The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

General, we’ll march through town and back just to give folk a chance to let them know how welcome they are in Massachusetts.”

Wadsworth held out his hand. “I look forward to serving with you, Colonel.”

“I look forward to sharing victory with you, General,” Revere said, shaking the offered hand.

Revere watched Wadsworth leave, then, still holding the warrant as though it were the holy grail, went back to the courtyard where Josiah Flint was stirring butter into a dish of mashed turnips. “I’m going to war, Josiah,” Revere said reverently.

“I did that,” Flint said, “and I was never so hungry in all my born days.”

“I’ve waited for this,” Revere said.

“There’ll be no Nantucket turnips where you’re going,” Flint said. “I don’t know why they taste better, but upon my soul you can’t trump a turnip from Nantucket. You think it’s the salt air?”

“Commanding the state’s artillery!”

“You ever traveled down east? It ain’t a Christian place, Colonel. Fog and flies is all it is, fog and flies, and the fog chills you and the flies bite like the very devil.”

“I’m going to war. It’s all I ever asked! A chance, Josiah!” Revere’s face was radiant. He turned a full triumphant circle, then slammed his fist onto the table. “I am going to war!”

Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere had heard the trumpet and he was going to war.

James Fletcher’s boat buffeted against the outgoing tide, pushed by a convenient southwest wind that drove the Felicity upriver past Majabigwaduce’s high bluff. The Felicity was a small boat, just twenty-four feet long, with a stubby mast from which a faded red sail hung from a high gaff. The sun sparkled prettily on the small waves of Penobscot Bay, but behind the Felicity a bank of thick fog shrouded the view towards the distant ocean. Brigadier McLean, enthroned on a tarry heap of nets in the boat’s belly, wanted to see Majabigwaduce just as the enemy would first see it, from the water. He wanted to put himself in his enemy’s shoes and decide how he would attack the peninsula if he were a rebel. He stared fixedly at the shore, and again remarked how the scenery put him in mind of Scotland’s west coast. “Don’t you agree, Mister Moore?” he asked Lieutenant John Moore who was one of two junior officers who had been ordered to accompany the brigadier.

“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.”