Redcoat Page 4

  “I will do it proper,” Nate said sullenly.

  “You’re daft as lights! You never did anything proper! Have you got any ordinary clothes? You can’t bugger about in a red coat, Nate. One side or other will have you. You need proper clothes, you need some money, you need to know where you’re going. You have to have somewhere to hide the first two days till the cavalry’s gone. Have you thought of any of that? Have you?”

  “You have,” Nate said stubbornly.

  “Aye, but I’m not running,” Sam said firmly, then dipped his brush in the water to scrub at the mare’s pelt.

  “Oh, that’s grand.” The voice came from a tall man who must have crept like a stalker through the willow shrubs and who now stepped on to the trunk of the fallen tree. He stood, legs apart and face shadowed by the peak of his silver-fronted tricorn hat, staring at Maggie and Nate. He was a big man, strong chested and flat bellied, who wore a brushed uniform on which the buttons were polished to a gleaming sheen. A handsome man, too, with a kind of power in his face and voice that cowed other men. “Kiss the girls and make them cry, is that it, Nate?” The sergeant, despite his clean boots, jumped into the stream and walked towards the lovers.

  Maggie twitched her arm from Nate’s elbow and raised the oxtail in a pathetic attempt to placate Sergeant Michael Scammell. “I got this for you.”

  “Fuck that.” Scammell whipped at the scrap of meat with his metal-topped cane, sending it spinning into the long grass beside the stream. He brought the cane whistling back, slicing it hard over his wife’s cheek. “Now piss off, Maggie! And wait for me. Move!” He screamed the last word as though he ordered a whole battalion to his bidding.

  Maggie, terrified of her husband, scrambled from the stream.

  Scammell watched her go, then turned back to face Nate. “You want to do something about that, Private Gilpin?”

  “We was only talking, Sergeant.”

  “Shut your face!” The cane flicked out, scoring down Nate’s jawbone. “If I smell you on her, Nate Gilpin, I’ll cut your liver out and push it down your bloody throat. You understand me?”

  “We was only talking.”

  “Only talking!” Scammell moved with a sudden vicious speed to hook Nate’s ankles with his right boot and elbow him down into the stream. Scammell had no physical fear. At Brandywine, when a trapped rebel company had threatened a desperate charge to escape, Scammell had plunged into them with a musket and bayonet and Sam remembered the cold efficiency with which this man had killed. A good man to have at one’s side in a battle, but not a man to have as an enemy.

  Now Scammell stood above Nate and put his cane beside Nate’s face, turning it. “See that?” A body, soaked in blood and with tatters of skin hanging from its spine, was being carried away from the flogging triangle. The man had died beneath the lash. “You see what happens, Nate Gilpin, when you aggravate your betters?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  The cane rapped Nate’s face back so he had to stare up into Scammell’s tough, knowing eyes. “I’ll have you on a bloody triangle and I’ll flog you myself!” Scammell hissed the words at Nate. “If you so much as look at my bloody woman again, Private Gilpin, I’ll have you on a flogging charge and I’ll have the skin off your fucking back. You hear me?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “The girls like you, don’t they? Handsome Nate!” Scammell’s face suddenly twisted in a shudder of anger and he slashed with the cane again, once, twice, opening cuts on Nate’s cheek and forehead. Then the Sergeant stepped back. “Get up and piss off.” The scorn of the stronger man for the weaker was absolute.

  Nate scrambled out of the stream and Sergeant Scammell watched him go, then sat himself on a branch of the fallen willow. He wiped a smear of blood from the cane’s tip. “Are they planning to run, Sam?”

  “Not if I can help it, Sarge.”

  “That’s not what I bloody asked, is it?”

  Sam looked at Scammell. Other men hated this tall, confident sergeant, but Sam was not so bothered. He recognized Scammell’s virtues which, though harsh, kept the company safe in battle, and, by treating the big sergeant with a fearless honesty, Sam had found he was treated fairly in return. “They’re not going to run, Sarge.”

  “They must be bloody brain-sick.” Scammell sounded genuinely puzzled. “Do they think I don’t notice?”

  Sam did not like to say that his brother was in love, and that lovers were always brain-sick. “Nate was always daft, but he doesn’t mean any harm, Sarge.”

  “He means to have my whore!” Scammell’s eyes were oddly unsettling, perhaps because they suggested that he could snap into a sudden violent rage at any moment. “Maggie’s a whore, but she’s my whore. If anyone’s going to sell her, Sam, it’s me. Not your brother.”

  “I told him that, Sarge.” Sam had hated watching Scammell cut his brother’s face, but to have offered brotherly assistance would have been to invite a flogging on a charge of striking a superior officer. The knack of the army was caution, and Sam reckoned he had that knack pretty well mastered.

  Scammell opened his pouch and took out a tuft of red wool. “For you.”

  Sam took it. The tuft was about three inches long, tightly woven, and dyed a brilliant red. “What is it?”

  “Put it on your hat. We’re all going to wear them, Sam.” Scammell laughed. “Remember that other night, when we stuck those bloody Yankees? The bastards are whining now, aren’t they? Saying we was unfair. We should have woken them up before we killed them. So the lily-white bastards have said they’ll take revenge and we’re going to show them who to aim for, Sam. Wear it to show them who did the damage. They say we’re murderers, so we’ll be proud of it. The buggers will think twice the next time they see the red hackle on the hats, won’t they?”

  “I think they will.” Sam was oddly pleased, reckoning that the red badge was a mark of honour. He tossed it on to the bank beside his stiff black tricorn. “I’ll sew it on tonight, Sarge.”

  Scammell still sat on the willow branch. “I watched you the other night, Sam. You were good.”

  “Yankees were asleep,” Sam said in a modest disclaimer of the praise, yet the sergeant’s approval was oddly pleasurable. It gave Sam status as a fully-fledged soldier, one who could join the small élite of hard men who, with Scammell’s approval, formed the heart of the company.

  “You’re a good lad, Sam, so don’t spoil it.”

  “Spoil it, Sarge?”

  Scammell scooped a handful of water to his mouth, then stood. “If Romeo and Juliet piss off, Sam, I might reckon it was your fault for not keeping an eye on your brother. You understand me? And then I might get unhappy with you. So watch him, and there won’t be no trouble.”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  “Or he’ll be dead.” Scammell climbed on to the bank. “We’re Bloodybacks, Sam, and we stay Bloodybacks till we’re wounded or dead. There’s no way out, none.” Scammell picked up the oxtail from the grass. “We took the oath, Sam, and we’re here till they push us under the daisies. Tell your brother that.” He nodded a curt farewell, then strode towards the turf bivouacs.

  Sam brushed the mare’s docked tail a last time, then flopped into the stream to cool himself. Fires sent the smell of cooking into the sky to mingle with the camp stench of thousands of unwashed men and women that was now so familiar to Sam that he did not even notice it. He found himself looking forward to the coming meal, to the conversation about the fire, and to the small laughter of comrades. He knew Nate’s foolishness could risk that small happiness.

  Because, for a Redcoat, there was no paradise; only the army, the smoke of battle, and the pride of a red hackle that proclaimed a man’s expertise at the slaughter. Sam had taken the King’s Shilling, and in return he had promised his life. Sam would be a Redcoat till death, and be bloody proud of it too.

  Four

  The ridges faded into a far distance, each ridge dark with trees, yet each ridge more faintly limned until, at th
e western horizon, the hills melted into the shimmer of pale sky. In the valleys between the ridges there were farms, roads, even small towns, yet from this vantage point the landscape seemed virgin. “Like Britain,” Sir William said, “when the Romans came.”

  “Not the happiest simile, perhaps?” Lord Robert Massedene ventured. “You remember they left, sir.”

  “So they did.” Sir William spoke absently. To the south-west, and evidently drawing his attention, there was a smudge of smoke in the cloudless sky, but the smoke was too distant for any of the horsemen to tell what burned. A forest fire? A house? They feared something worse, but none was willing to express the fear aloud.

  The horsemen were on a bare hill. Beneath them, curling about the hill’s base towards a ford, an earthen road was stirred into a choking dust by marching men. Battalion after battalion, trudging with the mindless step of weary men, followed their mounted officers towards the day’s bivouac. Guns, their bright barrels dimmed by the dust, spewed up yet more dust that settled on the high wagons of sutlers and engineers. The army’s women and children straggled along the road’s verges. The day was hot with the steamy, breath-stealing heat of the American summer, and the horsemen knew how the marching men would be sweating in their thick woollen uniforms.

  A red-coated horseman spurred along the road, scattering the camp followers until, seeing the bright uniforms above him, he turned his horse to the slope. The horse’s hooves spurted small plumes of dust from the dry ground.

  The man, a captain, curbed his sweating mare beside Sir William. “No news yet, sir.”

  Sir William had been made hopeful by the horseman’s evident haste, but he showed no visible regrets at the lack of news. “You look hot, John!”

  “It’s a damnably hot country, sir. God knows why we fight for the bloody place.”

  “For their own good, I suppose.” Sir William turned back to the west and continued his fruitless search of the heat-hazed landscape.

  Sir William was a burly man, heavy in his saddle, with a dark coarse face which went ill with the gaudy lace and shining braid of his senior rank. The face suggested a man of little thought and choleric temper, but in truth Major-General Sir William Howe, Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Army in North America, was a lazy, placid, and most genial man. A kindly man, known as Good-Natured Billy to his friends and aides, but a man capable of a country squire’s coarseness when, as rarely happened, his wrath was provoked. He turned back to the newcomer. “The Rangers left this morning, John?”

  “Yes, sir.” Captain John Andre, aide-de-camp to General Grey, confirmed that the Rangers had indeed ridden into the endlessly ridged landscape that shimmered in the heat.

  “I suppose watching won’t help.” Sir William swung himself from his saddle, then groaned as a stab of pain pierced his spine. Sir William’s father had suffered dreadfully from a pained back, and Sir William feared the same affliction, but this twinge happily passed swiftly. “You can eat with us, John?”

  “That’s why I hurried, sir. Your table puts General Grey’s to shame.”

  “I’m serving mere commons today, John, but you’re most welcome!” Sir William liked John Andre, and would dearly have liked to make the young man into one of his own aides, but he dared not poach from another general. That was irritating, for Sir William needed another aide now that the army was strung along the winding Pennsylvanian roads, rather than crammed into its New York garrison where messages could be so quickly acknowledged.

  Sir William, as the horsemen dismounted and their servants fetched food and wine to the hilltop, strolled to the eastern edge of the hill and gazed at the gentle hills and deep woods that stretched to a far river plain made faint by the haze of heat. “A remarkable landscape,” he said happily.

  Captain Lord Robert Massedene knew how fond his master was of all things American. Some country chapel with rotting boards and a sagging roofline could elicit Sir William’s admiration simply because it had had a lick of new limewash and thereby demonstrated the triumph of diligence over adversity. Massedene knew how senseless it would be to express his opinion that the landscape was really rather commonplace. “Magnificent, sir.”

  Sir William peered at a glint of silver which glimmered on the far plain. He supposed the bright gleam to be the River Delaware. “Shouldn’t we be able to see Philadelphia from here?”

  “Unless we landed in the wrong place.” Lord Robert Massedene was twenty-two, and the son of one of Sir William’s friends, which had made his appointment as an aide to Sir William a matter of tactful necessity, though Sir William had never regretted the enforced choice. Robert Massedene was short and stocky, with a boyish round face that bore a cheerful and indomitable grin. He was a younger son, doomed by primogeniture never to inherit wealth, and had chosen instead to earn his living by the sword which hung from silver chains at his waist.

  “The city’s to the right, sir.” John Andre joined the two men and pointed to where, in the hazed distance, Philadelphia was hidden by a swell of wooded ground.

  Sir William stared into the shimmering landscape. “Music,” he said suddenly. “Music!”

  The young aides, who were as fond of Sir William as he was of them, smiled at this sudden and inexplicable enthusiasm. “You want us to sing to you, sir?” said Lord Robert jokingly.

  “If you insist, Robert, but I was thinking more of Philadelphia.” Sir William turned to see how his servants were progressing with the preparation of dinner. “We must have music in the city. I want to see people happy. It must be a glow in dark times, a winter of joyfulness.” Sir William spoke with a fervour that contrasted with his usually placid disposition. He was a distant cousin of the King, yet he hated the royal policy and had, when the rebellion began, sworn never to fight against the colonists he so admired. Impecunity had changed Sir William’s mind, for he needed the commander-in-chief’s salary to pay his manifold debts, yet, even above his appointment as commander-in-chief, he valued his appointment as Peace Commissioner. He yearned for peace and believed the prize would come with Philadelphia.

  John Andre smiled. “But there won’t be any joy in the city, sir, till we’ve taken the river forts.”

  “We’ll take them, John.” Sir William seemed to dismiss the problem of clearing away the rebel forts that barred Philadelphia from the sea, and which would stop British ships bringing supplies into the city. “Is there a theatre in Philadelphia?”

  “There was four years ago, sir, though the churches wanted it closed.”

  “We could have a winter season of the drama, you think?”

  “Your second-in-command,” John Andre said slyly, “would suggest you hung Mister Washington first?”

  “My Lord Cornwallis would,” Sir William was not above a gentle mockery of his own, “but even My Lord knows you can’t conquer a wilderness. Look at it!” He gestured westwards towards the receding and fading ridges. “It goes to the world’s end! No, our best hope is to prove that the rebels have nothing to fear from us, nothing at all! We shall seduce them with success and dazzle them with benignity, isn’t that what you told me?”

  “I was ever eloquent.” Andre, half Swiss, was an elegant and clever man who knew how to amuse his elders. “Ah! Salmagundi! Chicken! I see we shall not starve today.”

  The soldiers slogged along the road while, above them, Sir William and his military family dined. Besides John Andre there were three other aides, as well as Sir William’s Hessian interpreter, and his private secretary. Hamlet, Sir William’s dog, was pampered by all of them; fed the choicest meat and tempted with water flavoured with wine. The horses cropped at the hill’s thin grass and the servants waited out of earshot. It was a gentle scene, only lacking ladies to give it domestic charm, yet it was spoilt for Sir William by the worries that constantly made him search the western view.

  John Andre, knowing just what disturbed Sir William, essayed reassurance. “It’ll arrive today, sir.”

  “You said as much yesterday, John.” Sir Wil
liam, the food forgotten, gazed westwards. “If Mister Washington did but know it, we can scarce fight a battle!”

  “We’ve ammunition enough for one victory,” Lord Massedene said soothingly.

  “So Mister Washington can afford to lose one more battle, then gain a famous victory immediately afterwards!” Sir William absent-mindedly caressed his dog’s ears. “Unless he’s given up after the last drubbing?”

  “Mister Washington,” Andre said, “is like a man with a headache who constantly seeks a brick wall against which to hammer his skull. No, sir. He’ll turn up again. He yearns for military glory.”

  “If he turns up today,” Sir William said, “he’ll get it! We’re an army without balls!”

  The aides smiled at the coarse jest which was, in all sadness, nearly true. Sir William’s army, ever manoeuvring itself closer to Philadelphia, was fast exhausting its stocks of musket cartridges. It was not battle which had depleted the men’s cartouches, but fear. Each night, marooned in the vastness of the American wilderness, the picquets became nervous. They fired at phantoms, and in minutes whole battalions were woken, had seized their muskets, and were joining the fusillade of crackling and sparking shots that flayed the empty night with noise and lead. Orders and threats had failed to stem the waste.

  It was a waste of fearful cost. Each paper-wrapped cartridge had to be brought from Britain to New York, and thence in smaller ships to the Chesapeake Bay, from where it was dragged in wagons over the ragged roads. Cartridges were like gold, yet each night the infantry hammered the empty darkness as though they possessed an inexhaustible supply. Threats to flog the offenders had not worked, for a whole army offended and Sir William’s only hope now was the arrival of a convoy of wagons loaded with the precious ammunition.