Lovell looked as if he had been slapped, but suddenly he straightened. “Every man, every gun, every musket, every tent, every scrap of supply, everything! On the ships tonight! Call General Wadsworth and Colonel Revere. Tell them we will leave the enemy nothing. Order the guns evacuated from Cross Island. You hear me? We will leave the enemy nothing! Nothing!”
There was an army to be saved.
It rained. The night was windless and so the rain fell hard and straight, turning the rough track which zigzagged up the northern end of the bluff into a chute of mud. There was no moonlight, but Colonel Revere had the idea to light fires at the track’s edge, and by their light the supplies were carried down to the beach where more fires revealed the longboats nuzzling the shingle.
The guns had to be manhandled down the track. Fifty men were needed for each eighteen-pounder. Teams hauled on drag-ropes to stop the huge guns running away, while other men wrenched at the huge carriage wheels to guide the weapons down to the beach where lighters waited to take the artillery back to the
Peleg Wadsworth blundered through the dark wet trees to make sure everything was gone. He carried a lantern, but its light was feeble. He slipped once and fell heavily into a deserted trench at the edge of the woods. He picked up the lantern, which, miraculously, had stayed alight, and gazed east into the darkness which surrounded Fort George. A few tiny rain-diffused splinters of light showed from the houses below the fort, but McLean’s defenses were invisible until a cannon fired and its sudden flame lit the whole ridge before fading. The cannon-ball plowed through trees. The British fired a few guns every night, not in hope of killing rebels, but rather to disturb their sleep.
“General? General?” It was James Fletcher’s voice.
“I’m here, James.”
“General Lovell wants to know if the guns are taken off Cross Island, sir.”
“I told Colonel Revere to do that,” Wadsworth said. Why had Lovell not asked Revere directly? He walked along the trench and saw that it was empty. “Help me out, James,” he said, holding up a hand.
They went back through the trees. General Lovell’s table was being carried away, and men were pulling down the shelter under which Wadsworth had slept so many nights. Two militiamen were piling the shelter’s brush and branches onto the campfire, which blazed bright in a billow of smoke. All the campfires were being fed fuel so the British would not guess the rebels were leaving.
The rain eased towards dawn. Somehow, despite the darkness and the weather, the rebels had managed to rescue everything from the heights, though there was a sudden alarm when McCobb realized the Lincoln County militia’s twelve-pounder gun was still at Dyce’s Head. Men were sent to retrieve it as Wadsworth went carefully down the rain-slicked track. “We’ve left them nothing,” Major Todd greeted him on the beach. Wadsworth nodded wearily. It had been a considerable achievement, he knew, but he could not help wonder at the enthusiasm men had shown to rescue the expedition’s weapons and supplies, an enthusiasm that had not been evident when they had been asked to fight. “Did you see the pay chest?” Todd asked anxiously.
“Wasn’t it in the general’s tent?”
“It must be with the tent, I suppose,” Todd said.
The rain stopped altogether and a gray, watery dawn lit the eastern sky. “Time to go,” Wadsworth said. But where? He looked southwards, but the seaward reach of Penobscot Bay was shrouded by a mist that hid the enemy ships. A lighter waited to take away the missing twelve-pounder, but the only other boat on the beach was there to carry Todd and Wadsworth to the
No guns fired in the dawn. The night’s rain had stopped, the clouds had cleared, the sky was limpid, the air was still and no fog obscured Majabigwaduce’s ridge. Yet no guns fired from the rebel batteries and there was not even the smaller sound of rebel picquets clearing night-dampened powder from their muskets. Brigadier McLean stared at the heights through his glass. Every few moments he swung the glass southwards, but mist still veiled the lower river and it was impossible to tell what ships lay there. The garrison had seen the strange ships appear in the twilight, but no one was certain whether they were British or American. McLean looked back to the woods. “They’re very quiet,” he said.
“Buggered off, maybe,” Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell, commanding officer of the 74th, suggested.
“If those ships are ours?”
“Then our enemies will have their tails between their legs,” Campbell said, “and they’ll be scampering for the hills.”
“My goodness, and maybe you’re right.” McLean lowered the glass. “Lieutenant Moore?”
“Sir?”
“My compliments to Captain Caffrae, and ask him to be so good as to take his company for a look at the enemy lines.”
“Yes, sir, and, sir?”
“And yes, you may accompany him, Lieutenant,” McLean said.
The fifty men filed through the abatis and went west along the ridge, keeping close to the northern side where the trees were dark from the previous day’s rain. To their left were the stumps of the felled pines, many scarred by cannon shot that had fallen short. About halfway between the fort and the rebel trenches Caffrae led the company into the trees. They went cautiously now, still going westwards, but slowly, always alert for rebel picquets among the leaves. Moore wished he wore a green coat like the enemy marines. He stopped once, his heart pounding because of a sudden noise to his right, but it was only a squirrel scrabbling up a trunk. “I think they’ve gone,” Caffrae said softly.
“Or perhaps they’re being clever,” Moore suggested.
“Clever?
“Luring us into an ambush?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Caffrae said. He peered ahead. These woods had been his playground where he came to alarm the rebels, but he had rarely advanced this far down the ridge. He listened, but heard nothing untoward. “Staying here won’t put gravy on the beefsteak, will it?” he said. “Let’s move on.”
They threaded the wet trees, still going at a snail’s pace. Caffrae now edged back to the left so he could see the cleared ground and he realized he had advanced well beyond the rebels’ foremost trenches, and those trenches were empty. If this was an ambush then it would surely have been sprung by now. “They’ve gone,” he said, trying to convince himself.
They went faster now, advancing ten or fifteen paces at a time, then came to a clearing that had plainly been a rebel encampment. Felled logs surrounded the wet ashes of three campfires, rough shelters of branches and sod stood at the clearing’s edges, and a latrine pit stank in the woods behind. Men peered into the shelters, but found nothing, then followed Caffrae along a track which led towards the river. Moore saw a piece of paper caught in the undergrowth and fished it out with his sword. The paper was wet and disintegrating, but he could still see that someone had written a girl’s name in pencil. Adelaide Rebecah. The name was written again and again in a round and childish hand. Adelaide Rebecah.
“Anything interesting?” Caffrae asked.
“Just mis-spelt love.” Moore said and threw the paper away.
At the side of the path between two of the encampments was a row of graves, each marked with a wooden cross and heaped with stones to stop animals clawing up the corpses. Names were written in charcoal on the crosses. Isaac Fulsome, Nehemiah Eldredge, Thomas Snow, John Reardon. There were seventeen names and seventeen crosses. Someone had written the words “for Liberty” after Thomas Snow’s name, except they had run out of space and the “y” was awkwardly cramped into a corner of the crosspiece.
“Sir!” Sergeant Logie called. “Sir!” Caffrae ran to the sergeant. “Listen, sir,” Logie said.
For a moment all Caffrae could hear was the water dripping from the leaves and the small susurration of feeble waves on the bluff’s beach, but then he heard voices. So the rebels were not gone? The voices appeared to come from the foot of the bluff and Caffrae led his men that way to discover a road hacked into the steep face. The road was rutted by wheels because this was how the guns had been hauled to the heights and then hauled down again, and one gun was still on shore. Caffrae, reaching the bluff’s edge, saw a boat on the shingle and saw men
