The Fort. Bernard Cornwell
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and masts and rigging. A gull cried overhead, a dog ran along the wharf with a cod’s head in its mouth and a legless beggar shuffled towards him. ‘Wounded at Saratoga, sir,’ the beggar said and Wadsworth handed the man a shilling.
‘Can I hail you a boat, sir?’ Dennis asked.
‘That would be kind.’
Peleg Wadsworth gazed at the fleet and remembered his morning prayers. There was so much confidence in Boston, so much hope and so many expectations, but war, he knew from experience, truly was the devil’s business.
And it was time to go to war.
‘This is not seemly,’ Doctor Calef said.
Brigadier McLean, standing beside the doctor, ignored the protest.
‘It is not seemly!’ Calef said louder.
‘It is necessary,’ Brigadier McLean retorted in a tone harsh enough to startle the doctor. The troops had worshipped in the open air that Sunday morning, the Scottish voices singing strongly in the blustery wind that fetched slaps of rain to dapple the harbour. The Reverend Campbell, the 82nd’s chaplain, had preached from a text in Isaiah: ‘In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan,’ a text that McLean accepted was relevant, but he wondered whether he had a sword strong and great and sore enough to punish the troops he knew would surely come to dislodge him. The rain was falling more steadily now, drenching the ridgetop where the fort was being made and where the two regiments paraded in a hollow square. ‘These men are new to war,’ McLean explained to Calef, ‘and most have never seen a battle, so they need to learn the consequences of disobedience.’ He walked towards the square’s centre where a Saint Andrew’s cross had been erected. A young man, stripped to the waist, was tied to the cross with his back exposed to the wind and rain.
A sergeant pushed a folded strip of leather between the young man’s teeth. ‘Bite on that, boy, and take your punishment like a man.’
McLean raised his voice so that every soldier could hear him. ‘Private Macintosh attempted to desert. In so doing he broke his oath to his king, to his country and to God. For that he will be punished, as will any man here who tries to follow his example.’
‘I don’t care if he’s punished,’ Calef said when the brigadier rejoined him, ‘but must it be done on the Lord’s day? Can it not wait till tomorrow?’
‘No,’ McLean said, ‘it cannot.’ He nodded to the sergeant. ‘Do your duty.’
Two drummer boys would do the whipping while a third beat the strokes on his drum. Private Macintosh had been caught trying to sneak across the low, marshy neck that joined Majabigwaduce to the mainland. That was the only route off the peninsula, unless a man stole a boat or, at a pinch, swam across the harbour, and McLean had placed a picquet in the trees close to the neck. They had brought Macintosh back and he had been sentenced to two hundred lashes, the severest punishment McLean had ever ordered, but he had few enough men as it was and he needed to deter others from desertion.
Desertion was a problem. Most men were content enough, but there were always a few who saw the promise of a better existence in the vastness of North America. Life here was a great deal easier than in the Highlands of Scotland, and Macintosh had made his run and now he would be punished.
‘One!’ the sergeant called.
‘Lay it on hard,’ McLean told the two drummer boys, ‘you’re not here to tickle him.’
‘Two!’
McLean let his mind wander as the leather whips criss-crossed the man’s back. He had seen many floggings in his years of service, and had ordered executions too, because floggings and executions were the enforcers of duty. He saw many of the soldiers staring aghast at the sight, so the punishment was probably working. McLean did not enjoy punishment parades, no one in his right mind would, but they were unavoidable and, with luck, Macintosh would reform into a decent soldier.
And what Leviathan, McLean wondered, would Macintosh have to fight? A schooner captained by a loyalist had put into Majabigwaduce a week before with a report that the rebels in Boston were assembling a fleet and an army. ‘We were told there were forty or more ships coming your way, sir,’ the schooner’s captain had told him, ‘and they’re gathering upwards of three thousand men.’
Maybe that was true and maybe not. The schooner’s captain had not visited Boston, just heard a rumour in Nantucket, and rumour, McLean knew, could inflate a company into a battalion and a battalion into an army. Nevertheless he had taken the information seriously enough to send the schooner back southwards with a despatch to Sir Henry Clinton in New York. The despatch merely said that McLean expected to be attacked soon and could not hold out without reinforcements. Why, he wondered, had he been given so few men and ships? If the crown wanted this piece of country, then why not send an adequate force? ‘Thirty-eight!’ the sergeant shouted. There was blood on Macintosh’s back now, blood diluted by rain, but still enough blood to trickle down and darken the waistband of his kilt. ‘Thirty-nine,’ the sergeant bellowed, ‘and lay it on hard!’
McLean resented the time this punishment parade stole from his preparations. He knew time was short and the fort was nowhere near completed. The trench about the four walls was scarcely two feet deep, the ramparts themselves not much higher. It was an excuse for a fort, a pathetic little earthwork, and he needed both men and time. He had offered wages to any civilian who was willing to work and, when insufficient men came forward, he sent patrols to impress labour.
‘Sixty-one!’ the sergeant shouted. Macintosh was whimpering now, the sound stifled by the leather gag. He shifted his weight and blood squelched in one shoe, then spilt over the shoe’s edge.
‘He’ll not take much more,’ Calef growled. Calef was replacing the battalion surgeon who was sick with a fever.
‘Keep going!’ McLean said.
‘You want to kill him?’
‘I want the battalion,’ McLean said, ‘to be more frightened of the lash than of the enemy.’
‘Sixty-two!’ the sergeant shouted.
‘Tell me,’ McLean suddenly turned on the doctor, ‘why is the rumour being spread that I plan to hang any civilian who supports the rebellion?’
Calef looked uncomfortable. He flinched as the whipped man whimpered again, then looked defiantly at the general. ‘To persuade such disaffected people to leave the region, of course. You don’t want rebels lurking in the woods hereabouts.’
‘Nor do I want a reputation as a hangman! We did not come here to persecute folk, but to persuade them to return to their proper allegiance. I would be grateful, Doctor, if a counter-rumour was propagated. That I have no intentions of hanging any man, rebel or not.’
‘God’s blood, man, I can see bone!’ the doctor protested, ignoring McLean’s strictures. The whimpers had become moans. McLean saw that the drummer boys were using less strength now, not because their arms were weakening, but out of pity, and neither he nor the sergeant corrected them.
McLean stopped the punishment at a hundred lashes. ‘Cut him down, Sergeant,’ he ordered, ‘and carry him to the doctor’s house.’ He turned away from the bloody mess on the cross. ‘Any of you who follow Macintosh’s example will follow him here! Now dismiss the men to their duties.’
The civilians who had volunteered or been conscripted for labour trudged up the hill. One man, tall and gaunt, with wild dark hair and angry eyes pushed his way past McLean’s aides to confront the general. ‘You will be punished for this!’ the man snarled.
‘For what?’ McLean enquired.
‘For working on the Sabbath!’ the man said. He towered over McLean. ‘In all my days I have never worked on the Sabbath, never! You make me a sinner!’
McLean held his temper. A dozen or so other men had paused and were watching the gaunt man, and McLean suspected they would join the protest and