The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War - xaviantvision

emembered the tall American in his green coat charging across the clearing. He could still see the man's upraised cutlass blade reflecting the day's newlight, the bared teeth, the intensity of hatred on the rebel's face, the determination to kill, and Moore remembered his own panic and the sheer luck thathad saved his life. He made himself drink more tea. "Why do they wear white crossbelts?" he asked."White crossbelts?" Beth was puzzled."You could hardly see them in the trees, except they wore white belts and that made them visible," Moore said. "Black crossbelts," he said, "they shouldbe black," and he had a sudden vision of the spray of blood from Sergeant McClure's mouth. "I killed them," he said, "by being selfish.""It was your first fight," Beth said sympathetically.And it had been so different from anything Moore had expected. In his mind, for years, there had been a vision of redcoats drawn up in three ranks, theirflags bright above them, the enemy similarly arrayed and the bands playing as the muskets volleyed. Cavalry was always resplendent in their finery,decorating the dream-fields of glory, but instead Moore's first battle had been a chaotic defeat in dark woods. The enemy had been in the trees and hismen, ranked in their red line, had been easy targets for those men in green coats. "But why white crossbelts?" he asked again."Were there many dead?" Beth asked."Six of my men," Moore answered bleakly. He remembered the stench of shit from McPhail's corpse and closed his eyes as if he could blot thatmemory away."Among the rebels?" Beth asked anxiously."Some, yes, I don't know." Moore was too distracted by guilt to hear the anxiety in Bethany's voice. "The rest of the picquet ran away, but they must havekilled some.""And now?"Moore finished the tea. He was not looking at Beth, but gazing at the ships in the harbor, noting how HMS Albany seemed to shiver when her gunsfired. "We did it all wrong," he said, frowning. "We should have moved most of the picquet to the beach and shot at them as they rowed towards the shore,then put more men halfway up the slope. We could have beaten them!" He put the mug on the logs and saw that his hand was no longer shaking. Hestood. "I'm sorry, Miss Fletcher, I never thanked you for the tea.""You did, Lieutenant," Beth said. "Doctor Calef told me to give it to you," she added."That was kind of him. Are you helping him?""We all are," Beth said, meaning the women of Majabigwaduce. She watched Moore, noting the blood on his finely tailored clothes. He looked soyoung, she thought, just a boy with a long sword."I must get back to the fort," Moore said. "Thank you for the tea." His job, he remembered, was to burn the oaths before the rebels discovered them.And the rebels would come now, he was sure, and all he was good for was burning papers because he had failed. He had killed six of his men by makingthe wrong decision and John Moore was certain that General McLean would not let him lead any more men to their deaths.He walked back to the fort, where the flag still flew. The harbor was a sudden cauldron of noise as more guns filled the shallow basin with smoke and,as Moore reached the fort's entrance, he saw why. Three enemy ships were under foresails and topsails, and they were sailing straight for the harbor.They were coming to finish the job.Commodore Saltonstall had promised to engage the enemy shipping with gunfire and so had cleared the Warren for action. Fog had prevented anengagement at first light and once that fog lifted there was a further delay because the Charming Sally, one of the privateers that would support theWarren, had a fouled anchor, but at last Captain Holmes solved the problem by buoying the anchor cable and casting it overboard, and so the three shipssailed slowly eastwards on the light wind. The commodore planned to sail into the harbor mouth and there use the frigate's powerful broadside to batterthe three enemy sloops. The heaviest British guns on those sloops were nine-pounders, while the Warren had twelve- and eighteen-pounders, guns thatwould mangle British timber and British flesh. The commodore would have liked nothing more than to have used those big guns on the thirty-two impudentmen who had dared send him a letter which, though expressed in the politest words, implicitly accused him of cowardice. How dare they! He shook withsuppressed anger as he recalled the letter. There were times, the commodore thought, when the notion that all men were created equal led to nothing butinsolence.He turned to see that the Black Prince and Charming Sally were following his frigate. The battery on Cross Island was already firing at the three Britishsloops which now barricaded the harbor's center. There was water at either end of the British line, but the larger transport ships had been moored to blockthose shallow channels. Not that Saltonstall had any intention of piercing or flanking Mowat's ships; he simply wanted to keep the Royal Marines on boardthe enemy sloops while Lovell assaulted the fort.The wind was slight. Saltonstall had ordered battle-sails, which meant his two big courses, the mainsail and foresail, were furled onto their yards so thattheir canvas would not block the view forrard. He had kept the staysail furled for the same reason, so the Warren was being driven by flying jib, jib, andtopsails. She went slowly, creeping ever closer to the narrow entrance between Cross Island and Dyce's Head, which was now in American hands.Saltonstall could see the green coats of his marines on that height. They were watching the Warren and evidently cheering because they waved their hatstowards the frigate.The three British sloops had been shooting towards the rebel battery on Cross Island until they saw the topsails loosed on the enemy ships, when theyhad immediately ceased fire so that their guns could be levered round to point at the harbor mouth. Every cannon was double-shotted so that two roundshots would be fired by each gun in the first broadside. The Warren, by far the largest warship in the Penobscot River, looked huge as she loomed in theentrance narrows. Captain Mowat, standing on the Albany's afterdeck, was surprised that only three ships were approaching, though he was more thansensible that three ships were sufficient. Still, he reckoned, if he had commanded the rebel fleet he would have sent every available vessel in anirresistible and overwhelming attack. He trained his glass on the Warren, noting that there were no marines on her forecastle, which suggested the frigatewas not planning to try and board his sloops. Maybe the marines were hiding? The frigate's cutwater appeared huge in his glass. He collapsed the tubesand nodded to his first lieutenant. "You may open fire," Mowat said.Mowat's three sloops had twenty-eight guns in their combined broadsides, a mix of nine- and six-pounders, and all of them shot two balls at the Warren.The noise of the guns filled the wide basin of Penobscot Bay while the Half Moon Battery, which had been dug into the harbor slope west of the fort,added her four twelve-pounders. All of those round shot were aimed at the Warren's bows, and the frigate shuddered under their massive blows. "You willreturn the fire, Mister Fenwick!" Saltonstall shouted at his first lieutenant, and Fenwick gave the order, but the only guns that the Warren could use were itstwo nine-pounder bow-chasers, which fired together to shroud the rearing bowsprit with smoke. The Warren's bows were being splintered by round shot,the impacts sending shock waves through the hull. A man was screaming in the fo'c'sle, a sound that irritated Saltonstall.His ship palpably slowed under the constant blows. Dudley Saltonstall, standing next to the impassive helmsman, could hear timbers splintering. Hewas not an imaginative man, but it suddenly struck him that this vicious, concentrated gunfire was an expression of British anger against the rebels whohad captured the high ground of their peninsula. Defeated on land they were revenging themselves with cannon-fire, well-aimed, brisk and efficientcannon-fire, and Saltonstall seethed with anger that his fine ship should be its victim. A twelve-pounder ball, fired from the harbor shore, struck a forrardnine-pounder, shearing its breech lines, shattering a trunnion, and slaughtering two crewmen whose blood spattered twenty feet across the deck. A spewof intestines lay like an untidy rope in the ugly bloodstain. The nine-pounder sagged in its carriage. One man had lost half his head, the other had beeneviscerated by the ball, which had lost its volition and come to rest by the starboard gangway."Swab the deck!" Saltonstall shouted. "Be lively!" A lieutenant called for seamen to fetch buckets of water, but before they could wash the sprawlingblood from the scrubbed planks, the commodore shouted again. "Belay that order!"Mister Fenwick, the first lieutenant, stared at Saltonstall. The commodore was famous for keeping a spanking clean ship, yet he had reversed the orderto swab the deck? "Sir?" Fenwick called uncertainly."Leave it be," Saltonstall insisted. He half-smiled to himself. An idea had occurred to him and he liked it. "Throw that offal overboard," he gestured tothe spilled intestines, "but leave the blood."A twelve-pounder ball struck the mainmast with enough force to make the canvas of the big maintopsail quiver. Saltonstall watched the mast, wonderingif it would fall, but the great spar held. "Summon the carpenter, Mister Coningsby," he ordered."Aye aye, sir," Midshipman Fanning, resigned to being called Coningsby, answered."I want a report on the mainmast. Don't just stand there! Look lively!"Fanning ran to a companionway to find the ship's carpenter who, he suspected, would be somewhere forrard surveying the damage that was beingdone to the Warren's bows where most of the enemy shots were slamming into the frigate. A nine-pounder ball slashed the shrouds of the spritsail yard sothat it dangled into the water, though luckily the spritsail itself was not bent onto the spar and so the canvas could not drag in the water to slow the Warreneven more. The jibboom was cut through and the remnant of the bowsprit was being held by only one shroud, and still the cannon-balls crashed home.