The Fort. Bernard Cornwell
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Mowat said brusquely. He was the senior naval officer at Majabigwaduce and, like Brigadier McLean, a Scotsman, but where the brigadier was emollient and soft-spoken, Mowat was famed for his bluntness. He fidgeted with the cord-bound hilt of his sword. ‘The bastards will come, Doctor, mark my word, the bastards will come. Like flies to dung, Doctor, they’ll come.’
Calef thought that likening the British presence at Majabigwaduce to dung was an unfortunate choice, but he made no comment on that. ‘In force?’ he asked.
‘They may be damned rebels, but they’re not damned fools. Of course they’ll come in force.’ Mowat still gazed at the anchored ship, then cupped his hands. ‘Mister Farraby,’ he bellowed across the water, ‘what the devil is happening?’
‘Roving a new sling, sir!’ the call came back.
‘How many guns will you bring ashore?’ the doctor enquired.
‘As many as McLean wants,’ Mowat said. His three sloops of war were anchored fore and aft to make a line across the harbour’s mouth, their starboard broadsides facing the entrance to greet any rebel ship that dared intrude. Those broadsides were puny. HMS North, which lay closest to Majabigwaduce’s beach, carried twenty guns, ten on each side, while the Albany, at the centre, and the Nautilus, each carried nine cannons in their broadsides. An enemy ship would thus be greeted by twenty-eight guns, none throwing a ball larger than nine pounds, and the last intelligence Mowat had received from Boston indicated that a rebel frigate was in that harbour, a frigate that mounted thirty-two guns, most of which would be much larger than his small cannon. And the rebel frigate Warren would be supported by the privateers of Massachusetts, most of whose craft were just as heavily gunned as his own sloops of war. ‘It’ll be a fight,’ he said sourly, ‘a rare good fight.’
The new sling had evidently been roved because a nine-pounder gun barrel was being hoisted from the Albany’s deck and gently lowered into one of the waiting longboats. Over a ton of metal hung from the yardarm, poised above the heads of the pigtailed sailors waiting in the small boat below. Mowat was bringing his port broadsides ashore so the guns could protect the fort McLean was building on Majabigwaduce’s crest. ‘If you abandon your portside guns,’ Calef enquired in a puzzled tone, ‘what happens if the enemy passes you?’
‘Then, sir, we are dead men,’ Mowat said curtly. He watched the longboat settle precariously low in the choppy water as it took the weight of the cannon’s barrel. The carriage would be brought ashore in another boat and, like the barrel, be hauled uphill to the site of the fort by one of the two teams of oxen that had been commandeered from the Hutchings farm. ‘Dead men!’ Mowat said, almost cheerfully, ‘but to kill us, Doctor, they must first pass us, and I do not intend to be passed.’
Calef felt relief at Mowat’s belligerence. The Scottish naval captain was famous in Massachusetts, or perhaps infamous was a better word, but to all loyalists, like Calef, Mowat was a hero who inspired confidence. He had been captured by rebel civilians, the self-styled Sons of Liberty, while walking ashore in Falmouth. His release had been negotiated by the leading citizens of that proud harbour town, and the condition of Mowat’s release had been that he surrender himself next day so that the legality of his arrest could be established by lawyers, but instead Mowat had returned with a flotilla that had bombarded the town from dawn to dusk and, when most of the houses lay shattered, he had sent shore parties to set fire to the wreckage. Two thirds of Falmouth had been destroyed to send the message that Captain Mowat was not a man to be trifled with.
Calef frowned slightly as Brigadier McLean and two junior officers strolled along the stony beach towards Mowat. Calef still had doubts about the Scottish brigadier, fearing that he was too gentle in his demeanour, but Captain Mowat evidently had no such misgivings because he smiled broadly as McLean approached. ‘You’ve not come to pester me, McLean,’ he said with mock severity, ‘your precious guns are coming!’
‘I never doubted it, Mowat, never doubted it,’ McLean said, ‘not for a moment.’ He touched his hat to Doctor Calef, then turned back to Mowat. ‘And how are your fine fellows this morning, Mowat?’
‘Working, McLean, working!’
McLean gestured at his two companions. ‘Doctor, allow me to present Lieutenant Campbell of the 74th,’ McLean paused to allow the dark-kilted Campbell to offer the doctor a small bow, ‘and Paymaster Moore of the 82nd.’ John Moore offered a more elegant bow, Calef raised his hat in response and McLean turned to gaze at the three sloops with the longboats nuzzling their flanks. ‘Your longboats are all busy, Mowat?’
‘They’re busy, and so they damn well should be. Idleness encourages the devil.’
‘So it does,’ Calef agreed.
‘And there was I seeking an idle moment,’ McLean said happily.
‘You need a boat?’ Mowat asked.
‘I’d not take your matelots from their duties,’ the brigadier said, then looked past Mowat to where a young man and woman were hauling a heavy wooden rowboat down to the incoming tide. ‘Isn’t that the young fellow who piloted us into the harbour?’
Doctor Calef turned. ‘James Fletcher,’ he said grimly.
‘Is he loyal?’ McLean asked.
‘He’s a damned light-headed fool,’ Calef said, and then, grudgingly, ‘but his father was a loyal man.’
‘Then like father, like son, I trust,’ McLean said and turned to Moore. ‘John? Ask Mister Fletcher if he can spare us an hour?’ It was evident that Fletcher and his sister were planning to row to their fishing boat, the Felicity, which lay in deeper water. ‘Tell him I wish to see Majabigwaduce from the river and will pay for his time.’
Moore went on his errand and McLean watched as another cannon barrel was hoisted aloft from the Albany’s deck. Smaller boats were ferrying other supplies ashore; cartridges and salt beef, rum barrels and cannonballs, wadding and rammers, the paraphernalia of war, all of which was being hauled or carried to where his fort was still little more than a scratched square in the thin turf of the ridge’s top. John Nutting, a Loyalist American and an engineer who had travelled to Britain to urge the occupation of Majabigwaduce, was laying out the design of the stronghold in the cleared land. The fort would be simple enough, just a square of earthen ramparts with diamond-shaped bastions at its four corners. Each of the walls would be two hundred and fifty paces in length and would be fronted by a steep-sided ditch, but even such a simple fort required firesteps and embrasures, and needed masonry magazines that would keep the ammunition dry, and a well deep enough to provide plentiful water. Tents housed the soldiers for the moment, but McLean wanted those vulnerable encampments protected by the fort. He wanted high walls, thick walls, walls manned by men and studded by guns, because he knew that the south-west wind would bring more than the smell of salt and shellfish. It would bring rebels, a swarm of them, and the air would stink of powder-smoke, of turds and of blood.
‘Phoebe Perkins’s child contracted a fever last night,’ Calef said brutally.
‘I trust she will live?’ McLean said.
‘God’s will be done,’ Calef said in a tone that suggested God might not care very much. ‘They’ve named her Temperance.’
‘Temperance! Oh dear, poor girl, poor girl. I shall pray for her,’ McLean said, and pray for ourselves too, he thought, but did not say.
Because the rebels were coming.
Peleg Wadsworth felt awkward as he led Lieutenant-Colonel Revere into the shadowed vastness of one of the armory’s stores where sparrows bickered in the high beams above boxes of muskets and bales of cloth and stacks of iron-hooped barrels. It was true that Wadsworth outranked Revere, but he was almost fifteen years younger than the colonel and he felt a vague inadequacy in the presence of a man of such obvious competence. Revere had a reputation as an engraver, as a silversmith and as a metal-worker, and it showed in his hands that were strong and fire-scarred, the hands of a man who could make and mend, the hands of a practical man. Peleg Wadsworth had been a teacher, and a good one, but