Mollow was at his side, fending off his bloody cutlass with his rifle stock as Alan thought him another foe to deal with. “Hold on, thar, boy! Git yerself a rifle, an’ we’re gonna do some hawg-killin’!”
The closest weapons Alan could find were militia muskets, and he did not have the right caliber ball for them. He searched back and forth across the fields until he came across the soldier Hatmaker, who had been shot in the chest and would no longer need his rifle.
“Form ranks, form two ranks!” Knevet was shouting, man-handling stunned sailors and surviving riflemen into some sort of order. There seemed too few to be credited. “Spread out, ten foot apart! Load up an’ stand by ta fire!”
Alan loaded Hatmaker’s rifle, wiping the blood from the breech and stock as he did so. He looked up to see French soldiers from Lauzun’s Legion stumble from the woods south of the road, along with a few men from the militia company who had run off from the fighting and had gotten mixed in with them. Cavalrymen in shakoes, sabers abandoned and bearing short musketoons and dragoon pistols, infantry in bearskin headresses with muskets, a wounded officer with a sword in hand being helped along by his orderly. There seemed too damned few of them to be credited, either. As he watched they turned to fire back into the woods from which they came, then spun about to continue running.
“First rank . . . fire!” Knevet called, and six or seven rifles made a harsh sound, spewing out a thick cloud of powder. “Reload! Second rank . . . fire!”
This time, Alan aimed and fired, his hands so weak that he could have just as easily hit either the ground at his feet or the bay beyond. A third volley sounded from the woods by the zigzag fences as Governour, Burgess, and their survivors came into sight, and they had the French and Rebels caught in an L-shaped killing ground, just about one hundred yards away, too far for accurate musket fire even for steady men, but as Governour had predicted, close enough to do terrible practice with Fergusons. The enemy melted away, spun off their feet to fall like limp rags.
“Kill ’em! Kill ’em all, goddammit!” someone ordered.
“Close ’em!” Knevet said, and the two ragged ranks began to walk forward, angling right to keep up with the fleeing foe as they finally broke and fled. There were not a dozen left on their feet, then eight; another volley and there were three, a few scattered shots and there were none left standing, only the writhing wounded crying out for quarter as the soldiers walked among them with their bayonet blades prodding at the dead.
Wanting no part of such a gruesome activity, Alan sank to his knees and concentrated on drawing breath into his lungs. He felt as though he had run a mile, and every limb of his body ached as though he had carried something heavy as he had done so.
“Ya hurt?” Mollow asked him, kneeling down by him.
“No, I don’t think so,” Alan panted. “You?”
“Cut ’r two, nothin’ much.” Mollow grimaced. He swung his canteen around from his hip and took a swallow, then offered it to Alan, who half drained it before handing it back reluctantly.
“Bastards worn’t ready fer this kinda fightin’,” Mollow commented. “Bet them Lauzun boys thort they’d tangled with red Injuns back in them woods. Them Virginia Militia put up a good fight fer a minute thar, though.”
Alan got to his feet and looked back to the north. He could follow the trail of the fighting through the tobacco fields where plants had been knocked flat by struggling, falling men, like a swath left by a reaper. And the swath was littered with bodies all the way back to the log barrier, bodies spilled on the ground like bundles of clothing empty of the men who had worn them, looking sunk into the ground in ungainly postures, a few squirming back and forth in pain still.
“God Almighty in Heaven,” Alan muttered in shock.
“Purty bad, wuhst iver I seen, an’ I seen me some fightin’,” Mollow went on as they walked stiff legged back toward the north. “You an’ yer Navy boys stand killin’ better’n most, I’ll ’low ya that. Whoo, all them cutlasses aswangin’ an’ them sailors ayellin’ and stampin’ fit ta bust, like ta curdled my jizzum!”
“Is fighting on land always like this?” Alan gaped in awe.
“Naw, mos’ times hit’s almost civilized.”
There was Hatmaker, curled up like a singed worm, his yellow hair muddied and his eyes staring at a beetle that crawled under his nose. A sailor was next, struck in the belly, flat on his back with his shirt up to reveal the huge purple bruise and bullet hole that he had clutched before he bled to death through the exit wound in his back. Nearer the logs there was Feather, the stubborn quartermaster’s mate, sprawled across the body of a Virginia militiaman, a musket bayonet still in his chest and the musket sagged to the ground like a fallen mast.
And there was old Nat Queener that Coe was trying to help, shot through the body and feebly fluttering his hands over his slashed belly, life draining from him as Alan watched. He knelt down next to him and the old man turned his face to him. “We done good, didn’t we, Mister Lewrie?”
“Aye, we did, Mister Queener,” Alan told him, tears coming to his eyes at the sight of him. He wasn’t long for the world with a wound like that. “Anyone you want to know about you being hurt?”
“Ain’t nobody back home, I outlived ’em all, Mister Lewrie. Mebbe ‘Chips’ an’ a few o’ me mates in Desperate, iffen they made it.”
“I’m so damned sorry, Queener.” Alan shuddered.
“Don’ ya take on so, sir. Hands’ll be lookin’ ta ya. Aw, I’d admire me somethin’ wet afore I go, Coe. Got anythin’?”
Coe lifted up a small leather bottle of rum and Queener gulped at it greedily.
Alan got to his feet, hearing Queener give a groan and the last breath rattling in his throat.
“’E’s gone, sir,” Coe said. “’E were a good shipmate.”
“Aye, he was. How many dead and wounded from our people?”
“Dunno, sir.”
“Find out and give me a list, Coe. You are senior hand, now.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Alan wandered off to pick his way across the field to retrieve his dropped pistols, the dragoon pistols, and to gather up the Ferguson he had discarded at the barrier. He ran across Governour, limping from a sword cut on his leg that was already bound up.
“Hard fight,” Governour said matter-of-factly. “But we got ’em all. No one to tell the tale back up at Gloucester Point, so we should be able to get away. It’s after four. Once we make the worst wounded comfortable, we should think of being on our way.”
“What about the dead?” Alan demanded, suddenly angry that the officer was so callous.
“Have to leave ’em where they lay.” Governour shrugged. “We’ll put the worst hurt up at the house where the Hayleys and their slaves can care for ’em. They’ll send for surgeons. We can’t care for them.”
“Goddamn you!” Alan shouted, whirling on him.
“Would you rather that was us?” Governour said with a sad smile, pointing to the nearest mutilated dead. “Grow up, for God’s sake, Lewrie. Get the names of the dead to leave with the Hayley family. Maybe they’ll put something up over their graves, I don’t know, but that’s all you can do after something like this. You’re a Navy officer, or the nearest thing we have to one right now. Act like one.”
They laid out their own dead with as much dignity as they could. Of the thirty soldiers and officers from the Volunteers, there were eighteen dead or so badly wounded they would have to be left behind. Of the eighteen sailors and petty officers, only nine would be leaving on the boats. Of the French and Rebel militia, there were not twenty men left alive from the nearly hundred who had come to take them.
Alan copied out his list of dead and badly wounded, then went up to the house, where Mrs. Hayley and her sister Nancy waited on the porch by the back terrace, aghast at the carnage, tears flowing down their faces at the horror that had come to their peaceful farm.
“Mrs. Hayley, Miss Ledbetter,” Alan said, doffing his hat to
them. “We are leaving soon. I have here a list of the people we left behind in your care, and the names of the dead. I trust in your Christian generosity to tend to them as gently as possible.”
“Yes, yes we shall,” Mrs. Hayley managed, stunned.
“I was going to give you some guineas, to pay for what we had to requisition, but I would admire if you used it instead to pay the surgeon who comes and perhaps to put up a small marker for our dead, along with the militiamen and French who died here today.”
“That is good of you, sir,” Mrs. Hayley whispered. “I . . .”
“This was a pointless, useless battle that no one’ll remember in a year, most like,” Alan went on coldly. “Had we gotten clean away, none of these poor men would have died. It solved nothing, it meant nothing.”
“I’m sorry!” Mrs. Hayley wailed, no longer able to bear his words of reproach, knowing full well that she had given her son her consent to carry word down the Neck, scheming happily to get him away unseen so he could play a hero’s part and she could be a patriot as well, never having seen the cost of patriotism firsthand.
“What happened to Rodney?” Nancy Ledbetter asked, her face ashen.
“I have no idea, nor do I particularly care,” Alan said. “He may be safe up the Neck, or he may lie dead out in the fields or woods. ’Tis all one to me. He brought it on himself if he was hurt or killed.”
“You’re a brutal young man, sir.” Nancy wept, clutching the small bag of coins he offered her along with the paper. “How can you go through life so uncaring about others?”
“Think on this, Mistress Ledbetter,” Alan said. “You and your scheming and spying killed nigh on a hundred men, maybe your own nephew, too. How brutal were you, my dear? Would you have wept a tear on my corpse? I doubt it. You’d have bedded me if you thought there was anything more to gain by it, all to bring this about. How can you live with yourself, I ask you, instead? Good-bye, Mistress Ledbetter.”
He turned to go, but she clutched at his sleeve. “Forgive us!” she pleaded. “We did not know . . .”
“Take it up with God. He’s better at forgiveness than I am.”
So saying, Alan made his way down to the boat landing, stopping to give what cheer he could to the wounded sailors and those soldiers he recognized in one of the slave huts where they had been installed to heal or die, as God willed.
He got down to the boats, where the small party waited to board for the escape across the bay. The tide was running out rapidly now, and the sun was almost gone. The barges twitched at the end of their painters as the inlet emptied with the outrush to the sea. They floated high instead of canting over with their keels in the tidal flats.
“Coe, take charge of the first boat,” he ordered his senior hand. “Corporal Knevet, better get your party aboard with Coe, here.”
“Yes, sir,” Knevet replied, wading out to the boat with the sailors.
Sir, Alan thought. The bastard actually called me “sir”!
There was a sharp pop up the creek, which had everyone diving for their rifles and a spot of cover from which to fire, but after a moment Governour and Burgess came out of the gloomy thickets to join them, the heavy dragoon pistol in Governour’s hand still smoking.
“What was that?” Alan asked.
“Nothing much,” Governour replied. “We ready to depart?”
“Aye. Burgess?”
Burgess wore a bandage about his head and one arm was in a sling, but he shouldered past Alan to splash out into the shallows without one word, tears running down his face.
“Let’s go, then,” Governour said.
• • •
There was no need to pole or row out of the inlet, for the wind was out of the south-east, so once past the mouth of the narrow inlet, with the lug sails set, they could wear up on the wind to beat through the pass at Monday Creek and get out into the bay far above the watching frigates in the mouth of the York. With the leeboards down in deep water, they were making a goodly clip, lost in the first of the night, dark sails and tarred hulls indistinguishable from the almost moonless waters.
“We want to keep a heading east-nor’east, Burgess,” Alan told the soldier, who was seated in his boat. “Keep an eye on the compass for me.”
“Yes, I will,” Burgess snuffled.
“What happened back there?” Alan asked, leaning close.
“God save us, it was George all over again,” Burgess said with a catch in his voice as he tried to mutter too soft to be overheard.
“George? Oh, your younger brother? What was?”
“We caught that Hayley brat,” Burgess told him. “Governour said he owed him a debt of blood, and he shot him in the belly, so he’d take days dying. We left him out there in the brambles, out of sight.”
Alan waited for a sense of shock, but his nerves were about out of the ability to be shocked by much of anything after all he had seen or done. He pondered how he felt about this revelation.
“Oh? Good,” Alan finally said, “serves the little bugger right.”
“God, Alan!” Burgess shuddered. “That makes us no better than the bastard who killed George. What does it matter, anyway? We’ve lost the army, mayhap lost the whole damned war here in the Chesapeake. All we had left was our honor, and now that’s gone, too. What’s a gentleman without his honor?”
“Alive,” Alan told him evenly. “And, if he’s not caught with his breeches down or the weapon in his hand, he is still a gentleman to everyone else. I’d have shot the little shit-sack myself if I’d run across him first. Now you and Governour have these men to look after, and your family down in Wilmington to worry about. Forget it.”
“I’ll never.”
“Hard times’d make a rat eat red onions,” Alan quoted back to him. “You do what you have to. This war has all cost us most of our decency, and it’s not through with us yet. Like our sailing master says, the more you cry, the less you’ll piss. Buck up and swear you’ll never do it again, but it’s done, and it wasn’t your hand done it. Governour’s still your brother. Worry about how he’s dealing with it.”
“You’re trying to make me feel good about it?” Burgess marveled.
“Let me know when you do.” Alan grinned in the dark. “Now keep an eye on that compass. There’s just enough moon to steer by. What’s our heading?”
“Um . . . just a touch north of east.”
Alan looked to the eastern horizon above them and found a star to steer by, swung the tiller slightly until he was on a close reach to the south-east breeze and leaned back, blanking his mind to what Burgess had just told him, blanking his mind to everything except getting across the bay before sunrise.
CHAPTER 14
“So you made it out past Cape Charles on the night of the 21st, sheltered on Curtis Island, coasted to Chingoteag the next night, and were finally picked up by the brig Dandelion on the 24th,” Admiral Hood’s flag captain said after reading the report before him.
“Aye, sir,” Alan replied.
The flag captain looked up from the written account that Alan had penned once ferried over to the Barfleur. It was an amazing document of raw courage, unbelievable bravery, and clever extemporizing to make the river barges seaworthy. Had there not been corroborating reports from the Loyalist Volunteer officers and the surviving seamen’s testimony, the captain would have dismissed it as the work of a fabulist, much on a par with the adventures of a Munchausen.
He studied the young man that stood before his desk, swaying easy to the motion of the flagship. The flag captain was of the common opinion that the finest intelligence, the best character, and the most courage were usually found in the most attractive physical specimens, and he found nothing to dissuade this opinion in Midshipman Lewrie. The uniform was stained and faded, but that did not signify; the lad’s hair was neat and clean, shorter than the usual mode and not roached back into such a severe style, the queue short and tied with a black silk ribbon, a pleasant light brown, touched blonde where the sun reached i
t from long service in tropic sunshine. The face was not too horsey and long, regular in appearance, the jaw not too prominent, but it was a firm jaw. The skin was tanned by sea service, and in the dim cabins, with only swaying lamps for illumination, the face was relaxed from the permanent squint sailors developed, showing the whitish chalk marks of frown lines and wrinkles-to-be in later years, held so squinted the sun could not stain them as it did the rest of the skin. And the eyes, which at first the captain believed to be aristocratic gray, now seemed more pale blue, of a most penetrating and arresting nature, windows to the restless soul within.
Had he not been in King’s uniform, he would have dismissed him as one of those pretty lads more given to the theatres and low amusements of the city, almost too pretty, except for that pale scar on the cheek. As for the rest of him, the shoulders were broad without being common, and he was slim, well knit and wiry; the waist and hips were narrow, showing a good leg in breeches and stockings, instead of being beef to the heel like a gunner’s mate or a representative of the lower orders. Could have been a courtier, but he gave off the redolence of a tarpaulin man.
“Hate to say so, but this report shall have to be redone,” the captain said with a rueful grin that was not unkindly. “It’s one thing to state the facts, but all these . . . adjectives and adverbs and what you may call ’ems, my word. And one does not make recommendations as to rewards for army officers, or suggestions on adopting Ferguson rifles for the Sea Service and all, you see?”
“I do, sir,” Alan replied evenly, showing no fatigue or disappointment at this news. It was all one to him, tired as he was.
“The main thing is to be professional in tone, no emotions at all. Wouldn’t want your contemporaries to think you were glory hunting. And none of this ‘it is my sad and inconsolable duty to report that so and so passed over,’ d’ya see? Tone it down and list the dead and wounded later, preceded by the phrase, ‘as per margin.’”
“I list them in the margin, sir?” Alan wondered.
“No, but that is the form most preferred by Mr. Phillip Stephens, the First Secretary to the Admiralty. But you cannot address it to him, as you did, but to your captain or commanding officer.”
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