over his head and shoulders and swiping his face with both of his hands.
'Wot was it?' Mollow asked, now dressed in full uniform and ready for a killing, his Ferguson at full cock.
'Dead woman and baby in the house,' Burgess said tighthly. 'Poor Mister Lewrie saw it and near lost his wits.'
'The usual sort o' thing, Mister Burgess?' Mollow asked.
'Worse than the usual,' Burgess replied.
'Should I be booryin' 'em?'
'Much too late for that,' Chiswick said with a shake of his head.
'The usual?' Alan demanded, after another long pull at he flask. 'The
'They were Rebels,' Chiswick told him.
'Damn you to hell, Rebel or savage, no one deserved that!'
'I'm not saying anyone ever deserves that, Alan,' Burgess insisted, taking back his flask now that Lewrie looked human once more and full of normal, righteous anger. 'But like your whore must have told you, this is the worst sort of civil war. It's not flags and trumpets and regulars going at each other like a war in Europe, not here in the South, anyways. It's partisan fighting, and horrors like this on every hand. Families turned on each other, neighbors turned on each other, and after a while the decent spirit of Man gets lost in the tit-for-tat.'
'How would you know they were Rebels?' Alan asked.
'You read that… epitaph on the wall,' Burgess said. 'And you'll notice there's no men's bodies about the place. Off with the fighting in the spring and summer most like and not coming home again, or still bearing arms and not had the chance to discover what happened to their people. Arnold and Phillips were through here; Tarleton was through here scouting and foraging with us as well. Who knows who did it, or when?'
'If that's the sort of war we're fighting, then God damn us all for murdering cowards!' Alan raged. 'Women and little babies, for Christ's sake! It's one thing for a man to be punished for rebellion, but this!'
'Like my brother George,' Burgess spat. 'This could just is easy be a Loyalist farm and those innocents slain by the Rebels!'
'And it still wouldn't make it right,' Alan declared.
'No, it would not.' Burgess softened, laying a firm hand on Alan's shoulder to steady him. 'And I hope the officer and the men who did this die just as painful and as gruesome a death, no matter what uniform they wear. All we can do is make sure we would not do such a deed.'
'God, get me away from this hateful country and back I sea where I belong,' Alan prayed. 'Where the fighting is clean and upright, and a man can keep his honor!'
'Speaking of that, we'd best be getting back to the others,' the young infantryman said. 'Mollow, find that seaman. We'll be leaving.'
'Aye,' the soldier replied. 'Be takin' the road, I 'spect? Cain't lead no stock through the woods.'
'We'll have to. You scout ahead, once we're ready.'
Alan went back into the sun to fetch his waistcoat and jacket, still damp but a lot cleaner than they had been before, and donned them. He hung his military accoutrements about him and took up the rifle once more as Mollow and Cony gathered the stock for leading. He was happy to shake the dust of the place from him and unable to smell anything else than the sick and copper odor of death that clung to the farmstead. The fresh blood smell of the 'spatched cocks and the hogs almost made him start gagging all over again, and he walked as far from them as he could, letting Cony lead the horse with the drag as they started out.
He trudged along, stumbling over shallow wagon ruts and loose rocks in the lane between the fences, too shaken to care where they were going.
God, how could any human being with any honor at all do such a murthering thing? he asked himself. Bastard, I may be, but I could never raise my hand against a woman. Maybe Cheatham is right—I am not the basest person that was ever born after all. The Navy would never do such a deed or allow it to happen. Thank God Father shoved me in the Fleet and not some regiment bound for the Colonies, or I'd have run screaming into the backwoods by now, sick of it all.
He tried to harken back to all the women he had known who had done him dirty, trying to discover one who might have deserved such a death, and was amazed that even the Covent Garden whore who had pinched his purse of nearly ten pounds when he was a feckless fifteen could not engage his rage enough to wish her such agony.
And the babe. God in heaven, how could he ever sear that fiendish sight from his memory. He hated babies, usually; squawling little bundles of nastiness best kept out of sight with a nurse and trotted out at bedtime for a cuff on the ead The getting of them was enjoyable, but the keeping of them was not, a matter best left to the sluts who dropped them.
Then there was Lucy Beauman. What if it had been her slashed open like that? What if he and Lucy married someday? And what if it had been his child, his heir, nailed to the wall by some rampaging fiend?
I'd hunt the bastard down and kill him slow, Alan vowed, suddenly full of anger instead of sickness. Whoever did that deserves to die, and to die horribly. I wish I could find him and make him pay, and I don't care if it's that hero Tarleton, or that turncoat Arnold, or Cornwallis himself. The regular army would make him roast, by God.
They reached the main road, Alan never being aware of the dread and anticipation with which the soldiers had walked that sunken farm lane, sure an ambush would occur at any moment. In his anger he was oblivious.
'You are looking positively wolfish,' Chiswick commented as they waited for Mollow to scout west against any party advancing on Yorktown to their rear.
'Must be your… what did you call it… whiskey?'
'Liked it, did you?' Chiswick grinned. 'There'll be plenty more in camp. The soldiers can brew it themselves from corn, and this country is full of that. Easiest way to get corn products to market from up in the Piedmont, and no taxes to pay for import of claret or port.'
'It helps,' Alan confessed. 'Look here, Burgess. You said to the private that it was the usual, or worse than the usual. So you have seen such an atrocity before?'
'Yes, more than enough, unfortunately.'
'Has your unit ever…' Alan asked, wondering what a band of Loyalist volunteers could do in reprisal to the people they ran across who supported the rebellion.
'No, we have not!' Burgess snapped, his eyes narrowing, 'How dare you accuse me of such a thing. I've half a mind to call you out for it. We may not be an
'My apologies, then, Burgess,' Alan said, seeing that Chiswick was indeed ready to kill him for the slur on his unit's honor, and on his own personal honor.
'That is not good enough, sir,' Burgess said.
'I most humbly beg your pardon, Mister Chiswick, for by the asking of a question meant in all innocence, that you might have felt that I had cast any aspersions upon you or your company,' Alan said in the most formal tone of complete and abject apology, amazed at himself to be backing down from any man, even someone he was beginning to like. He would not have done it in London, and they would have met and crossed swords or stood and delivered a volley out of sheer pride and honor.
He shifted the rifle to his left hand and offered Burgess the right, which Burgess took after a moment. 'I am sorry I was so quick to take offense, Alan, but damme, that was a little close to my feelings. We've flogged and hung before to prevent that sort of thing.'
'Then I shall be easy in my mind that we are still decent Christians, no matter what sort of service we have seen.' Alan smiled as they shook hands heartily.
'Well, not well-churched Christians, I think.' Burgess smiled.
'But never capable of such as we saw, so that says something for our salvation,' Alan said. 'For being a pair of rake-hells?'
'Amen to that.'
Once determining that the Williamsburg road was clear of enemy activity, they led their menagerie east, back to the working party, just in time to see the end of labors. Two stout pines had been cut down for replacement masts, trimmed of limbs and laid out to be skinned clean of bark and knurls, Two lighter timbers had been selected for replacement royal and topgallant yards. Other blocks from the butts had been shaped roughly into new
