The Fort (6 page)

“I am pleased, Colonel,” Wadsworth said warmly. “You will receive orders later today, but I can tell you their gist now. Your guns should be taken to the Long Wharf ready for embarkation, and you should withdraw from the public magazine whatever gunpowder you require.”

“Shubael Hewes has to authorize that,” Revere said distractedly, still reading the warrant.

“Shubael Hewes?”

“The deputy sheriff, General, but don’t you worry, I know Shubael.” Revere folded the warrant carefully, then cuffed at his eyes and sniffed. “We are going to captivate, kill, and destroy them, General. We are going to make those red-coated bastards wish they had never sailed from England.”

“We shall certainly dislodge them,” Wadsworth said with a smile.

“More than dislodge the monsters,” Revere said vengefully, “we shall slaughter them! And those we don’t kill, General, we’ll march through town and back just to give folk a chance to let them know how welcome they are in Massachusetts.”

Wadsworth held out his hand. “I look forward to serving with you, Colonel.”

“I look forward to sharing victory with you, General,” Revere said, shaking the offered hand.

Revere watched Wadsworth leave, then, still holding the warrant as though it were the holy grail, went back to the courtyard where Josiah Flint was stirring butter into a dish of mashed turnips. “I’m going to war, Josiah,” Revere said reverently.

“I did that,” Flint said, “and I was never so hungry in all my born days.”

“I’ve waited for this,” Revere said.

“There’ll be no Nantucket turnips where you’re going,” Flint said. “I don’t know why they taste better, but upon my soul you can’t trump a turnip from Nantucket. You think it’s the salt air?”

“Commanding the state’s artillery!”

“You ever traveled down east? It ain’t a Christian place, Colonel. Fog and flies is all it is, fog and flies, and the fog chills you and the flies bite like the very devil.”

“I’m going to war. It’s all I ever asked! A chance, Josiah!” Revere’s face was radiant. He turned a full triumphant circle, then slammed his fist onto the table. “I am going to war!”

Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere had heard the trumpet and he was going to war.

James Fletcher’s boat buffeted against the outgoing tide, pushed by a convenient southwest wind that drove the
Felicity
upriver past Majabigwaduce’s high bluff. The
Felicity
was a small boat, just twenty-four feet long, with a stubby mast from which a faded red sail hung from a high gaff. The sun sparkled prettily on the small waves of Penobscot Bay, but behind the
Felicity
a bank of thick fog shrouded the view towards the distant ocean. Brigadier McLean, enthroned on a tarry heap of nets in the boat’s belly, wanted to see Majabigwaduce just as the enemy would first see it, from the water. He wanted to put himself in his enemy’s shoes and decide how he would attack the peninsula if he were a rebel. He stared fixedly at the shore, and again remarked how the scenery put him in mind of Scotland’s west coast. “Don’t you agree, Mister Moore?” he asked Lieutenant John Moore who was one of two junior officers who had been ordered to accompany the brigadier.

“Not dissimilar, sir,” Moore said, though abstractedly, as if he merely essayed a courtesy rather than a thoughtful response.

“More trees here, of course,” the brigadier said.

“Indeed, sir, indeed,” Moore said, still not paying proper attention to his commanding officer’s remarks. Instead he was gazing at James Fletcher’s sister, Bethany, who had the tiller of the
Felicity
in her right hand.

McLean sighed. He liked Moore very much, considering the young man to have great promise, but he understood too that any young man would rather gaze at Bethany Fletcher than make polite conversation to a senior officer. She was a rare beauty to find in this distant place. Her hair was pale gold, framing a sun-darkened face given strength by a long nose. Her blue eyes were trusting and friendly, but the feature that made her beautiful, that could have lit the darkest night, was her smile. It was an extraordinary smile, wide and generous, that had dazzled John Moore and his companion, Lieutenant Campbell, who also gaped at Bethany as though he had never seen a young woman before. He kept plucking at his dark kilt as the wind lifted it from his thighs.

“And the sea-monsters here are extraordinary,” McLean went on, “like dragons, wouldn’t you say, John? Pink dragons with green spots?”

“Indeed, sir,” Moore said, then gave a start as he belatedly realized the brigadier was teasing him. He had the grace to look abashed. “I’m sorry, sir.”

James Fletcher laughed. “No dragons here, General.”

McLean smiled. He looked at the distant fog. “You have much fog here, Mister Fletcher?”

“We gets fog in the spring, General, and fog in the summer, and then comes the fog in the fall and after that the snow, which we usually can’t see because it’s hidden by fog,” Fletcher said with a smile as wide as his sister’s, “fog and more fog.”

“Yet you like living here?” McLean asked gently.

“God’s own country, General,” Fletcher answered enthusiastically, “and God hides it from the heathen by wrapping it in fog.”

“And you, Miss Fletcher?” McLean inquired of Bethany. “Do you like living in Majabigwaduce?”

“I like it fine, sir,” she said with a smile.

“Don’t steer too close to the shore, Miss Fletcher,” McLean said sternly. “I would never forgive myself if some disaffected person was to take a shot at our uniforms and struck you instead.” McLean had tried to dissuade Bethany from accompanying the reconnaissance, but he had not tried over-enthusiastically, acknowledging to himself that the company of a pretty girl was a rare delight.

James Fletcher dismissed the fear. “No one will shoot at the
Felicity
,” he said confidently, “and besides, most folks round here are loyal to his majesty.”

“As you are, Mister Fletcher?” Lieutenant John Moore asked pointedly.

James paused, and the brigadier saw the flicker of his eyes towards his sister. Then James grinned. “I’ve no quarrel with the king,” he said. “He leaves me alone and I leave him alone, and so the two of us rub along fair enough.”

“So you will take the oath?” McLean asked, and saw how solemnly Beth gazed at her brother.

“Don’t have much choice, sir, do I? Not if I want to fish and scratch a living.”

Brigadier McLean had issued a proclamation to the country about Majabigwaduce, assuring the inhabitants that if they were loyal to his majesty and took the oath swearing to that loyalty, then they would have nothing to fear from his forces, but if any man refused the oath, then the proclamation promised hard times to him and his family. “You do indeed have a choice,” McLean said.

“We were raised to love the king, sir,” James said.

“I’m glad to hear it.” McLean said. He gazed at the dark woods. “I understood,” the brigadier went on, “that the authorities in Boston have been conscripting men?”

“That they have,” James agreed.

“Yet you have not been conscripted?”

“Oh, they tried,” james said dismissively, “but they’re leery of this part of Massachusetts.”

“Leery?”

“Not much sympathy for the rebellion here, General.”

“But some folk here are disaffected?” McLean asked.

“A few,” James said, “but some folk are never happy.”

“A lot of folks here fled from Boston,” Bethany said, “and they’re all loyalists.”

“When the British left, Miss Fletcher? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, sir. Like Doctor Calef. He had no wish to stay in a city ruled by rebellion, sir.”

“Was that your fate?” John Moore asked.

“Oh no,” James said, “our family’s been here since God made the world.”

“Your parents live in Majabigwaduce?” the brigadier asked.

“Father’s in the burying ground, God rest him,” James said.

“I’m sorry,” McLean said.

“And Mother’s good as dead,” James went on.

“James!” Bethany said reprovingly.

“Crippled, bedridden, and speechless,” James said. Six years before, he explained, when Bethany was twelve and James fourteen, their widowed mother had been gored by a bull she had been leading to pasture. Then, two years later, she had suffered a stroke that had left her stammering and confused.

“Life is hard on us,” McLean said. He stared at a log house built close to the river’s bank and noted the huge heap of firewood stacked against one outer wall. “And it must be hard,” he went on, “to make a new life in a wilderness if you are accustomed to a city like Boston.”

“Wilderness, General?” James asked, amused.

“It is hard for the Boston folk who came here, sir,” Bethany said more usefully.

“They have to learn to fish, General,” James said, “or grow crops, or cut wood.”

“You grow many crops?” McLean asked.

“Rye, oats, and potatoes,” Bethany answered, “and corn, sir.”

“They can trap, General,” James put in. “Our dad made a fine living from trapping! Beaver, marten, weasels.”

“He caught an ermine once,” Bethany said proudly.

“And doubtless that scrap of fur is round some fine lady’s neck in London, General,” James said. “Then there’s mast timber,” he went on. “Not so much in Majabigwaduce, but plenty upriver, and any man can learn to cut and trim a tree. And there are sawmills aplenty! Why there must be thirty sawmills between here and the river’s head. A man can make scantlings or staves, boards or posts, anything he pleases!”

“You trade in timber?” McLean asked.

“I fish, General, and it’s a poor man who can’t keep his family alive by fishing.”

“What do you catch?”

“Cod, General, and cunners, haddock, hake, eel, flounder, pollock, skate, mackerel, salmon, alewives. We have more fish than we know what to do with! And all good eating! It’s what gives our Beth her pretty complexion, all that fish!”

Bethany gave her brother a fond glance. “You’re silly, James,” she said.

“You are not married, Miss Fletcher?” the general asked.

“No, sir.”

“Our Beth was betrothed, General,” James explained, “to a rare good man. Captain of a schooner. She was to be married this spring.”

McLean looked gently at the girl. “Was to be?”

“He was lost at sea, sir,” Bethany said.

“Fishing on the banks,” James explained. “He got caught by a nor’easter, General, and the nor’easters have blown many a good man out of this world to the next.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’ll find another,” James said carelessly. “She’s not the ugliest girl in the world,” he grinned, “are you?”

The brigadier turned his gaze back to the shore. He some-times allowed himself the small luxury of imagining that no enemy would come to attack him, but he knew that was unlikely. McLean’s small force was now the only British presence between the Canadian border and Rhode Island and the rebels would surely want that presence destroyed. They would come. He pointed south. “We might return now?” he suggested, and Bethany obliged by turning the
Felicity
into the wind. Her brother hardened the jib, staysail, and main so that the small boat tipped as she beat into the brisk breeze and sharp dashes of spray slapped against the three officers’ red coats. McLean looked again at Majabigwaduce’s high western bluff that faced onto the wide river. “If you were in command here,” he asked his two lieutenants, “how would you defend the place?” Lieutenant Campbell, a lank youth with a prominent nose and an equally prominent adam’s apple, swallowed nervously and said nothing, while young Moore just leaned back on the heaped nets as though contemplating an afternoon’s sleep. “Come, come,” the brigadier chided the pair, “tell me what you would do.”

“Does that not depend on what the enemy does, sir?” Moore asked idly.

“Then assume with me that they arrive with a dozen or more ships and, say, fifteen hundred men?”

Moore closed his eyes, while Lieutenant Campbell tried to look enthusiastic. “We put our guns on the bluff, sir,” he offered, gesturing towards the high ground that dominated the river and harbor entrance.

“But the bay is wide,” McLean pointed out, “so the enemy can pass us on the farther bank and land upstream of us. Then they cross the neck,” he pointed to the narrow isthmus of low ground that connected Majabigwaduce to the mainland, “and attack us from the landward side.”

Campbell frowned and bit his lip as he pondered that suggestion. “So we put guns there too, sir,” he offered, “maybe a smaller fort?”

McLean nodded encouragingly, then glanced at Moore. “Asleep, Mister Moore?”

Moore smiled, but did not open his eyes. “
Wer alles verteidigt, verteidigt nichts
,” he said.

“I believe
der alte Fritz
thought of that long before you did, Mister Moore,” McLean responded, then smiled at Bethany. “Our paymaster is showing off, Miss Fletcher, by quoting Frederick the Great. He’s also quite right, he who defends everything defends nothing. So,” the brigadier looked back to Moore, “what would you defend here at Majabigwaduce?”

“I would defend, sir, that which the enemy wishes to possess.”

“And that is?”

“The harbor, sir.”

“So you would allow the enemy to land their troops on the neck?” McLean asked. The brigadier’s reconnaissance had convinced him that the rebels would probably land north of Majabigwaduce. They might try to enter the harbor, fighting their way through Mowat’s sloops to land troops on the beach below the fort, but if McLean was in command of the rebels he reckoned he would choose to land on the wide, shelving beach of the isthmus. By doing that, the enemy would cut him off from the mainland and could assault his ramparts safe from any cannon-fire from the Royal Navy vessels. There was a small chance that they might be daring and assault the bluff to gain the peninsula’s high ground, but the bluff’s slope was dauntingly steep. He sighed inwardly. He could not defend everything because, as the great Frederick had said, by defending everything a man defended nothing.

“They’ll land somewhere, sir,” Moore answered the brigadier’s question, “and there’s little we can do can stop them landing, not if they come in sufficient force. But why do they land, sir?”