“Four shillings for the lady!”
“At once, sir,” Brown said, coming from the tent, though instead of holding coins he brought a hammer and a chisel that he took to a nearby block of wood. He had one silver dollar that he laid on the timber, then he carefully placed the chisel’s blade to make a single radial cut in the coin. The hammer smacked down and the coin leaped up from the chisel’s bite. “It’s daft, sir, to slit a coin into five pieces,” Brown grumbled, replacing the dollar. “Why can’t we make four pieces worth one shilling and threepence each?”
“Because it’s easier to cut a coin into four parts rather than five?” Moore asked.
“Of course it is, sir. Cutting into four only need a wide chisel blade and two cuts,” Brown grumbled, then hammered another cut into the dollar, slicing away a wedge of silver that he pushed across the chopping-block towards Bethany. “There, miss, one shilling.”
Bethany took the sharp-edged slice. “Is this how you pay the soldiers?” she asked Moore.
“Oh, we don’t get paid, miss,” Corporal Brown answered, “except in promissory notes.”
“Give Miss Fletcher the remainder of the coin,” Moore suggested, “and she will have her four shillings and you need cut no more.” There was a shortage of coinage so the brigadier had decreed that each silver dollar was worth five shillings. “Stop staring!” Moore called sharply to the gunners who had paused in their work to admire Beth Fletcher. Moore picked up the ravaged dollar and held it to Bethany. “There Miss Fletcher, your fee.”
“Thank you, sir.” Bethany put the shilling slice back on the block. “So how many promissory notes do you have to write each week?” she asked.
“How many?” Moore was momentarily puzzled by the question. “Oh, we don’t issue notes as such, Miss Fletcher, but we do record in the ledger what wages are owed. The specie is kept for more important duties, like paying you for corn and fish.”
“And you must need a lot of corn and fish for two whole regiments,” she said. “What is that? Two thousand men?”
“If only we were so numerous,” Moore said with a smile. “In truth, Miss Fletcher, the 74th musters just four hundred and forty men and we Hamiltons number scarce half that. And we hear now that the rebels are readying a fleet and an army to assail us!”
“And you think that report is true?” Bethany asked.
“The fleet, perhaps, is already on its way.”
Bethany stared past the three sloops to where wisps of mist drifted across the wide Penobscot River. “I pray, sir,” she said, “that there will be no fighting.”
“And I pray otherwise,” Moore said.
“Really?” Bethany sounded surprised. She turned to look at the young lieutenant as if she had never really noticed him before. “You want there to be a battle?”
“Soldiering is my chosen profession, Miss Fletcher,” Moore said, and felt very fraudulent as he said it, “and battle is the fire in which soldiers are tempered.”
“The world would be better without such fire,” Bethany said.
“True, no doubt,” Moore said, “but we did not strike the flint on the iron, Miss Fletcher. The rebels did that, they set the fire and our task is to extinguish the flame.” Bethany said nothing, and Moore decided he had sounded pompous. “You should come to Doctor Calef’s house in the evening,” he said.
“We should, sir?” Bethany asked, looking again at Moore.
“There is music in the garden when the weather permits, and dancing.”
“I don’t dance, sir,” Bethany said.
“Oh, it is the officers who dance,” Moore said hastily, “the sword dance.” He suppressed an urge to demonstrate a capering step. “You would be most welcome,” he said instead.
“Thank you, sir,” Bethany said, then pocketed the ravaged dollar and turned away.
“Miss Fletcher!” Moore called after her.
She turned back. “Sir?”
But Moore had no idea what to say, indeed he had surprised himself by calling after her in the first place. She was gazing at him, waiting. “Thank you for the supplies,” he managed to say.
“It is business, Lieutenant,” Beth said evenly.
“Even so, thank you,” Moore said, confused.
“Does that mean you’d sell to the Yankees too, miss?” Corporal Brown asked cheerfully.
“We might give to them,” Beth said, and Moore could not tell whether she was teasing or not. She looked at him, gave a half smile, and walked away.
“A rare good-looking lassie,” Corporal Brown said.
“Is she?” Moore asked most unconvincingly. He was gazing down the slope to where the settlement’s houses were spread along the harbor shore. He tried to imagine men fighting there, ranks of men blasting musket-fire, the cannons thundering the sky with noise, the harbor filled with half-sunken ships, and he thought how sad it would be to die amidst that chaos without ever having held a girl like Bethany in his arms.
“Are we finished with the ledgers, sir?” Brown asked.
“We are finished with the ledgers,” Moore said.
He wondered if he really was a soldier. He wondered if he would have the courage to face battle. He stared after Bethany and felt lost.
“Reluctance, sir, reluctance. Gross reluctance,” Colonel Jonathan Mitchell, who commanded the Cumberland County militia, glared at Brigadier-General Peleg Wadsworth as though it was all Wadsworth’s fault. “Culpable reluctance.”
“You conscripted?” Wadsworth asked.
“Of course we goddamn conscripted. We had to conscript! Half the reluctant bastards are conscripted. We didn’t get volunteers, just whining excuses, so we declared martial law, sir, and I sent troops to every township and rounded the bastards up, but too many ran and skulked, sir. They are reluctant, I tell you, reluctant!”
It had taken the fleet two days to sail to Townsend where the militia had been ordered to muster. General Lovell and Brigadier-General Wadsworth had been hoping for fifteen hundred men, but fewer than nine hundred waited for embarkation. “Eight hundred and ninety-four, sir, to be precise,” Marston, Lovell’s secretary, informed his master.
“Dear God,” Lovell said.
“It surely isn’t too late to request a Continental battalion?” Wadsworth suggested.
“Unthinkable,” Lovell said instantly. The State of Massachusetts had declared itself capable of ejecting the British on its own, and the General Court would not look happily on a request for help from General Washington’s troops. The Court, indeed, had been reluctant to accept Commodore Saltonstall’s aid, except that the
“We shall need them,” Wadsworth said. He had inspected the three militia battalions and had been appalled by what he found. Some men looked fit, young and eager, but far too many were either too old, too young, or too sick. One man had even paraded on crutches. “You can’t fight.” Wadsworth had told the man.
“Which is what I told the soldiers when they came to get us,” the man said. He was gray-bearded, gaunt, and wild-haired.
“Then go home,” Wadsworth said.
“How?”
“Same way you got here,” Wadsworth had said, despair making him irritable. A few paces down the line he found a curly-haired boy with cheeks that had never felt a razor. “What’s your name, son?” Wadsworth asked.
“Israel, sir.”
“Israel what?”
“Trask, sir.”
“How old are you, Israel Trask?”
“Fifteen, sir,” the boy said, trying to stand straighter. His voice had not broken and Wadsworth guessed he was scarcely fourteen. “Three years in the army, sir,” Trask said.
“Three years?” Wadsworth asked in disbelief.
“Fifer with the infantry, sir,” Trask said. He had a sackcloth bag hanging at his back and a slender wooden
