The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

“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 border 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