Redcoat Page 8

  “Buggers are here!” Liam Shaughnessy scrambled to his feet and ran towards the stand of muskets. Other men, stirred by the sudden shots, rolled out of their shelters and grabbed their guns.

  More musket fire stabbed the darkness from the picquet line. Tongues of flame leapt towards the dark woods at the edge of the encampment. Someone whooped a howl of delight and the first shots from the camp itself crashed loud in the night. This was an antidote to boredom, an irresistible opportunity, and men stood in the firelight, pulled their triggers, then reloaded eagerly to fire again. The American boy, startled by the sudden commotion, stood helplessly amidst the excited men who ran past him to flay the night with musketry.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” sergeants shouted in the twilight, but the firing was infectious. Up and down the line, spreading to neighbouring battalions, the muskets flamed towards the trees. The picquets, far out, would be cursing and crouching as the heavy lead balls whipcracked overhead to crash among the leaves.

  “Stop firing! Stop firing!” An officer’s voice shouted behind Sam.

  Sergeant Derrick, the Light Company’s second sergeant, slashed his cane down on a man’s musket, then another. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

  Slowly, fitfully, the firing died. Occasionally it would flare up again, crackling like burning thorns in the distance, but the officers and sergeants, roused from their sleep, gradually beat order into the men and drove them back towards their fires. Other officers galloped from the village angrily demanding to know which picquets had fired and upon whose orders.

  Corporal Dale’s picquet had fired, and done so without orders, and Sergeant Scammell, the guard sergeant, was rousted back to the lines where, in a voice loud enough to be heard in the next battalion, he swore it was the neighbouring troops who had first fired.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Elliott, his face red from an evening’s drinking, knew that the battalion’s officers were threatened with a fine for this night’s work, that the guard sergeant would be reduced to the ranks, and the men flogged. He did not care about the flogging, but he cared about one of his best sergeants and about his own pocket. He drew Scammell to one side where the two men bent their heads together.

  “He’s getting a right roasting,” Liam Shaughnessy opined.

  “They said any sergeant who fired without orders would lose his stripes!” Nate laughed. “Imagine Scammy back in the ranks?”

  The laughter died as Sergeant Scammell about-turned and marched with a grim face towards the company. “Get in your beds, you scum! And put those muskets in the stands!” His hard face sought a victim and settled on the young American boy who, bemused by all the firing and fuss, still grinned half-wittedly beside Sam’s bivouac. “You! What are you doing here?” Scammell pointed his metal-topped cane at the farm boy.

  The boy seemed incapable of speaking, so Sam, who had not even fetched his own musket, spoke for him. “He wanted to see the artillery, Sergeant.”

  Scammell, amazingly, smiled. “The artillery! You want to see the cannons, is that it, lad?”

  “Yes, sir.” The boy nodded.

  “You should have said! Come on then, lad. I’ll show ’em you. And I’ll give you a bite to eat. You’re hungry, I dare say?”

  “I am.” The boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, lapsed into embarrassed smiles under the Sergeant’s unexpected friendliness.

  “What’s your name, lad?”

  “James, sir.”

  “Well, come on, Jimmy-me-lad! Rare big guns, we’ve got.”

  Sam watched the Sergeant lead the boy away and supposed that the hapless James would be blandished into joining one of the loyalist regiments. And quite right too, in Sam’s view, for why should the Americans not fight to put down their own troublemakers?

  Sam, once the excitement of the evening was over, crawled into the shelter of his bivouac, laid his head on his hat, and closed his eyes.

  He woke in the cold, wet, silver-grey before dawn. The reveille had not yet sounded, but already a few shadowy figures moved through the mist; women remaking the cooking fires or bugle boys rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Sam yawned, tried to sleep again, but immediately he closed his eyes it seemed that the bugles split the air with their racket. Sergeant Derrick, a vast-bellied and affable man, must have been ready for the reveille for he was fully dressed, cheerful, and rousting through the shelters. “Let’s be having you bastards! Up and shine! Sam! Nate! I want you two! Fetch some axes! Lively now!”

  Derrick wanted timber cut. It seemed an unnecessary chore to Sam, for there were plenty of fence rails still to be stolen from the fields, but Derrick insisted and so the brothers, axes over their shoulders, followed the Sergeant out of the bivouacs towards the misted woods where the dawn made the shadows mysterious and grey. “Maggie still giving your brother trouble, Sam?” Derrick asked.

  “Like an itch, Sergeant.”

  Derrick laughed. “She’s daft, that one. I told Scammy not to trouble himself with her, but she’s a pretty thing. Makes a man jealous, that does. I had a woman in tow once.” He shrugged, then hefted his musket as they approached the dew-wet bushes at the wood’s edge. “No rebels here.” He said it cheerfully, but was plainly nervous. He cocked the gun, and the click of the pawl dropping into place seemed unnaturally loud.

  “Start here, Sarge?” Sam gestured towards a birch tree that grew at the very edge of the woods.

  “Too wet.” Sergeant Derrick stared around the trees. “Over here, boys.” He prowled the wood’s margin, walking as carefully as a poacher who fears a spring gun or steel-jawed trap. It seemed to Sam that the big Sergeant was searching for something other than timber to be cut and, after just a few slow paces, Derrick found it. “My oh my! Look at that, lads!”

  Sam had to edge past Nate to see what had caused the Sergeant’s evident relief.

  A corpse lay in the long grass. It was a boy dressed in a torn coat and baggy trousers belted together with a length of frayed rope. A floppy, wide-brimmed hat lay a couple of feet from the dead boy’s head, while, next to his outstretched right hand and fallen into the grass, was the pistol. The boy’s long hair was bright with dew, and in his skinny throat was a red-filled, ragged-edged hole. It was the same boy who had edged so shyly towards Sam’s fire the night before, the boy who had only wanted to stare at the soldier’s big guns. “A Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Sergeant Derrick said softly, “with a bullet in his gullet.”

  In the dawn’s grey light Sam could see that the boy’s pistol had no lock, and that the iron bands which fixed barrel to stock were rusted and loose. The pistol could never have been fired. The gun was nothing but a toy to a growing boy too interested in soldiers.

  “That ain’t a rebel,” Nate said fiercely.

  “Now, boy! Watch it!” Derrick grinned confidingly, but Nate would not heed.

  “He was called James! He was with Scammell last night. He was talking to us! Just before the firing!”

  Sergeant Derrick stood very close to Nate. “Listen. That is a rebel. He was shot last night after firing at our picquet. That’s what happened, Private Gilpin, and that way none of our lads fetch a skinning, none of our sergeants loses his stripes, and none of our Jack-puddings has to pay a fine. Do you understand?”

  “But – ”

  Sergeant Derrick struck Nate’s face a stinging, skull-ringing blow. “You didn’t hear me, son! It’s a rebel. He was attacking us, so the fucking picquet did the right thing. Or do you want a kicking? Is that it, Nate Gilpin? You want the sergeants to have a mill with you?”

  Sam looked past Derrick. The boy looked oddly peaceful. His hands were curled into fists and his legs slightly drawn up. There was something horribly pathetic about the rope belt about his waist. A fly crawled towards the bloody hole. Sam supposed Scammell had stabbed the boy with a bayonet to make it look like a bullet hole. Blood had drenched the torn jacket and flecked the grass. “He wasn’t a rebel, Sarge.” Sam’s voice was tentative, so unlike his brother’s passionate denouncement
s.

  Derrick turned on Sam. “Of course he wasn’t a bloody rebel! I know it, you know it, and Nate knows it, but the bloody army doesn’t know it!” The Sergeant glared at the brothers, and Sam understood that, because Scammell had seen them talking with the boy after the firing, it was important that they keep their mouths shut. Sergeant Derrick, who was popular, must have been deputed to square the Gilpin brothers. “The silly buggers say we’re not supposed to fire,” Derrick went on, “but they can’t blame us if we were attacked, can they? So here’s the enemy!”

  But Derrick had hit a streak of stubbornness in Nate. Somehow Nate believed that if only Sergeant Scammell could be humbled, then Maggie would be free. “I talked to him,” Nate said staunchly. “Sam did too, didn’t you, Sam?”

  Sam said nothing.

  Nate pleaded with his brother. “Sam?”

  Sam shrugged. “He could have been spying on us, couldn’t he?” Sam knew instantly he had done wrong, that he was condoning murder, but he wore a red hackle now to show that he was one of the élite men who had taken the blades to the enemy at the tavern. Sam had earned Sergeant Scammell’s praise, and Sam did not want to lose that approbation. And how could Sam and Nate, mere privates, take on the certainty of the sergeants and officers who would insist that this pathetic corpse was a rebel soldier?

  Sergeant Derrick grinned at Sam’s answer, then went to the field’s edge where he waved his arms and hollo’d towards the nearest picquets. He turned back to Nate. “You heard your brother, Nate. He’s a rebel.”

  Nate bent down, picked up the floppy brimmed hat, and covered the dead boy’s face. “He was only a kid. He weren’t never a rebel, never!”

  “Don’t be so soft! He’s a Yankee! They smile to our faces and shoot us in the back an hour later!”

  Sergeant Derrick grabbed Nate’s shoulder and turned him so quickly that Nate lost his footing and stumbled into the grass beside the dew-covered corpse. Derrick bent over him. “One word from you, Nate, and I’ll tell Scammy you were under the blanket with Maggie last night. You can understand that, can’t you? I’ll say you were laughing at him and rogering his woman. He’ll skin you alive, Nate, he’ll give you a belting like you never had.” Derrick prodded the stiff corpse with his musket. “He’s a rebel and this way no one gets hurt by the staff! No flogging, no demotions, no fines. Everyone’s happy!” Derrick laughed suddenly. “Except his mother, of course, but she won’t miss the little bastard. Bloody Yankees breed like rabbits. Now, get up, lad.”

  The battalion’s officers arrived, and after them came a staff officer mounted on a big black horse. The undergrowth was trampled around the boy’s body as a ring of uniformed men stared in triumph at the puny corpse. Sergeant Scammell, chin shining from an early shave, proclaimed that the body was proof that the picquets had indeed been attacked, and therefore justified in returning fire.

  “There.” Lieutenant-Colonel Elliott, vindicated, looked up at the staff officer.

  “Damned lucky for you, Elliott!” The staff officer asked to see the boy’s weapon and Sergeant Derrick picked the broken pistol out of the grass.

  “It got damaged, sir,” Derrick said confidingly.

  For an instant, a suicidal instant, Sam had the urge to step forward and proclaim that the American boy had been innocent, that he had been with Sam when the shooting started, and Sam’s right foot actually moved involuntarily forward, but then he caught Scammell’s gaze: the Sergeant’s eyes were as hard as stones and filled with a promise of dreadful violence. Sam froze.

  The staff officer fingered the weapon’s rusty hoops, clear evidence that the pistol had not been fired in months. He smiled. “Dangerous men, these Yankees.” He threw the broken toy far into the undergrowth. “One armed rebel,” he said, thus finishing the matter.

  “Just good shooting,” Elliott beamed. “And alert picquets, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’d say you’re off the hook, Elliott. I’ll tell the General.” The staff officer wheeled his horse and spurred away. The hooves made small, bright fountains from the wet grass.

  There was a murmur of relieved laughter from the ring of men, then Elliott nodded at Scammell. “Bury him before his bloody mother finds him. And well done, Sergeant.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Later, after the boy had been tipped into a shallow grave at the trees’ edge, Nate shook his head. “You’re a bastard, Sam. He was a kid, and you know it!”

  “And it was our word against Scammy’s, and Derrick’s, and the Colonel’s! You might want a skinned back, Nate, but I don’t!”

  “It was murder,” Nate said. “Murder.” He stared almost in horror at his twin brother. “You could go home and tell mother what happened? Could you? You could boast about that?”

  “Don’t be so bloody daft!” But Sam was troubled. After the boy had been buried and his grave had been disguised with year-old leaf mould, Sam had seen Scammell putting coins into Derrick’s hand. He knew murder had been done and that an innocent was dead, but this was the army and Nate’s squeamishness would win no wars. Yet his brother was right, and Sam knew it, and he wondered why right and wrong became as blurred as the mist which still lingered on the pastures. “I’m sorry,” he said finally and with undisguised misery.

  Nate put his arm on Sam’s shoulder. For the first time ever it seemed as if Nate were the stronger of the two brothers. “You want to get out, Sam,” Nate’s voice was troubled, “before they change you.”

  “I’m not changing.”

  “You’ll be like Scammy,” Nate said. “You’ve got to get out, Sam, before they twist you. Come with Maggie and me.”

  But Sam did not respond, for there was nothing to be said and nothing to be done. Because he was a Redcoat.

  Eight

  The British were coming. It was certain now. George Washington’s army, attempting to stay between the Redcoats and Philadelphia, had been outmanoeuvred and left adrift, so nothing now stood between the city and the British. Indeed a message had already come, brought by the first Redcoat to appear in the streets, which requested the citizens of Philadelphia to stay within their doors while the troops arrived. The message, sent by the British Commander-in-Chief, had only increased alarm among the ladies of the city. If General Howe warned honest folk to stay indoors, then surely the danger must be dreadful?

  The preceding twenty-four hours had been truly fearful. There were rumours that arsonists equipped with barrels of tar and other incendiaries had been infiltrated into the city. When the British came, it was said, Philadelphia would be torched, thus preserving the pride of the rebellious Americans who could then claim their capital had not been taken.

  To prevent the arson, Loyalists had formed watch-parties and searched the city. Abel Becket and Ezra Woollard had led one such group, probing into the dark, empty corners of the warehouses behind Water Street, then breaking into the vacated houses of the Patriots to make certain that no incendiarist lurked in the cellars. Neither an arsonist nor a tar barrel had been found, but in the night two drunken men had boasted they had tinder and steels ready, and so the rum-soaked pair had been locked in the New Jail on Walnut Street.

  The morning of the British arrival dawned cloudy and wet, but rifts appeared in the clouds, sunlight shone across the river, and the Loyalists interpreted the clearing rain as a symbol of hope. The crowds, despite the request that citizens should remain indoors, gathered early, stretching from the Northern Liberties to the city’s centre. The British, it was clear, would be welcomed to the rebel capital not by a handful of stubborn Loyalists but by crowds that would number in the thousands.

  Jersey Loyalists crossed the river by ferry, and across their path went a shallop with a single girl at its helm. Caroline Fisher also went to Philadelphia, though not to cheer. A weak sunlight cast long shadows as she moored the shallop and climbed to the wharf. The wharf-master who usually guarded her craft was missing, evidently gone to join the crowds pressing towards Second Street. To avoid the crush Carol
ine went south along the quays, then cut into the city along the narrow path by Dock Creek.

  “Hey!” The voice came from behind her. Caroline, who was used to being accosted, ignored it. “Caroline!” The call was more peremptory this time, and was followed by pounding footsteps that made her turn to face her pursuer.

  It was Ezra Woollard, grinning and heavy, and dressed in clothes so ill cut that he might have been a Quaker. He slowed, still grinning. “Come to see the Redcoats?”

  Caroline’s face showed the disgust she felt for her former suitor. “There was a time when you’d have shot at them, Ezra.”

  “Maybe I still would.” Woollard was breathing heavily from his pursuit of Caroline. “But there’s more to a man’s loyalty than what you see on his face.” If Woollard hoped to pique Caroline’s curiosity by coyness, he failed, for she showed no interest in pursuing his hint. Woollard offered her a quick smile. “Been a long time, girl.”

  “I hadn’t been counting the days.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you? Been too busy with Master Jonathon, haven’t you?” Woollard laughed to see the flicker of anger which rewarded his words. “He came to see you last Sabbath, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t have to tell you – ’

  “Come on, girl!” Woollard interrupted her, “I heard from Davie Logan! The cripple crossed the river twice, and where the hell else would he be going? So where’s he gone now?”

  Caroline was hatless and her hair was bright in the dank shadow of the warehouse that edged the creek. She glanced sideways, but Woollard’s closeness had trapped her against the brick wall. She looked defiantly into his face. “He went to deliver your message to the British, Ezra. All your careful plans. I know what your loyalty is.”

  “You know nothing, girl.” Woollard betrayed neither surprise nor dismay that Caroline should know of his treachery. Instead, stepping a half pace closer to her, he shook his head. “Jonathon never bloody got to the British, did he?”