The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War Read online

  “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 bord
er 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?”

  “You tell me.”

  “To capture the harbor, sir, because that is the value of this place.”

  “Thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven, Mister Moore,” McLean said, “and they do want the harbor and they will come for it, but let us hope they do not come soon.”

  “The sooner they come, sir,” Moore said, “the sooner we can kill them.”

  “I would wish to finish the fort first,” McLean said. The fort, which he had decided to name Fort George, was hardly begun. The soil was thin, rocky, and hard to work, and the ridge so thick with trees that a week’s toil had scarcely cleared a sufficient killing ground. If the enemy came soon, McLean knew, he would have small choice but to fire a few defiant guns and then haul down the flag. “Are you a prayerful man, Mister Moore?” McLean asked.

  “Indeed I am, sir.”

  “Then pray the enemy delays,” McLean said fervently, then looked to James Fletcher. “Mister Fletcher, you would land us back on the beach?”

  “That I will, General,” James said cheerfully.

  “And pray for us, Mister Fletcher.”

  “Not sure the good Lord listens to me, sir.”

  “James!” Bethany reproved her brother.

  James grinned. “You need prayers to protect yourself here, General?”

  McLean paused for a moment, then shrugged. “It depends, Mister Fletcher, on the enemy’s strength, but I would wish for twice as many men and twice our number of ships to feel secure.”

  “Maybe they won’t come, sir,” Fletcher said. “Those folks in Boston never took much note of what happens here.” Wisps of fog were drifting with the wind as the Felicity ran past the three sloops of war that guarded the harbor entrance. James Fletcher noted how the three ships were anchored fore and aft so that they could not swing with the tide or wind, thus allowing each sloop to keep its broadside pointed at the harbor entrance. The ship nearest the beach, the North, had two intermittent jets of water pulsing from its portside, and James could hear the clank of the elmwood pumps as men thrust at the long handles. Those pumps rarely stopped, suggesting the North was an ill-found ship, though her guns were doubtless efficient enough to help protect the harbor mouth and, to protect that entrance even further, red-coated Royal Marines were hacking at the thin soil and rocks of Cross Island which edged the southern side of the channel. Fletcher reckoned the marines were making a battery there. Behind the three sloops, and making a second line across the harbor, were three of the transport ships that had carried the redcoats to Majabigwaduce. Those transports were not armed, but their size alone made them a formidable obstacle to any ship that might attempt to pass the smaller sloops.

  McLean handed Fletcher an oilcloth-wrapped parcel of tobacco and one of the Spanish silver dollars that were common currency, as payment for the use of his boat. “Come, Mister Moore,” he called sharply as the paymaster offered Bethany an arm to help her over the uneven beach. “We have work to do!”

  James Fletcher also had work to do. It was still high summer, but the log pile had to be made for the winter and, that evening, he split wood outside their house. He worked deep into the twilight, slashing the ax down hard to splinter logs into usable firewood.

  “You’re thinking, James.” Bethany had come from the house and was watching him. She wore an apron over her gray dress.

  “Is that bad?”

  “You always work too hard when you’re thinking,” she said. She sat on a bench fronting the house. “Mother’s sleeping.”

  “Good,” James said. He left the ax embedded in a stump and sat beside his sister on the bench that overlooked the harbor. The sky was purple and black, the water glinted with little ripples of fading silver about the anchored boats; glimmers of lamplight reflected on the small waves. A bugle sounded from the ridge where two tented encampments housed the redcoats. A picquet of six men guarded the guns and ammunition that had been parked on the beach above the tideline. “That young officer liked you, Beth,” James said. Bethany just smiled, but said nothing. “They’re nice enough fellows,” James said.

  “I like the general,” Bethany said.

  “A decent man, he seems,” James said.

  “I wonder what happened to his arm?”

  “Soldiers, Beth. Soldiers get wounded.”

  “And killed.”

  “Yes.”

  They sat in companionable silence for a while as the darkness closed slow on the river and on the harbor and on the bluff. “So will you sign the oath?” Bethany asked after a while.

  “Not sure I have much choice,” James said bleakly.

  “But will you?”

  James picked a shred of tobacco from between his t
eeth. “Father would have wanted me to sign.”

  “I’m not sure Father thought about it much,” Bethany said. “We never had government here, neither royal nor rebel.”

  “He loved the king.” James said. “He hated the French and loved the king.” He sighed. “We have to make a living, Beth. If I don’t take the oath then they’ll take the Felicity away from us, and than what do we do? I can’t have that.” A dog howled somewhere in the village and James waited till the sound died away. “I like McLean well enough,” he said, “but . . .” He let the thought fade away into the darkness.

  “But?” Bethany asked. her brother shrugged and made no answer. Beth slapped at a mosquito. “‘Choose you this day whom you will serve,’” she quoted, “‘whether the gods which your father served that were on the other side of the flood, or . . .’” She left the Bible verse unfinished.

  “There’s too much bitterness,” James said.

  “You thought it would pass us by?”

  “I hoped it would. What does anyone want with Bagaduce anyway?”

  Bethany smiled. “The Dutch were here, the French made a fort here, it seems the whole world wants us.”

  “But it’s our home, Beth. We made this place, it’s ours.” James paused. He was not sure he could articulate what was in his mind. “You know Colonel Buck left?”

  Buck was the local commander of the Massachusetts Militia and he had fled north up the Penobscot River when the British arrived. “I heard,” Bethany said.

  “And John Lymburner and his friends are saying what a coward Buck is, and that’s just nonsense! It’s all just bitterness, Beth.”

  “So you’ll ignore it?” she asked. “Just sign the oath and pretend it isn’t happening?”

  James stared down at his hands. “What do you think I should do?”

  “You know what I think,” Bethany said firmly.

  “Just ’cos your fellow was a damned rebel,” James said, smiling. He gazed at the shivering reflections cast from the lanterns on board the three sloops. “What I want, Beth, is for them all to leave us alone.”

  “They won’t do that now,” she said.

  James nodded. “They won’t, so I’ll write a letter, Beth,” he said, “and you can take it over the river to John Brewer. He’ll know how to get it to Boston.”