The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles (3 page)

How late was it? Four-thirty? Five? Philip peered over the earthwork, saw hundreds of fallen grenadiers and light infantrymen, flowers of scarlet wool and blood strewing the hillside. He squinted through the acrid, choking clouds, hastily grabbed the black’s arm, pointed.

“General Howe, he finally got some brains,” the black observed. But his eyes were fearful.

The re-forming British ranks looked different. The soldiers were stripping themselves of their cumbersome packs and field gear. They tossed aside their mitre-like hats or bearskin caps. Threw off their white crossbelts, red uniform jackets—

Down the line, Dr. Warren was likewise discarding his fine coat. “I think they mean to break through this time,” he said. “Howe has all the powder he needs. He must know we’re running short.”

“Why the hell doesn’t someone send for more?” a man complained.

“Someone did,” Warren told him.

“Then where the hell is it?”

Warren shook his head. “I don’t know. Perhaps the message was intercepted.” His mouth twisted. “Or the messenger ran away. I’ve noticed that’s not unusual this afternoon—”

The drumbeats resumed. Philip swallowed, reloading.

The British marched up the hillside and across the swampy patches in front of the rail fence and stone wall. This time, they looked much grimmer. They stepped over their fallen comrades without glancing down, but the rage on their faces was obvious.

The soldiers kept coming, gaiters splashed with blood from the previous engagements. Up and down the line, the Americans began firing. For a few moments, it seemed as if the pattern of the first two assaults would be repeated. The front ranks faltered. Men stumbled, pitched over, shrieking—

The smoke in the redoubt was suffocating. It settled over Philip and the others like a pall. He was frightened out of his wits when he used his last powder to shoot the bent nail. The Brown Bess might explode—

It didn’t. But he couldn’t see whether he’d hit anyone.

Bayonets shining dully in the smoke, the British were halfway up the side of Breed’s Hill. Suddenly Philip heard a change in the level of sound—

Fewer and fewer American muskets were shooting. “Fire!” Colonel Prescott screamed, somewhere out of sight down on the left. Hoarse voices answered:

“Powder’s gone!”

Then Philip’s heart nearly stopped. The loud gulp of Salem Prince was audible too. They and the others still on their feet in the redoubt heard a dreadful new sound, almost like a mass chant on the other side of the earthwork. The British soldiers were calling encouragement to one another:

“Push on. Push on. Push on—”

Philip peered over the lip and knew what was coming: a direct breach of the redoubt. There was no longer enough firepower to repel the advance.

All at once a few British soldiers began to run toward the hill’s summit. Then more. Soon the whole front rank was charging, bayonets thrust out ahead. Salem Prince leaned his elbows on the little ledge to steady them, fired his last ball with powder he had borrowed from Philip. The ball drilled a round red hole in a portly sergeant’s forehead.

But they kept coming, on the run:

“Push on. Push on. Push on
—”

In the last terrible seconds of waiting, Philip raised his Brown Bess like a club, grimly aware of its limitations as a weapon against bayonets. British discipline, instilled as a tradition not to be violated, had paid off after all. In the wake of two disastrous charges, they intended to make the third succeed:

“PUSH ON! PUSH ON!”

A bayonet flashed above Philip’s head. Musket clutched in both hands, he fended the downward thrust of the British light infantryman towering at the edge of the redoubt. Philip smashed the musket against the soldier’s left leg. The man pitched forward into the redoubt. His bayonet gored Salem Prince through the chest.

The black fell screaming. The British soldier floundered on top of him, struggling to rise. A bayonet raked Philip’s left shoulder from behind. He dodged away, raised his musket by the muzzle, struck the fallen soldier’s head once, twice, three times, panting as he hit. The soldier’s skull caved in. He collapsed across the dead black man.

But there were hundreds more of the soldiers jumping into the redoubt now, those murderous bayonets slashing and stabbing. In the smoke it was almost impossible to tell friend from foe. Philip heard an officer’s cry:

“Retreat! Retreat to Bunker’s! Abandon the redoubt—!”

Hysteria then Pandemonium.

Royal Marines who had reinforced the infantry regiments leaped into the redoubt, firing at close range. Philip kicked and clubbed his way toward the narrow entrance packed with frantic men. His chest hurt from breathing smoke. He coughed. His eyes streamed tears.

Another bayonet wielded by some phantom came tearing at his cheek. Philip kicked the unseen soldier, hit his calf, heard him curse. The bayonet slid by Philip’s shoulder and into the eye of a Rhode Islander behind him in the stampede. Blood gushed over Philip’s filthy neck, hot, ripe-smelling. He wanted to scream but he didn’t.

He saw Dr. Warren in the crush, brandishing a musket. Random sunlight made Warren’s face gleam like a medal for a moment. A bayonet speared Warren’s ribs. Then the doctor went rigid, as if a musket ball had hit him. Horrified, Philip watched the patriot leader disappear in the smoky carnage.

He fought ahead. Saw sunlight gleaming—the outer end of the entrance passage. He raised his Brown Bess horizontally, ducked and battered through, his only goal that patch of brilliant light beyond the earth walls.

His chest on fire from the smoke he’d inhaled, he broke out and began to run down through the orchard on the northwest slope of Breed’s Hill. From the redoubt he still heard screaming, muskets exploding, and the howls of the redcoats taking vengeance.

The sun was dropping behind the smoke. It had to be almost six o’clock, Philip thought as he scrambled toward the top of Bunker’s Hill. There, Old Put’s men had dug another fortification—

Empty now.

Everywhere, the colonials were fleeing. Rushing toward the all-too-narrow strip of land that was the only escape route from the peninsula jutting into Boston harbor. Philip headed that way, running for his life because that was the order he heard yelled from all sides:

“Retreat,
retreat!”

The Charlestown Neck proved almost impassable. Men shoulder to shoulder beat and clawed one another to gain a yard’s forward passage. Off in the Mystic River, the guns of
Glasgow
erupted. Cannon balls tore the Neck to pieces, shot up huge gouts of earth, blasted men to the ground. Philip felt something sticky strike him in the face. He glanced down, gagged. A hand blown from a body—

He wiped some of the blood away and struggled ahead, trying not to be sick.

Near him, a weary Rhode Islander shouted with false jubilation:

“I hear Tommy lost a thousand ’r more, and us but a hundred!”

It might be so,
Philip thought, gouging and shoving his way over the perilously narrow piece of land. It might be so, but it was no American victory. Even if the British had paid with fifty times the number of dead, how could anyone call it a victory? Though the king’s troops had died by the score in the first two charges, they had broken through on the third—with those invincible bayonets that still blazed in Philip’s imagination—

All at once he felt totally discouraged, disheartened. Even more disheartened than he’d been during what was perhaps the lowest point in his life: the grim sea voyage on which his mother, Marie Charboneau, had died, and he had taken a new name before stepping foot on the shore of his adopted land. Years from now, Breed’s Hill might or might not be deemed a victory of sorts. But he saw it as a clear defeat.

As he ran on in the smoky sunset, glimpsing safe ground ahead at last, he knew that he and his wife and their unborn baby confronted a future that had become utterly bleak in a single afternoon’s two-hour engagement.

The thirteen colonies faced exactly the same future. At last, the might of Great Britain had asserted itself.

Very likely the king would spare nothing to bring the Americans to their knees with fire and steel; that terrible steel—

The struggle of the patriots could be very long.

And doomed.

“J
UD DARLIN’?”

He reached across her naked hip for the jug of rum they’d shared. The cabin was warm this June evening, accentuating the woman’s smell: a faintly gamy combination of sweat and farm dirt that never failed to excite him. When he’d consumed sufficient rum.

“Jud?” she said again.

“What?”

“That all for tonight?”

“Not by a damn sight, my girl.”

He drank; emptied the jug. Dropped it and heard it thud on the dirt floor. He rolled toward her, stroking a moon-dappled patch of thigh. She guided his hand up her hard belly to one of her breasts. She laughed; a coarse, harlot’s laugh:

“Good. The old fool, he won’t be back till the cock crows, I bet. Means to show the gentry he’s doin’ his duty, ridin’ patrol with the best. If he only knowed he could meet some of the gentry right, in his own bed—!” She giggled.

“Lottie, stop talking so goddamned much.” He gave her a fierce kiss that was half passion, half punishment.

She complained that it hurt, shoved his exploring fingers away. The straw crunched as she shifted out of his grasp:

“You’re not treatin’ me proper this evening, Jud Fletcher. Like to took my head off with that kiss.”

“Sorry.”

He reached for the rum, remembered it was gone, swore softly. A ravening thirst still burned in him. But then, when didn’t it?

“That all you can say?
Sorry?”

“What else should I say, Lottie? Conversation’s not one of your better skills, so let’s get down to the one in which you excel, shall we?”

Once more he reached out to touch her nakedness. His hand was moonlit for a moment. It was a strong young man’s hand with fine golden hairs downing the tanned back.

But he’d angered her:

“No, sir, I want to know where your head’s at tonight, Mr. Judson Fletcher.”

His laugh aped the crude guffaws heard at taverns, or around the gamecock ring. Like downing rum, that sort of laugh somehow came easy. He said:

“I’ll show you where it ought to be, honeylove—”

He bent his bare back, his mouth seeking. Again she struggled away. She was beginning to irritate him considerably.

Pettish, she said, “Listen, you yelled out somebody’s name last time.”

“Oh hell no I didn’t.”

“Yes you did, I heard it, right there at the end.”

“All right, I got plumb excited and yelled your name.”

“No, sir, Judson Fletcher, it wasn’t Mrs. Lottie Shaw you was yellin’ about—” Another laugh; vicious. “You were givin’ somebody else a hard ridin’ and I don’t take kindly to it.”

Furious, he wrenched away. He stood up, naked in the moonlight falling through the curtainless, glassless window of the crude little farm cabin. “For Christ’s sake, woman, you got what you want from me. What that old wreck your papa married you off to can’t deliver—”

“I want a little respect too,” the young woman whined. “A little feelin’—I don’t want somebody pokin’ around in me and callin’ out ‘Peggy, Peggy!’”

He seized her bare shoulder. “Shut your mouth, Lottie.”

“Leggo!” She writhed. “I heard it clear.
‘Peggy!’
Think I don’t know which Peggy that is?” She was growing shrill, matching his anger. “Think the whole damn county don’t know whose head you wisht you could put horns on—?”

He found the rum jug and hurled it at her half-seen form. She yelped, dodged away. Outside, her husband’s yellow hound began to bark.

Judson grabbed up his clothes, practically yanked them on. By then, Lottie Shaw had realized her error. She leaped naked through the patch of moon, doubled over in exaggerated penitence, pressed her cheek against his ribs as she clasped his waist. While stuffing his fine lace-fronted shirt into his pants, Judson gave her an elbow in the nose, not entirely by accident.

Lottie hung on. Judson’s blue eyes and fair, clubbed hair looked all afire in the light from the window. Lottie began to cry in earnest:

“Don’t get mad, darlin’. I spoke too sharp. Come on back and love me again—”

Judson leaned down toward her in the patch of moonlight, a tall, elegantly handsome young man with a long, sharp nose and just a slight softness at the edges of his mouth. His fingers closed on her muscled forearm. He looked like some avenging angel of scripture as he said quietly:

“You ever speak her name again in my presence—or if I ever hear of you speaking it to anyone, Lottie, I’ll come here and kill you. Now think about that.”

Pulling loose, he yanked on his boots of costly Russian leather, picked up his rich coat of dark green velvet and stalked out of the cabin.

He shied a stone at the yellow hound to drive him away, then pulled himself up on the beautiful roan he’d tethered to a low branch of a scrawny apple tree the farmer was trying to grow in his dooryard. Still shaking with anger, he galloped out the lane and turned into the road leading toward the Rappahannock, and home.

It was a fine, balmy evening in late June. He reached behind him, pried up the flap of his saddlebag, wiggled his fingers down inside, let out an oath. He was half drunk and wanted to be completely so. And he was out of rum.

Lottie Shaw was another kind of medicine he took on the sly. Tonight, by catching him when he’d accidentally cried
her
name, Lottie had gone dry on him too.

He cropped the roan without mercy, thundering down the dirt road in the sweet-smelling night because fleeing from the pain of having uttered Peggy’s name without thinking had plunged him into this star-hung dark and pain of a different sort, equally hurtful.

Riding the roads of Caroline County, Virginia, always reminded him of his one best friend of boyhood. George Clark, the second of farmer John Clark’s six sons.

The bond between George and Judson had been a powerful one in the years when they were growing up together, even though George’s father was relatively poor, while Judson Fletcher’s was rich. Maybe the reason was simply that any human being of any age liked to find another who would act as pupil—and George Clark, though two years younger than his friend, had discovered early that Judson was something besides a typical tobacco planter’s son. In fact, Judson loathed Sermon Hill. He much preferred studying what George, a boy who had roamed the Virginia woodlands since he could toddle, taught so eagerly.