The Fort (12 page)

“They are British,” the Reverend Murray said in agreement, “and ‘pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ Proverbs eighteen,” he added helpfully, “verse sixteen.”

“Words of wisdom,” Lovell said, “and indeed they do underestimate us!” The general was staring at the map and searching for the optimism that had lightened his morning.

“They shall suffer for their arrogance,” Murray said, and raised a reverent hand, “‘what is this thing that ye do? Will ye rebel against the king? Then answered I them, and said unto them, the God of Heaven, he will prosper us.’” He smiled benignly. “The words of the prophet Nehemiah, General.”

“He will indeed prosper us,” Lovell echoed, “and perhaps you would lead us in prayer, Reverend?”

“Gladly.” The men bowed their heads as the Reverend Murray prayed that God would send a swift victory. “May the forces of righteousness glorify Thy name, O Lord,” the Reverend Murray beseeched, “and may we show magnanimity in the triumph that Thy words have promised us. We ask all this in Thy holy name. Amen.”

“Amen,” Lovell said fervently, his eyes tight shut, “and amen.”

*    *    *

“Amen,” Brigadier McLean muttered in response to the grace before supper. He had been invited to Doctor Calef’s house, which lay two hundred yards east of Fort George. That name, he thought ruefully, was a grand name for a fort that was scarcely defensible. Captain Mowat had sent one hundred and eighty burly seamen to help the work, yet still the walls were only waist high and a mere two cannons had been emplaced in the corner bastions.

“So the wretches are here?” Calef inquired.

“So we hear, Doctor, so we hear,” McLean responded. News of the enemy fleet’s arrival had come from the river’s mouth, brought by a fisherman who had fled the rebels so quickly that he had been unable to count the ships and could only say that there was a terrible lot of them. “It seems they’ve sent a considerable fleet,” McLean commented, then thanked the doctor’s wife, who had passed him a dish of beans. Three candles lit the table, a finely polished oval of gleaming walnut. Most of the doctor’s furniture had come from his Boston home and it looked strange here, much as if the contents of a fine Edinburgh mansion were to be moved to a Hebridean croft.

“Will they come tonight?” Mrs. Calef inquired nervously.

“I’m assured no one can navigate the river in the dark,” McLean said, “so no, ma’am, not this night.”

“They’ll be here tomorrow,” Calef averred.

“So I expect.”

“In some force?” Calef asked.

“So the report said, Doctor, though I am denied any specific detail.” McLean flinched as he bit onto a grindstone chip trapped in the cornbread. “Very fine bread, ma’am,” he said.

“We were maltreated in Boston,” Calef said.

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“My wife was insulted in the streets.”

McLean knew what was in Calef’s mind, that if the rebels were to take Majabigwaduce then the persecution of the loyalists would start again. “I regret that, Doctor.”

“I dare say,” Calef said, “that if the rebels were to find me, General, they would imprison me.” The doctor was merely toying with his food, while his wife watched him anxiously.

“Then I must do my utmost,” McLean said, “to keep you from imprisonment and your wife from insult.”

“Scourge them,” Calef said angrily.

“I do assure you, Doctor, that is our intent,” McLean said, then smiled at Calef’s wife. “These are very fine beans, ma’am.”

They ate mostly in silence after that. McLean wished he could offer a greater reassurance to the loyalists of Majabigwaduce, but the arrival of the rebel fleet surely meant an imminent defeat. His fort was unfinished. True, he had made three batteries to cover the harbor entrance. There was one on Cross Island, the large Half Moon Battery down on the shore, and a third, much smaller, on the high bluff above the harbor mouth, but none of those batteries was a fort. They were emplacements for cannon that were there to fire at the enemy ships, but not one of the earthworks could withstand an assault by a company of determined infantry. There had simply not been enough time, and now the enemy was here.

Many years before, while fighting for the Dutch, McLean had been captured by the French and held prisoner. That had not been unpleasant. The French were generous and had treated him with courtesy. He wondered how the Americans would behave and feared, as he ate the tough, undercooked beans, that he was about to find out.

Tomorrow.

Marine Lieutenant Downs of the
Tyrannicide
took men ashore on the northernmost of the Fox Islands. It was fully dark by the time their longboat grounded on a shingle beach beneath the black shapes of a half-dozen houses that stood on the higher ground. Small lights shone from behind shutters and around doorways and, as the marines dragged their boat higher up the beach, a voice hailed from the darkness. “Who are you?”

“His Majesty’s Royal Marines!” Downs called back. The Fox Islands were notorious for being loyalist and Downs did not want one of his men being killed or wounded by some malevolent Tory shooting out of the night. “A relief fleet for Majabigwaduce!”

“What do you want here?” the voice called, still suspicious.

“Fresh water, news, a couple of women would be welcome too!”

Boots sounded on the shingle and a tall man emerged from the shadows. He carried a musket that he slung on his shoulder when he saw the dozen men about the longboat. He had noticed the white crossbelts, but in the dark of night he could not see that their coats were green and not red. “Strange time to be looking for water,” he said.

“We’re after water and news,” Downs said cheerfully. “General McLean is still at Majabigwaduce?”

“No one’s kicked him out yet.”

“Have you seen him?”

“I was there yesterday.”

“Then, sir, you will do me the honor of accompanying me to my ship,” Downs said. His marines, like those of the
Hazard
, had been sent to find men who had seen McLean’s fortifications.

The islander took a pace backwards. “What ship are you from?” he asked, still thoroughly suspicious.

“Take him,” Downs ordered and two of his marines seized the man, confiscated his musket, and dragged him back to the longboat. “Don’t make a sound,” Lieutenant Downs warned the man, “or we’ll stove your skull in like an egg.”

“Bastards,” the man said, then grunted as a marine punched him in the belly.

“We are patriots,” Downs corrected him and, leaving two men to guard the prisoner, went to find more loyalists who could tell the expedition just what waited for them upriver.

Dawn brought a thick fog into which Lieutenant John Moore went with twenty men to the small battery that McLean had placed high on Majabigwaduce’s bluff. The battery possessed three six-pounder cannons mounted on naval carriages and served by sailors from HMS
North
, commanded by a midshipman who, to the eighteen-year-old Moore, looked no older than twelve or thirteen. “I’m fifteen, sir,” the midshipman responded to Moore’s inquiry, “and three years in the Navy, sir.”

“I’m John Moore,” Moore introduced himself.

“Pearce Fenistone, sir, and honored to make your acquaintance.” Fenistone’s battery was no fortress, merely an emplacement for the guns. A space had been cleared in the trees, a patch of ground leveled, and a platform of split logs laid for the carriages. Four trees had been deliberately left unfelled and the gunners used their trunks as anchors for the cannons’ breeching ropes and train-tackle. A ship’s cannon was restrained by its breeching ropes, which were seized to the hull and stopped a gun recoiling across a deck, while the train-tackle was used to run the gun back into position, and Fenistone’s men were using the tree trunks to tame their beasts. “It does check the recoil, sir,” Fenistone said when Moore admired the ingenious arrangement, “though we do get showered with pine needles every time we fire.” The battery had no parapet and its ready magazine was merely a shallow pit dug at the rear of the makeshift decking. Two gratings were piled with round shot beside which were piles of what looked like children’s rope quoits. “Ring-wadding, sir,” Fenistone explained.

“Ring-wadding?”

“The guns point downwards, sir, and the ring-wads hold the balls in the barrel. We’d look a little foolish if we loaded and the balls rolled out before we fired. It’s most embarrassing when that happens.”

The battery had been placed above the harbor’s mouth rather than at the western edge of the bluff. The six-pounders, which had been taken from the
North
’s portside broadside, were too light to have much effect at long range, but if the enemy ships attempted to enter the harbor they would be forced to sail beneath the three cannon that could fire down onto their decks. “I’d wish for heavier metal, sir,” Fenistone said wistfully.

“And a proper fort to defend your guns?”

“In case their infantry attacks?” Fenistone asked. “Well, fighting infantry isn’t our job, sir, it’s yours.” The midshipman smiled. For a fifteen-year-old, Moore thought, Fenistone was wonderfully confident. “Captain Mowat gave us strict instructions what to do if we are attacked by land, sir,” he went on.

“Which is?”

“Spike the guns and run like buggery, sir,” Fenistone answered with a grin, “and get the gunners back to the
North
, sir.” He slapped at a mosquito.

Moore looked down at Mowat’s ships, which were wreathed in mist. The three sloops looked formidable enough in their line, though he knew they were lightly armed compared to most warships. Behind them, in a parallel line, were the three transport ships, which looked far larger and more threatening, but in truth were defenseless hulls, merely there to act as an obstacles in the event the enemy managed to pierce Mowat’s first line.

“Are they coming today, sir?” Fenistone asked anxiously.

“So we believe,” Moore said.

“We’ll give them a warm British welcome, sir.”

“I’m sure you will,” Moore said with a smile, then beckoned at his men to stop gawping at the ships’ guns and to follow him westwards through the trees.

He stopped at the brink of the bluff. Ahead of him was the wide Penobscot River beneath its thinning pall of fog. Moore stared southwards, but could see nothing stirring in the distant whiteness. “So they are coming today, sir?” Sergeant McClure asked.

“We must assume so.”

“And our job, sir?”

“Is to take post here, Sergeant, in case the rascals attempt a landing.” Moore looked down the steep slope and thought the rebels would be foolish to attempt a landing on the narrow stony beach at the bluff’s foot. He supposed they would land farther north, perhaps beyond the neck, and he wished he had been posted on the isthmus. There would be fighting and he had never fought; part of him feared that baptism and another part yearned to experience it.

“They’d be daft buggers to land here, sir,” McClure said, standing beside Moore and gazing down the precipitous slope.

“Let us hope they are daft buggers.”

“We’ll shoot the bastards easy, sir.”

“If there are enough of us.”

“That’s true, sir.”

The fog thinned as the wind freshened. Lieutenant Moore had posted himself at the peninsula’s southwestern corner, at Dyce’s Head, and as the sun climbed higher more and more men made their way to that vantage point to watch for the enemy. Brigadier McLean came, stumping with his stick along the narrow path between the pines, leading seven other red-coated officers who all stood gazing southwards down the river that sparkled so prettily under the summer sun. Still more officers arrived, and with them came civilians like Doctor Calef who stood close to the brigadier and tried to make small-talk. Captain Mowat was there with two other naval officers, all of them holding long telescopes though there was nothing to see. The river was empty.

“I forgot to ask you last night,” McLean said to Calef, “how is Temperance?”

“Temperance?” Calef asked, puzzled, then remembered. “Ah, she’s recovering. If a baby survives a day of fever they usually recover. She’ll live.”

“I’m glad,” McLean said. “There are few things so distressing as a sick bairn.”

“You have children, General?”

“I never married,” McLean said, then doffed his hat as more villagers came to the bluff with Colonel Goldthwait. Goldthwait was American and loyalist, a horse-breeder whose rank had been earned in the old Royal Militia. He feared that any rebel force in the river might persecute the loyalists and so he had brought his family to live under the protection of McLean’s men. His two daughters had accompanied him to the bluff, along with Bethany Fletcher and Aaron Bank’s twin daughters, and the presence of so many young women attracted the younger Scottish officers.

Lieutenant Moore steeled himself to approach Bethany. He took off his hat and offered a bow. “Your brother isn’t here?” he asked.

“He went fishing, Lieutenant,” Bethany lied.

“I thought no one was allowed to leave the peninsula?” Moore queried.

“James left before that order was given,” Bethany said.

“I pray he returns safely,” Moore said. “If the rebels catch him, Miss Fletcher, I fear they might detain him.”

“If they catch you, Lieutenant,” Bethany said with a smile, “they might detain you.”

“Then I must ensure I am not caught,” Moore said.

“Good morning, Miss Fletcher,” Brigadier McLean said cheerfully.

“Good morning, General,” Bethany said and lightened the brigadier’s morning with her most dazzling smile. She felt awkward. Her pale-green linen dress was patched with common brown cloth and her bonnet was long-peaked and old-fashioned. The Goldthwait girls wore lovely cotton print dresses that they must have received from Boston before the British had withdrawn from that city. The British officers, Beth thought, must think her very plain.

Thomas Goldthwait, a tall and good-looking man dressed in the faded red coat of the old militia, took McLean aside. “I wanted a word, General,” Goldthwait said. He sounded awkward.

“I’m at your service, sir,” McLean responded.

Goldthwait stared south for a brief while. “I have three sons,” he said finally, still gazing southwards, “and when you arrived, General, I gave them a choice.”