Jack Absolute (30 page)

Jack peered to his left, sulphurous smoke making vision hard. But he could just distinguish another horse there, a
splendid grey, in the centre of the corkscrewed British line. He tapped Doughty and his horse spurred forward towards the
other. At twenty paces, Jack had his guess confirmed. Simon Fraser sat on his huge gelding, calmly calling orders to the bugler
and drummer at his side, who responded in note and beat. Soldiers were receiving the messages and rallying to the colours
that waved above the General, both the King’s Union Standard and the blue of the 24
^th
.

‘General!’

‘Captain Absolute.’ Simon Fraser gazed down – his horse was two hands bigger than Doughty at the least. ‘Auch, it’s good to
see ye, lad. The Commander will be unco pleased. Though you seem to have lost some weight. Either that or you’ll be needin’
a new tailor.’

As he spoke, ball was whispering past their heads. ‘His compliments, sir. And he urges you to withdraw and rally at the redoubt.’

‘Exactly what I’m trying to do. But I want to bring my men along with me, ye ken.’

A ball passed through the General’s sleeve, just at his wrist. He seemed not to notice. ‘Lad, I’m bereft of officers. Could
you help me straighten this line?’

He gestured to his left where a body of men were milling like sheep harried by a collie.

Without another word, Jack leaped from Doughty’s back, thrusting the reins into the hands of a dazed young officer, scarcely
more than a boy, who took them, mumbling the while. The lad’s spontoon, the spear such officers were meant to carry and often
didn’t, was discarded at his feet. Though it was considered old-fashioned, Jack had always quite liked the half-pike weapon.
Keeping your enemy three arm-lengths away had obvious advantages over a sword; and it was perfect for the job before him.

He grasped the wooden pole and ran to the distressed
men. ‘To me,’ he bellowed, waving the spontoon above his head. He saw a corporal. ‘Seize the end,’ he ordered, and when the
man had taken the butt, Jack pushed the tip out flat before him. It became a line and six men were suddenly against it. Setting
their feet, somehow the two of them held on, as six more pressed.

‘Handle your cartridge,’ Jack shouted, and half of them did just that. Some of the others, seeing the rally, joined it.

‘Prime!’ Jack marched to the side of the swelling ranks, stood there, chest square to the enemy, despite the close passage
of lead ball, his spontoon now at half-port, butt to the ground. If he was steady, then perhaps they would be. He only hoped
he would remember the drill. He hadn’t trained as an infantry officer in many a year.

‘Shut your pans!’ he bellowed. ‘Steady there! Charge your cartridge! Draw your rammers! Ram down your cartridge! Return your
rammers! Poise your firelocks! Cock your firelocks! Present your firelocks! Hold now, men. Hold!’

Jack held them there for that moment, the one that would bring them together as soldiers and comrades, not targets. Then he
shouted, ‘Fire!’ It was not the most effective volley the British army had ever discharged. But the men had held, and soon
dozens more had joined them, rallying NCOs forcing them into the ranks. The milling stopped.

‘Good men. You, Corporal, there! Once more, if you please.’

‘Sir!’

As the man shouted the commands, Jack leaned forward into the smoke, trying to see. Suddenly, a gust of wind swept the warcloud
away and his vision cleared. The first thing he noticed, strangely, was a heron, on the wing, its long neck scrunched, as
ungainly in flight as ever. The bird seemed not disgruntled in the least by the noise below it, giving out its harsh croak,
off to fish in a different stream with that deadly
elegance Jack and Louisa had observed. Smoke and rifles and man’s petty quarrels would not bend it from that purpose.

Looking down, the second thing Jack saw was Benedict Arnold. The man was maybe seventy yards away, a sword in one hand, a
pistol in the other. Beside him stood a buck-skinned rifleman.

Perhaps it was the sight of the bird, the calmness of its passing, but Jack had a moment of sudden clarity. Above the tumult,
he could not hear what Arnold was saying. But he understood as if he were next to him when the General tapped the buck-skinned
shoulder with his pistol barrel then pointed with his sword towards Simon Fraser.

Lethargy held his legs. He found it hard to turn, his voice coming as if from some far-away place, too long in arriving. He
saw the rifleman raise his weapon, sight …

‘General!’ screamed Jack, but the noise was too much, the distance between them too great. Yet he was near enough for all
that; when the bullet struck home and Fraser jerked and began to fall from his saddle, Jack was at his side, catching him,
lowering him to the ground. The great grey reared and plunged away towards the Rebel line. As Jack supported General Fraser’s
head, the eyes rolled open.

‘Am I hit, Jack?’

‘I’m afraid you are, sir.’

‘It is nothing, I am sure.’ Fraser said, tried to rise, then fainted. Jack lowered him to the ground, appalled at the source
of the blood spreading down the white waistcoat, staining the breeches. Gut shot, the worst of wounds.

‘You! Ensign!’ Jack yelled at the young man who yet retained Doughty’s reins. He started forward as if he were the one hit.
‘You must help me get the General on to the horse. You must ride him back to the surgeons. Now!’

Somehow – for Fraser was a big man – they hoisted the
mercifully unconscious General across the saddle. The ensign, at Jack’s urging, mounted behind. Once up, Jack removed his
two pistols from their holsters, then slapped the horse on its withers; Doughty, responding instantly, as always, to the command,
galloped away.

The sight of Fraser’s fall had broken the spirit of even those who would rally. Men everywhere began to run and Jack could
see he had no hope of stopping them. They would probably kill him if he tried. For just one moment he was tempted to run at
the enemy ranks, to seek out Arnold and slaughter him as he had slaughtered Fraser – for what he had ordered, the murder of
an opposing general, was against all the rules of war. He even took one step forward, the only Redcoat doing so … then through
the smoke, two blue-coated figures were running at him, bayonets fixed, yelling in their triumph. Jack’s first bullet took
the leading man in his shoulder, spinning him away. The other paused for just a moment, to look down at his fallen friend,
then screamed and levelled at Jack. But the pause did for him. Jack, sighting briefly, put a ball between his eyes. Then,
like all around him, Jack turned on his heel and ran.

This time he took to the woods directly behind the fracturing British line, for the trees would give some cover from the American
riflemen. More Redcoats were streaming down from his right, from the higher ground there, buck-skinned pursuers clubbing at
their backs. He kept away from the path where men were bunching into a mass target and dying, and instead ran through the
undergrowth between the maples and the birches, vaulting many bodies, both red-coated and dark blue. Men screamed at him from
the ground, cursing, pleading, but he did not pause. He could do nothing for any of them, would only join them, shot dead
on the ground, if he were lucky, bayoneted and left to bleed to death if he was not – for the Americans had
the killing fever and would not yet think of quarter. The rout held even him in its terrorizing grip. His one hope lay ahead.

The trees thinned, the wood ended. Then there was a meadow and, a couple of hundred yards across it, Balcarras’s Redoubt.
Before that, a smaller earthwork occupied a slight rise in the ground. By-passing this at a smart sprint – Rebels already
had it under fire from the forest’s edge – Jack ran straight to the wooden palisades beyond. The gates had to be on the far
side, away from the enemy, but Jack knew they would be blocked by scores of desperate men. So he followed the example of an
equally tall sergeant of grenadiers before him and hurled himself straight at the wooden wall. Grasping the top of the stake,
which was cut into a sharp point, he heaved himself up and over the parapet. Men were crowded thick on the walkway and he
nearly took two with him as he fell to the ground the other side.

The order within was the reverse of the chaos without. Light infantrymen and others from the Advance Corps stood to at the
walls, muskets held across their chests. Beneath each one stood another, weapons loaded, ready to be passed up. The central
ground of the fort was filled with companies standing to, ready to be sent wherever they were needed. And, descending a stair
from the parapet and walking up their ranks towards him, a smile on the ever pallid face, was Alexander Lindsay, Earl of Balcarras.

‘Why, Jack! Never took you for a sprinter.’ Suddenly the smile disappeared. ‘But if you’re running, then where’s my blasted
horse?’

‘Bearing General Fraser to the surgeons, Sandy. And with the same devotion he always showed to me, I trust.’

The Earl laid a hand on Jack’s arm. ‘Not bad, is it, the General’s wound?’

‘The very worst, I fear.’ Swiftly, Jack related the story and
Arnold’s part in it. It was one of the few times he’d seen colour come to the younger man’s cheeks.

‘By God, let me but meet him on this field,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay him for Simon Fraser.’

‘I think you’ll get your chance soon enough.’ Jack had been loading his pistols as he spoke. Slamming down the second pan,
he added, ‘For if I am not mistaken, that’s him coming.’

Jack had cocked an ear to the parapets. Indeed the noise from beyond them had swelled even in their short conversation. Both
men ran up the stairs, looked over the parapet. The defended knoll that lay in front of their position was smothered in musket
smoke, surrounded by screaming Yankees. Even as they first looked, a group of Redcoats broke from it, through the blue ranks,
fleeing back towards them.

‘Arnold will be there, leading them,’ Jack said. ‘As well as being no gentleman he’s mad as a Bedlamite. He’ll be on you in
a moment and he has men to spare.’

Balcarras glanced around. ‘Unless he brings up cannon – and it looks like he’s in too much of a hurry – I’ll wager a guinea
to a grouse that we’ll break him here. That will give General Burgoyne time to set up the secondary defence. He’s ridden back
to do so.’ Balcarras sighed. ‘So long as Breymann holds his redoubt, there, to the right.’ He pointed and Jack looked. ‘It
is our weak point to be sure, I warned them before. Those cabins beside him, they can be too easily taken and his flank turned.’

The firing had doubled in volume even as he spoke. Lines of men in every shade of coat had begun to move across the meadow.
Ball, in ever increasing numbers, was thrumming by or smashing into the logs before them.

It made concentration difficult. ‘Cabins,’ echoed Jack. He had noted something about cabins in the eternity that was the last
hour, had ridden past them. They were held by … held by … Canadians. And Indians.

Até.

He grasped Balcarras’s forearm. ‘I’m for those cabins, Sandy.’

‘Take your pick, Jack. It will be hot wherever you go. But perhaps there will be the hottest.’

‘Have you a spare musket and bayonet?’

‘Take mine.’ He passed over both weapons. Jack checked the charge under the pan and thrust the blade into his belt beside
his charged pistols. ‘Now,’ the Earl continued, ‘that’s a horse you owe me, a musket, and a bayonet … don’t get yourself killed,
dear fellow, you are too much in my debt.’ He turned, yelled down the ranks of waiting men, ‘Cock your firelocks! Present!
Hold on my command!’ Sergeants echoed the cry along the ramparts.

The cry of ‘Fire!’ came moments later, as Jack grasped the rear log wall of the stockade, the guns roaring almost as one.
The vibration transferred through the wood to his hands, stinging them as he vaulted over. He landed somewhat awkwardly on
the earth that had been thrown up against the redoubt, fell, his bearskin hat rolling far into the scrapings below. He left
it, crouched and began to walk swiftly forward. It was when he cleared the cover of the walls that he realized how exposed
he was. To his left, the lines of American troops had already crashed against Balcarras’s Redoubt and, like a wave around
a beach boulder, had spilled around it. Some were now paralleling his walk down towards the Breymann Redoubt a few hundred
yards ahead while, behind them, more solid bodies were marching there beneath banners. To his right, two companies of Redcoats
had formed a double rank. He saw their colour, noted that they were the regiment he’d been rather casually assigned to by
Burgoyne, the 24
^th
. They stood, muskets levelled at the Americans. He was directly between the rivals and equidistant from each, which was probably
all that was saving him – from blue ranks
to red, it was a long shot for both. Still, after those initial glances, Jack decided to work on the – he had to admit – somewhat
childish principle that if he was not seeing them, they were not seeing him. He ground his teeth and kept his eyes fixed forward
on his destination. It took only a minute, yet his shirt was soaked in sweat when he arrived. Just before the redoubt, a large
shrub offered a little cover and he took it.

Though he was no engineer, even he could see what Sandy had meant. The German redoubt, while not as large or impressive as
the British one, looked sturdy enough; but it was the cabins on the flanks that were its true weak points. Capture them and
you turned the whole position, exposed the main fortification to fire from all sides. And unlike the palisades that were lined
with men who would die for their dukes and their prickly honour, the cabins had apparently been garrisoned by the half-trained
Canadian volunteers and the men who least liked such a static form of fighting – the very last of Burgoyne’s Native allies.

Someone on the American side had obviously noted the same weaknesses. Mass and rapid firing was being directed at the musket
slits of the larger of the two cabins, making it hard for the defenders to fire back. This was enabling parties of Rebels
to draw ever closer, bearing firebrands and brushwood, and hurl these against the back wall. Another party carried a cedar
trunk, its end roughly hewn into a point, to batter in the cabin door. With that, it would not be long before the door crumpled
and they were inside, massacring the defenders.