Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Ha!” Cornwallis erupted.

  “My lord?” Sir William challenged his second-in-command.

  Cornwallis stared aggressively at Sir William. Finally, and with great deliberation, he merely said, “Your cook overcooks brawn.”

  “I have half a mind,” Sir William ignored the horrid man, “to see the cockfighting this afternoon. Isn’t there a pit on Front Street?”

  “In Moore’s Alley, sir, just by Carr’s Store.” Lord Robert offered the gravy boat. “And with some extraordinary fine birds, they say.”

  But there was to be no cockfight, for, at three o’clock, when dinner was still taking its stately course, a shout of the guards and a rattle of hooves proclaimed the coming of, if not news, at least excitement. Sir William, betraying the nervousness that he was trying so hard to disguise, threw down his napkin and, trailing half-fed officers, went to the courtyard where a blindfolded man sat on a horse. The stranger was escorted by two dragoons and, miracle of miracles, had Sir William’s missing dog, Hamlet, on a long leash tied to one of his stirrups.

  “Hamlet!”

  The dog, yapping and frantic, tried to escape the leash. Sir William ran forward to help, then snapped at one of the dragoons, “Release him, release him!”

  “The rebel, sir?”

  Sir William, a frantic dog now in his arms, noticed for the first time that the blindfolded man was, indeed, a rebel. The man had come, a lieutenant of dragoons said, under a flag of truce, and had been blindfolded so he could not carry back details of the defences that barred the northern approaches to the city.

  The man, released from his blindness, bowed to Sir William. “My name is Colonel Mitchell.”

  “Sir William Howe,” Howe introduced himself.

  Mitchell smiled. “Your dog, I guess? We found him with our army, sir, but his collar betrayed his true allegiance.”

  “And you brought him back! Upon my honour, sir, I’m grateful! Most grateful!”

  “He comes, sir, with General Washington’s compliments, and upon General Washington’s particular orders.”

  “That’s kind of …” Sir William paused, not wanting to dignify the rebel commander with due rank, but gratitude made him gracious “… General Washington, and you will inform him, sir, that I am in his debt. You have not, I trust, been badly treated?”

  “Indeed not, sir.”

  “And you will dine with us? We have brawn, a fine claret little bruised by shipping, and, I think, a pumpkin pie!”

  Mitchell smiled at the General’s eagerness, but shook his head. “If it doesn’t offend you, sir, I must leave.”

  “There is no thanks I can render?” Sir William, truly delighted by Washington’s gesture, stroked the small dog which, happily, seemed none the worse for its adventure. “No gift I can return, Colonel?”

  Mitchell gave a crooked smile. “General Washington, sir, asks nothing of you in the belief that he can take whatever he wants.”

  “Very good! Very good! Bravely said, sir!” Howe beamed at his officers, expecting to see them share his jollity, but, except for Massedene, they seemed unamused. Howe, though, was enjoying this wry confrontation. “You will give the General,” the word came more easily the second time, “my respects, sir, also my best wishes to his wife and my regrets that we should find ourselves as enemies.”

  “At least,” Mitchell seemed somewhat bemused by this affable reception, “we no longer need count General Burgoyne amongst our foes.”

  “The rumour has reached you, has it?” Howe’s delight at being reunited with his dog could not be spoilt by such tittle-tattle. “I just hope Gentleman Johnny never finds the rascal who spreads such scandal about him!”

  “More than a rumour, sir. He surrendered at Saratoga.”

  “Splendid! Splendid!” Sir William was all happiness. “My thanks, sir, my sincerest thanks! I regret the need to blindfold you again, but you will understand?”

  The rebel colonel left, and Sir William went back to dinner where, with indulgent joy, he fed brawn to his prodigal pet. He fussed and combed the dog, only ceasing when, from the south and west, the guns at last rose to a thunder of death to tell the city that a battle was waged where the water mingled with mud about two forts.

  And where, scrambling over a dike, Christopher Vane went forward with the grenadiers who were to take possession of a beaten fort.

  The battle had flared suddenly. One moment the warships had coasted out of range, the next a crash of gunfire beyond Fort Mercer informed the waiting troops that at last, at long last, the Hessians were attacking.

  Ships went about, sails flapped like monstrous wings and were sheeted home, then broadsides thundered from the chequered sides. On the marshes every gun in every British battery opened fire. The grenadiers’ officers, bawling orders, chivvied their men over the mud and into the waiting boats that were manned by seamen from the fleet. The heron, legs trailing, disdainfully flew between the spreading smoke that wavered in thin skeins above the river, then was fed with more smoke that gushed from jets of flame as great guns hammered back on trails or carriages. Mortars, squatting evil on their beds, arched shells over the shallow water. The shells, their burning fuses leaving pencil traces in the sky, exploded in stabs of flame within the courtyard of Fort Mifflin.

  Sam, scrambling with the cheering grenadiers, followed Vane down to the mud and into the left flank boat. He could see smoke beyond the far fort now, a sign that the Hessians were attacking in New Jersey, but he was far more worried about the closer Fort Mifflin which was now ringed by British guns. “They’re not firing back, sir,” he said hopefully.

  “Perhaps they’re holding their fire for us, Sam,” Vane teased his servant cheerfully. Or perhaps the fort had been so battered by gunfire that its men just waited for a chance to surrender. “But we’re sitting at the spikes, Sam, sitting at the spikes!” Vane’s mood soared at the prospect of action.

  “Spikes, sir?”

  “Front seat at the theatre, Sam, where the spikes stop the audience mauling the actresses. But we’ll give our Yankees a mauling, eh?”

  “Put your backs into it. Row!” The bo’sun on Sam’s boat seemed to think it was a race with the other eleven launches that, oars rising and dipping, crept across the shoal water. Gulls, startled by the cannon fire, wheeled overhead.

  A different note intruded on the gunfire; a deeper sound betraying a larger gun, and Sam saw a spreading cloud of smoke come from the ramparts of Fort Mifflin. A frigate, sailing slowly past the water ramparts, seemed to shiver as the enemy ball struck home.

  “That fort ain’t a dead ‘un!” a lieutenant called from the bow.

  “Will be soon!” Vane’s exhilaration was blissful. The waiting was over, and he would charge with these splendid men into the churned wreckage of the gun-hammered fort. Now, on the verge of action, an unbidden daydream entertained him. Martha had somehow reached the fort and was in deadly danger, from which he, Captain Vane, would rescue her. She would be tearful with gratitude and would melt with the affection that he so desperately wanted from her.

  “Augusta’s gone aground!” The bo’sun suddenly shattered Vane’s dream. The seaman was pointing at the frigate which had taken the enemy’s opening shot.

  “No!” Vane said, but, despite his denial, the Augusta was lowering boats that would attempt to tow the frigate off the shoal. “Not that it matters,” Vane muttered to himself.

  “It doesn’t?” Sam, crouching by his master, wanted reassurance.

  “She can still fire, can’t she?” Vane flinched from an oarsplash. “And the Yankees aren’t putting up much of a display.”

  The words were no sooner said than the complete line of the water-facing ramparts of Fort Mifflin erupted in flame-jetted smoke as the American batteries poured their fire at the stranded frigate. The guns’ thunder filled the air, and the river became a loud and murderous duel between the fort and the grounded Augusta. The second frigate, bow guns cracking sharp, sailed to the rescue.

&nb
sp; “I thought we was occupying a beaten fort!” Sam protested.

  “The more enemy,” Vane said loudly, “the more glory!”

  Sam’s boat grounded on a mud shoal and a sergeant’s sharp voice ordered the men over the side. “Get your feet wet, you bastards!”

  “Skirmish order!” a major in the next boat shouted. The other launches ran their keels on to the mud and the bright red coats of the grenadiers spilt into the shallow water. “Forward!”

  “Into the breach, Sam.” Vane lifted his face to the smell of the powder smoke and the rumbling of the heavy cannon balls in their flight. “On, you noble English!” he laughed, and drew his sabre.

  It seemed madness to Sam. They were a half-mile from the fort, and most of that half-mile was a glutinous stretch of water-logged mud into which men sank up to their knees. There were small rippling creeks, the ribs of an abandoned boat, and always the sticky, clinging, sucking mud across which a chain of men were approaching the smoke-wreathed fort. The other battles, across and on the river, seemed extraneous, something happening in another place and nothing to do with Sam.

  The grenadiers, at last reaching the more solid ground of Mud Island, crouched at a bank of sand. They were waiting now, Vane explained, for Fort Mercer to be captured and for its guns to be turned on Mifflin. The rebels in the latter fort, who had watched the grenadiers struggle over the mud, were beginning a desultory musket fire. The balls cracked and hissed overhead, but the distance was too great for the fire to be effective. However, the distance was not so great that the rebels’ insults, shouted from behind their parapets, could not be heard.

  “Ignore them!” A major strolled behind the crouching men. “We’ll make them eat their words soon enough! We’ll go for the abatis, lads! You’ll take casualties, but that’s what you joined for! A soldier’s heaven is carpeted with whores, so don’t be feared! Take your blades to the bastards and give them hell!”

  They waited. The artillery duel filled the sky with a great rumbling as if massive casks were being rolled on boards overhead. Sam, watching the fort over the dune’s crest, saw wooden palings flung about like firewood. Mortar shells, blasting scarlet, churned flame and smoke within the courtyard. Above the fort, somehow unscathed, the rebel flag still snapped in the smoke-thick wind.

  As did the flag above Fort Mercer. That fort’s guns, far from having been captured by the Hessians, were firing at the grounded frigate. A second naval boat, much smaller and further down river, was also aground and also under cannonade.

  “She’s on fire, sir!” Sam was staring at the Augusta.

  Captain Vane was still keyed to the coming battle, but he turned to watch the Augusta just as a lance blade of fire, pure as a lightning’s stab, drove up from amidships and went on, spearing up, higher than the highest topmast.

  For a second it seemed that every gun on the river stopped firing as, around the watery arena, men stared at the stricken boat. The lance of fire twisted, faded, then, just as it seemed the boat was safe, the whole frigate blasted itself apart in a great gouting flame-filled explosion. A mast, launched like an arrow, cartwheeled in the air, then shattered into its constituent spars. Deck planking was scattered to the clouds. A sail, burning and twisting like a giant bat from hell, flapped grotesquely across the sky. A whole ship, all its great solid mass and grace, was turned into a maelstrom of dark stinking smoke and death. Debris, spat from the boiling fire-lit cloud, splashed into the water.

  For a few numbing seconds it was oddly silent.

  Then the shock of the explosion came with a deafening noise that, like an earthquake, seemed to shake the ground. A wave, cresting on the shoals, was driven towards the island. More explosions, punching the onlooking soldiers’ ears, swept over the marshes as powder barrels in the ship’s ready magazines exploded.

  Ash, driven by the flames and carried by the wind, sifted like black snow on the waters. Great ribs stood clear in the fire that raged in the opened hull. The water, flooding back from the explosion’s thrust, caused smoke, black as the clouds of hell, to boil up over the broken waves.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ.” Vane stared open-mouthed.

  The second grounded boat was also aflame, the fire flickering in the delicate spider web of masts and spars. Boats rowed its crew away from their doomed vessel.

  Then, from the rebel fort, came a cheer; a triumphant, jeering, and derisive cheer. One man stood on the nearest bastion and cupped his hands towards the grenadiers. “You bastards! Do you like the American welcome?”

  “Fuck him!” Vane, his mood plunging to despair, seized Sam’s musket, cocked and aimed it, then fired at the taunting rebel.

  “Missed!” The man laughed, jumped down, and a small cannon, loaded with canister and held back for the grenadiers’ attack, opened fire. The balls, whistling and snapping, flayed overhead.

  “Back!” The grenadier major, knowing that everything had gone wrong this day, shouted at his men. “Back!”

  Captain Vane wanted to go on; he wanted to charge the impudent fort. Madness and revenge made him incoherent. He wanted to go forward, but he was given no choice. “Back!” The grenadier major shouted the order again, and back Vane went. He stumbled over the clinging, dreadful mud, retreating with the infantry who were pursued by the American’s taunting, killing cannonade. Sam helped one grenadier who had been pierced in the leg with canister. Another man was face down in the mire, sinking, drowning, except that he was already dead with a ball in his spine. Canister balls flicked and gouged the slick mud, and every step of the grenadiers’ retreat was marked by more shouted insults.

  They floundered to the boats. Two men were dead, three injured. The second grounded warship, a sloop set afire by its own crew lest the enemy refloat her, exploded, but in the day’s misery it went unnoticed. The smoke of two broken ships drifted over the river, and at dusk the boats still burned to cast a lurid, rippling light across the shoals.

  And over Fort Mercer, as over Fort Mifflin, the rebels’ striped flag still flew.

  “Sir William will take it hard!” Vane himself seemed close to tears as, with Sam beside him, he rode from the Schuylkill’s middle ferry to the city. “It went wrong, Sam, dreadful wrong! I hate to bear the news!”

  But Vane did not need to bear the news, for Sir William had already heard, and Sir William, in despair, sat by a fire with a sleeping Hamlet at his feet. He tried to smile as Vane, muddy and exhausted, came into the room, but he could only manage a grimace. “I know what happened, Christopher.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Sir William shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “The forts will fall, sir.” Vane found himself offering consolation. He noticed Hamlet, but this was no time to make a comment, for he had never seen Sir William so downcast.

  “Oh, the forts will fall!” Sir William said. “But for what, Kit? We can’t win here! We can’t take every town and every village and every bridge and every damned farmhouse! And if we did, how would we govern them? They’ve tasted victory. They’ll never let go now, never!”

  “Victory, sir? It was only a repulsed attack! We’ll attack again.”

  “No.” Sir William slowly lifted a single sheet of paper as though it weighed a ton. “Brought by a cutter from New York, then overland.”

  Christopher Vane, his shadow cast long by the flickering candles, crossed the room and took the paper. He read it once, then again, then closed his eyes. “Oh, God.” The shame of it was too much, pricking his eyelids with tears. He heard the Widow’s laughter in his head. Defeat.

  “Saratoga,” Sir William said the name bitterly, “wherever in God’s holy bloody hell Saratoga may be.”

  Vane opened his eyes, expecting to see the whole world changed, but Sir William still sat in the leather chair before the fire and a cold wind still plucked at the window panes to bring, from the street, a man’s voice in drunken song. Vane looked back at the despatch. “The whole army? Surrendered?”

  “To rebels.” Sir Wi
lliam, in a fit of anger, scared his dog by snatching the paper back. He threw it on to the fire. “I prayed it wasn’t true. I prayed!” Sir William paused, looking suddenly much older than his forty-eight years. “I’ve done my best, Kit. I’ve been reluctant to fight, but I’ve won every battle I was forced to fight. I’ve restrained the hotheads in the hope that we can persuade the rebels to talk. I’ve tried to protect their women and their houses. I’ve offered them amnesty, redress of their grievances, peace! They talk of tyranny, and I have practised decency! Christian, gentlemanly, English decency!” He shuddered suddenly. “Perhaps I should give them what they want. Fire and sword and hate without end!”

  Sir William was preaching Vane’s gospel, but Vane could not take advantage of it. He felt too sorry for this kind and broken man. “But you won’t, sir.”

  “No. And now the French will come in. It’s all they needed. Saratoga!” Sir William closed his eyes. “A hundred thousand men. A hundred thousand men! That’s what I needed, and they give me thirty to hold everything between the Floridas and Canada. Thirty thousand men, less the six thousand at Saratoga. Jesus!” He thumped the chair’s arm, making the dog whimper. “If I walk on water and turn the loaves and fishes into a feast, will that be sufficient for London?”

  But Vane could offer no answer. God had doffed his red coat, and an army’s hopes were ashes in a cold wind, drifting to an empty sea.

  Twenty-One

  Captain Vane walked cold streets. He could no more believe what was reported from Saratoga than he could believe what he had seen with his own eyes on the marshes. He went to change out of his muddy uniform before seeking the Widow’s solace, hoping that her allegiance to friendship would let her give sympathy, even love, in this sad night. Vane wondered how many men had died; men whose names would be posted in church porches throughout Britain and Ireland to say that sons and husbands had been killed to keep the plague of republicanism out of America.