to support the central fight, the fog brought fratricide. Two rebel regiments, each mistaking the other for enemy, opened fire. Rebel slaughtered rebel, and on their flanks, like an avenging torrent, the red-coated counterattack drove home.

  Murderous volleys tore the rebel lines to bloody shreds. The attack drove mercilessly on. Bereft of orders, lost, defeated, the Americans gave ground, and the retreat turned into flight.

  God wore a red coat that day.

  The American centre had nearly snatched victory, but faltered. The right had struck a Hessian-defended ravine, and halted. The rebel left had driven deep into the British lines and captured the bivouac area where the chance of plunder checked their advance as surely as any Redcoat volley. Their officers had tried to roust them onwards, and wondered when the promised support would come from the centre or the left. It did not come, and the Virginians were stranded.

  Captain Christopher Vane rode towards that embattled flank. He met a brigade major who offered him a flask of brandy and gestured towards the sod bivouacs that studded the gardens and fields. “Fully of Virginians,” he said cheerfully. A rifle bullet, fired by a rebel sharpshooter, whiplashed between the two officers. The major would not give the enemy the satisfaction of appearing to notice the threat. “They’re trapped.”

  “Trapped?”

  “We’ve sent two battalions to their north. Ten minutes, Kit, and they’ll have to surrender.” The major raised the brandy flask in a toast. “I give you joy of the day.”

  “Indeed!” Vane felt the exhilaration of victory as Redcoat volleys scoured the edge of the bivouacs. The lead balls thumped into turf huts and spurted embers from the cooking fires that had been abandoned in the dawn. The Virginians, who had fought so deeply into the British line, were being crammed into a small tight scrap of hell where the bullets thudded and the smoke thickened. Around them, making a new fog with powdersmoke, the Redcoats and Hessians fired. They had faces smeared black with powder, and blackened lips drawn back from snarling teeth as they killed and went on killing. Men tore their fingernails as they clawed at flints. They loaded and reloaded, pouring death into a
shrinking circle. Musket fire came back from the rebels, but the American fire was drowned by the slaughtering, vengeful musketry of the victors.

  The rebel fight ended when Hessian cannons, charged with the canister that broke apart like birdshot from the bucking muzzles, opened fire. The smoke billowed in vast clouds towards the camp where bivouacs were shattered into scraps of turf and wood and screaming men. From somewhere in the fog-shrouded horror a voice shouted for the Germans to hold their fire.

  The guns, that had hammered five yards back with each killing shot, fell silent. The smoke, thick as gruel and stinking of blood, drifted with the shredding fog. A white shirt, pathetically torn, waved from the rebel ranks.

  “I think that’ll serve!” the major said cheerfully. “You care to join me, Kit?”

  They rode forwards, swords sheathed, and from all around the bivouac other officers trotted towards the rebel regiment. The Virginians’ colonel, surrounded, outnumbered, and bereft of the support his general had promised, helped his officers tear their flag to small shreds which they burned on a Hessian fire. Some of their men wept for the shame of it. Others smashed their muskets on the ground, breaking the butts so the weapons could not be used against the Patriots. Others, the wounded, just bled and suffered.

  “Captain Vane!” A Hessian colonel, recognizing Sir William’s new aide, spurred towards Vane. “My joy for you!”

  “And mine for you, sir.” Vane leaned over and shook the colonel’s hand. The first Redcoats and Hessians, victorious, were tearing at rebel coats and pouches, seeking coins or rum, food or keepsakes. Vane watched them, then saw the enemy officers, faces drawn, walk with their swords ready to be surrendered. Vane took pleasure in the sight, but knew, perhaps better than any man, just how close this day had been. Had it not been for Washington’s blunders it could well have been the Redcoats who now offered their reversed blades to the victors.

  That horrid thought made Vane twist his mare away from the surrendering enemy officers. He rode through the sullen and defeated ranks and saw, far to the north, other British battalions marching in pursuit of the enemy. He put his spurs back, revelling in the sudden freedom of clean air that did not stink of smoke or blood. His mare’s hooves drummed the earth. To his left, pale in the mist that still clung in patches to the wet soil, a house burned.

  The fields were littered with the sad droppings of battle. Muskets lay in the grass. Bodies lay in clumps, sometimes alone. They looked oddly small. Most, Vane noted dispassionately, had curled fists. A wounded man clutching a seeping hole in his belly staggered southwards. A horse, one leg broken, tried to struggle from a ditch, then screamed as a woman, come to plunder the field, slashed its neck. The horse quivered, thrashed, died, and the woman, helped by two small children, lost no time in unbuckling its expensive saddle. Other women, camp followers who scented plunder, were coming with drawn knives to deal with the dying and the dead. The children acted as scouts for the women, seeking out the men who were too badly hurt to resist the knives and mauling hands. British and rebels alike were killed and plundered. Screams sounded. It was the noise of a field after victory.

  A spurt of musketry splintered the clearing mist and Vane saw rebels running from the British advance. Green-uniformed horsemen were far to the east; American Loyalists on the Old York Road who would head those fleeing rebels off and savage them with sabre cuts. A cheer sounded, drawing Vane’s attention north again, where a group of British prisoners, released by the day’s fortunes, welcomed their liberators.

  And Vane saw his stallion.

  He saw the black horse with its white socks being ridden by a white-shirted man who jumped a rail fence then leaped from the saddle. He fell down and clutched the body of a dead man. Another man, a Redcoat, took the horse’s reins.

  Christopher Vane stared, scarcely believing his good fortune. He shouted, but was too far away to be heard. He would have to pay a reward to whoever had found the stallion, but better that than lose the horse itself. He kicked back with his heels and the mare, winded and tired by her day’s exertions, went into a reluctant trot.

  Then Vane saw the white-shirted man stand, turn, and hit the Redcoat. Vane shouted helplessly. The Redcoat stumbled and the other man was climbing into the saddle and galloping northwards.

  The exhausted mare could never catch the black stallion. Vane shouted uselessly, then saw deliverance. From the wooded valley at the far side of the road, pursuing the rebel guards who had tried to escape, burst the green uniforms of the Loyalist hussars. Sabres, bright against the thinning mist, slashed down. A man, screaming, twisted with blood splashing. Rebels tried to surrender, but there was no war so bitter as that between fellow countrymen, and the American hussars gave no quarter. Six of the Loyalists, sabres reddened, had jumped the fence into the road to complete the encirclement of their victims and, in doing so, had headed off the stallion.

  The boy who rode the black horse turned away from the horsemen as though he would set the stallion to jump the fence into the field. He rode, Vane noted, beautifully, but the stallion stumbled at the verge and gave time for Vane, who had mercilessly raked his mare’s flanks with his spurs, to leap the low rail, turn, and, as calmly as if he met a friend in some English lane, lean over and take the black horse’s bridle.

  The stallion, recognizing its stable companion, whinnied and ducked its head. The horses nuzzled each other and Vane found himself staring into the wide, battle-maddened eyes of a young, good-looking boy “Good afternoon,” Vane said. “At least I think it’s afternoon. Some bastard stole my watch, or perhaps I lost it. Are you English?”

  “Sir?” Sam was shaking like a leaf in storm. “Yes, sir.”

  Vane leaned over and fondled the stallion’s ears. “My horse. I do thank you. I suppose you’ll want the reward?”

  “Your horse?”

  Vane could see that the boy’s wits were gone to the wind, as if he had stood too close to a cannon’s muzzle when it fired. “I couldn’t afford him,” Vane said conversationally, “but I thought he might win a race or two for me.” He sensed that this boy was ready to snap. “I shouldn’t really keep him with a mare, but it seemed a pity to geld him. Don’t you agree?”

  The boy turned and stared at a dead man who lay in the mud. In the field the last rebels died beneath the hussars’ blades. A horseman laughed.

  “He’s called Hector,” Vane said. “Not a very good name, but the man who sold it to me had no imagination, none. What’s your name?”

  “Me?” Sam seemed unaware that his mount had been captured. “Sam, sir. Sam Gilpin.”

  “Gilpin? A very English name.” And a very English face, too, Vane thought. Not the usual surly, squat and toothless horror, but a fine-looking Saxon boy. The very face of England, Vane considered, and he wondered why such a boy would join the army. “You must ride well, Private Gilpin. Hector’s a lively beast, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir.” Sam was staring at Nate. Sam’s eyes were puffy and the musket stains on his face streaked with tears.

  “Gilpin! Off that bloody horse!” Sergeant Scammell, who had run after Sam, took his hat off to Vane, his only acknowledgement of the officer’s presence. “You bastard! Off!”

  “You’d better do what he says,” Vane said in a kindly sort of way.

  “Sir?” Sam frowned at the staff officer, then twisted to look at Scammell. “You killed him! You murdered him!”

  “And you hit me, you bastard, and you’re going to have a skinning for that, Sam Gilpin!” Scammell’s face was bruised.

  “He was my brother!” Sam’s scream was filled with all his hopelessness and grief.

  Scammell seized Sam’s leg, twisted and pulled, and the boy tumbled from the saddle. “Bastard!” Scammell kicked Sam as Captain Vane, still scarcely believing his good luck in retrieving the stallion, pulled the horse away from the two men and led it towards a group of mounted officers.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Elliott, introduced to Vane, offered a flask of rum and congratulations. N
ews was exchanged, and relieved laughter sounded loud on the muddy road. A Highland regiment, plaids swinging, marched north in the pasture. From the village to the west, guns pursued the fleeing Americans with roundshot.

  “You look as if you were in the thick of it, Vane?” Elliott said.

  Vane glanced at the dried blood on his breeches. The morning’s events seemed a very long way away. “It was my servant, sir. Fellow had the ill manners to die all over me.”

  “Could he cook?”

  “Not well.”

  “Then you won’t regret him. Always have a servant who can cook.” Lieutenant-Colonel Elliott stared north. “My God, but the Yankee-doodles broke sudden!”

  “Didn’t they.” A scream came from the roadside and Vane turned to see an American prisoner being forced to his feet. The prisoner was a wounded cripple who could not stand, so a lieutenant ordered a stretcher to be made from two captured rebel muskets and two jackets.

  Then a shout made Vane look to where the fair-haired boy who had been riding the stallion was backed against the fence by the furious sergeant. Vane frowned. “That lad there, Sam Gilpin. Is he any good?”

  Elliott clearly thought it odd to be asked such a question, but Vane was an aide to Sir William, and to be humoured. “He works miracles with horses. Christ knows why he didn’t join the cavalry.”

  “Or why he joined the army at all,” Vane said. “He seems to be in bad odour with his sergeant?”

  Elliott smiled. “Scammell’s not a man to cross, Vane.”

  Sergeant Scammell was spitting words into Sam Gilpin’s face. “You hit me, Sam Gilpin! You hit me! I’m going to have you on a triangle and I’m going to have you flogged till your ribs are polished!”

  Sam stared back, murder in his face. “You shot him!”

  “He was running! And you didn’t stop him! I’ll have you flogged for that too, you bastard!” Scammell struck Sam’s face once, twice, a third time. “You bastard!”

  “Enough!” The voice came from behind Scammell. It was a sharp, authoritative voice that made the sergeant turn and look up to see the strange officer who had stopped Sam’s panicked flight.