energetically, “no damned good at all!”
Adams gave a flutter of his hands that might have been construed as agreement. When he rested his hands on his lap again he saw the slight tremor in his fingers. It would not go away. Age, he supposed, and sighed inwardly.
“The Congress must come to its senses,” Gates declared.
“The Congress, of course, pays close heed to the sentiments of Massachusetts,” Adams said, dangling a great fat carrot in front of Gates’s greedy mouth. The general wanted Massachusetts to demand George Washington’s dismissal and the appointment of Horatio Gates as commander of the Continental Army.
“And you agree with me?” Gates asked.
“How could I possibly disagree with a man of your military experience, General?”
Gates heard what he wanted to hear in that answer. He stood and poured himself more tea. “So the State of Massachusetts wants my help?” he asked.
“And I had not even stated my purpose,” Adams said with feigned admiration.
“Not difficult to grasp, is it? You’ve sent your pillow-biters off to Penobscot Bay and they can’t get the job done.” He turned a scornful face on Adams. “Sam Savage wrote to tell me the British had surrendered. Not true, eh?”
“Alas, not true,” Adams said with a sigh. “The garrison appears to be a more difficult nut to crack than we had supposed.”
“McLean, right? A competent man. Not brilliant, but competent. You wish for more tea?”
“This is as sufficient as it is delicious,” Adams said, touching a finger to the untasted cup.
“You sent your militia. How many?”
“General Lovell commands around a thousand men.”
“What does he want?”
“Regular troops.”
“Ah ha! He wants real soldiers, does he?” Gates drank his second cup of tea, poured a third, then sat again. “Who pays for this?”
“Massachusetts,” Adams said. God knew Massachusetts had already spent a fortune on the expedition, but it seemed another fortune must now be expended and he prayed that Brigadier-General McLean had a vast chest of treasure hidden in his toy fort or else the State’s debt would be crippling.
“Rations, transport,” Gates insisted, “both must be paid for!”
“Of course.”
“And how do you convey my troops to the Penobscot River?”
“There is shipping in Boston,” Adams said.
“You should have asked me a month ago,” Gates said.
“Indeed we should.”
“But I suppose Massachusetts wanted the battle honor for itself, eh?”
Adams gently inclined his head to indicate assent and tried to imagine this irascible, touchy, resentful Englishman in charge of the Continental Army and was profoundly grateful for George Washington.
“Lieutenant!” Gates barked.
The pale lieutenant appeared at the door. “Your honor?”
“My compliments to Colonel Jackson. His men are to march for Boston at daybreak. They march with arms, ammunition, and a day’s rations. Full orders will follow tonight. Tell the colonel he is to keep a detailed, mark that, detailed, list of all expenditures. Go.”
The lieutenant went.
“No good shilly-shallying,” Gates said to Adams. “Henry Jackson’s a good man and his regiment is as fine as any I’ve seen. They’ll finish McLean’s nonsense.”
“You are very kind, General,” Adams said.
“Not kind at all, efficient. We have a war to win! No good sending fart-catchers and pillow-biters to do a soldier’s job. You’ll do me the honor of dining with me?”
Samuel Adams sighed inwardly at that prospect, but liberty had its price. “It would be a distinct privilege, your honor,” he said.
Because, at last, a regiment of trained American soldiers was going to Penobscot Bay.
Letter from Brigadier-General Lovell to Commodore Saltonstall, August 5th, 1779:
From the Minutes of Brigadier-General Lovell’s Council of War, Majabigwaduce, August 11th, 1779:
From the Journal of Sergeant Lawrence, Royal Artillery. Fort George, Majabigwaduce, August 5th and August 12th, 1779:
Chapter Eleven
Wednesday, August 11th, started with a thick fog and still airs. Small waves slapped wearily on the harbor shore where a lone gull cried. Peleg Wadsworth, standing on Dyce’s Head, could see neither the enemy fort nor their ships. Fog blanketed the world. No cannon fired because the whiteness concealed targets from rebel and king’s men alike.
Colonel Samuel McCobb had brought two hundred men from his Lincoln County militia to the meadow just beneath Dyce’s Head. These were the same men who had fled from the Half Moon Battery and now they waited for General Lovell, who had decided to send them back to the battery. “If you fall off a horse,” Lovell had asked Peleg Wadsworth the previous night, “what do you do?”
“Climb back into the saddle?”
“My sentiments, my sentiments,” Lovell had declared. The general, who had been in despair just a couple of days before, had apparently climbed back into his own saddle of confidence. “You dust yourself down,” Lovell had said, “and scramble back up! Our fellows need to be shown they can beat the enemy.”
James Fletcher was waiting with Peleg Wadsworth. Fletcher would guide McCobb’s men down to Jacob Dyce’s cornfield which lay a hundred or so paces up the slope from the deserted battery. There the militia would hide. It was a trap devised by Lovell, who was certain that McLean would not be able to resist the lure. Wadsworth had urged Lovell to assault the fort directly, but the general had insisted that McCobb’s men required heartening. “They need a victory, Wadsworth,” Lovell had declared.
“Indeed they do, sir.”
“As things are,” Lovell had admitted with bleak honesty, “we’re not ready to assault the fort, but if the militia’s confidence is restored, if their patriotic fervor is aroused, then I believe there is nothing they cannot achieve.”
Peleg Wadsworth hoped that was true. A letter had arrived from Boston warning that a fleet of British warships had left New York harbor and it was presumed, no one could say for certain, that the fleet’s destination was Penobscot Bay. Time was short. It was possible that the enemy fleet was sailing elsewhere, to Halifax or
