The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

dangerously before being held by the shrouds. “Furl the maintopsail!” Saltonstall called to the second lieutenant. He needed to take the pressure off the damaged mast or else it would go overboard and he would be a floating wreck under the pounding of the British guns. He saw smoke jet from the fort on the skyline and saw a rent appear in his foretopgallant sail. “Take in the foresails! Mister Fenwick!” Saltonstall called through a speaking trumpet. The jibs and staysail would pull the damaged bowsprit to pieces unless they were furled. A round shot from the Half Moon Battery thumped hard into the hull, shaking the shrouds.

The two privateers had not followed the Warren into the harbor’s mouth, but instead stood just outside the entrance and fired past the frigate at the distant sloops. So the Warren was taking almost all of the British cannon-fire and Saltonstall knew he could not just stay and be shot to splinters. “Mister Fenwick! Launch two longboats! Tow the bows round!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

“We kept their marines busy,” Saltonstall muttered. That had been the arrangement, that his ships would threaten the British line and so keep the Royal Marines away from the fort, which, he assumed, General Lovell was even now attacking. It should all be over by midday, he reckoned, and there was small point in taking any more casualties and so he would retreat. He needed to turn the frigate in the narrow space and because the wind was fitful he had men tow the Warren’s head around. British cannon-balls exploded great spouts of water about the heaving oarsmen, but none of the shots struck the longboats, which at last succeeded in turning the Warren westwards. Saltonstall dared not set the jib, flying jib, or staysail because even this small wind would exert enough pressure on those sails to pull his damaged bowsprit to pieces, and so he relied on the longboats to tow the frigate to safety. The men hauled on their oars and slowly, persistently hammered by British round shot, the Warren edged her way back into the wider bay.

Saltonstall heard a cheer from the three British sloops. The commodore sneered at the sound. The fools thought they had beaten his powerful frigate, but he had never planned to engage them closely, merely to keep their marines aboard while Lovell assaulted the fort. A last shot slashed into the water to spray the quarterdeck, then the Warren was towed north under the lee of Dyce’s Head and so out of sight of the impudent enemy. The two forrard anchors were let go, the oarsmen in the longboats rested, and the guns were housed. It was time to make repairs.

Peleg Wadsworth crouched opposite the captured highlander who was sitting with his back against a bullet- scarred beech tree. The prisoner had been found hiding in a thick stand of brush, perhaps hoping to sneak his way back to Fort George, but he would have found any escape difficult because he had been struck in his calf by a musket-ball. The ball had mangled his flesh, but it had missed the bone and the doctor with the Lincoln County militia had reckoned the man would live if the wound did not turn gangrenous. “You’re to keep the wound bandaged,” Wadsworth said, “and keep the bandage damp. You understand that?”

The man nodded. He was a tall youngster, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old, with raven-black hair, pale skin, dark eyes, and an expression of befuddlement, as if he had no comprehension of what fate had just done to him. He kept looking from Wadsworth to James Fletcher, then back to Wadsworth again. He had been stripped of his red coat and wore nothing but shirt and kilt. “Where are you from, soldier?” Wadsworth asked.

The man answered, but his accent was so strong that even when he repeated the name Wadsworth did not understand. “You’ll be properly looked after,” Wadsworth said. “In time you’ll go to Boston.” The man spoke again, though what he said was impossible to tell. “When the war is over,” Wadsworth said slowly, as if he was talking to someone who did not speak English. He assumed the Scotsman did, but he was not sure. “When the war is over you will go home. Unless, of course, you choose to stay here. America welcomes good men.”

James Fletcher offered the prisoner a canteen of water which the man took and drank greedily. His lips were stained by the powder from the cartridges he had bitten during the fight, and tearing the cartridges open with the teeth left a man’s mouth dry as dust. He handed back the canteen and asked a question that neither Fletcher nor Wadsworth could understand or answer. “Can you stand?” Wadsworth asked.

The man answered by standing up, though he winced when he put any weight on his injured left leg. “Help him down to the beach,” Wadsworth ordered Fletcher, “then find me up here again.”

It was midday. Smoke rose all along the height of the bluff where men had made campfires to brew tea. The British cannon still fired from the fort, but their rate of fire was much slower now. Wadsworth reckoned there were at least ten minutes between each shot, and none did any damage because the rebels were staying out of sight among the trees, which meant the enemy had nothing to aim at and their fire, Wadsworth supposed, was a mere message of defiance.

He walked southwards to where the marines held Dyce’s Head. The gunfire in the harbor had died, leaving long skeins of smoke drifting slowly across the sun-rippled water. The Warren, her bows scarred by round shot, was seeking shelter west of the bluff where the three captured British cannon were now pointing at the fort under the guard of Lieutenant William Dennis.

Dennis smiled when his old schoolmaster appeared. “I’m delighted to see you unscathed, sir,” he greeted Wadsworth.

“As I am you, Lieutenant,” Wadsworth said. “Are you thinking of using these cannon?”

“I wish we could,” Dennis said, and pointed to a fire-scarred pit. “They exploded their ready magazine, sir. They should have spiked the guns, but they didn’t. So we’ve sent for more powder bags.”

“I’m sorry about Captain Welch,” Wadsworth said.

“It’s almost too hard to believe,” Dennis said in a puzzled tone.

“I didn’t know him well. Hardly at all! But he inspired confidence.”

“We thought him indestructible,” Dennis said, then made an uncertain gesture towards the west. “The men want to bury him up here, sir, where he led the fight.”

Wadsworth looked to where Dennis pointed and saw a body shrouded by two blankets. He realized it had to be Welch’s corpse. “That seems fitting,” he said.

“When we take the fort, sir,” Dennis said, “it should be called Fort Welch.”

“I have a suspicion,” Wadsworth replied drily, “that we must call it Fort Lovell instead.”

Dennis smiled at Wadsworth’s tone, then reached into his tailcoat pocket. “The book I was going to give you, sir,” he said, holding out the volume by Cesare Beccaria.

Wadsworth was about to express his thanks, then saw that the book’s cover had been ripped and the pages churned into a mangled mess. “Good Lord!” he said. “A bullet?” The book was unreadable, nothing but torn paper now.

“I hadn’t finished it,” Dennis said ruefully, trying to separate the pages.

“A bullet?”

“Yes, sir. But it missed me, which is a good omen, I think.”

“I pray so.”

“I’ll find you another copy,” Dennis said, then summoned a lean, hatchet-faced marine a few paces away. “Sergeant Sykes! Didn’t you say my books were only good for lighting fires?”

“True, sir,” Sykes said, “I did.”

“Here!” Dennis tossed the ruined book to the sergeant. “Kindling!”

Sykes grinned. “Best use for a book, Lieutenant,” he said, then looked at Peleg Wadsworth. “Are we going to attack the fort, General?”

“I’m certain we will,” Wadsworth said. He had encouraged Lovell to order an attack late in the day when the setting sun would be in the eyes of the fort’s defenders, but so far Lovell had not committed himself. Lovell wanted to be certain that the American lines were secure from any British counterattack before launching his troops at the fort, and so he had ordered the rebel force to dig trenches and throw up earth walls at the wood’s edge. The marines had ignored the order. “Aren’t you supposed to be digging a trench here?” Wadsworth asked.

“Lord above, sir,” Dennis said, “we don’t need a trench. We’re here to attack them!”

Wadsworth wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment, but he could hardly express his agreement without seeming disloyal to Lovell. Instead he borrowed a telescope from Dennis and used it to gaze at the small British gun emplacement that was now the nearest enemy post. He could not see the battery clearly because it was half- hidden by a cornfield, but he could see enough. The earthwork was a semicircle a small distance up the slope from the harbor and halfway between the marines and the fort. The battery’s cannon were facing southwest, towards the harbor entrance, but Wadsworth supposed they could easily be levered around to face west and so rip into any infantry attacking from Dyce’s Head. “You think those guns are a menace, sir?” Dennis asked, seeing where