The French Admiral

the Honorable Treghues, and of the people in the wardroom.

'A most charming gentleman, your captain,' Burgess said.

'As long as he has his wits about him, yes,' Alan replied, and spent the next few minutes of their ride filling Burgess in on how the captain had behaved before his surgery, and how brutally he had treated everyone. Alan did not go into Treghues's reasons regarding himself; he liked Burgess and wanted him to remain a friend.

'You're a lucky fellow, Alan,' Burgess opined.

'How do you come by that, Burgess?' Alan asked, mystified.

'When you are on shipboard, you have your fellow midshipmen in a snug mess with a steward and a hammock man to see to your table and your kit, never have to sleep out in the wilds in all weathers, and you are assured where your next meal is coming from. What more could you desire in time of war?'

'Going back to London and raising merry hell,' Alan said, laughing, 'and letting some other person fight the damn thing.'

'Well, had I the choice to make, I would have preferred the navy to the army,' Burgess said. 'Like that wardroom where your officers live and dine—it looked damned comfortable.'

'Burgess, all the partitions are deal or canvas and come down when the ship is piped to quarters,' Alan explained. 'There normally would be artillery in the wardroom, and when the iron begins to fly there is no safe place aboard a ship. They shovel the dead—what's left of 'em—and the hopelessly wounded over the side to make space in which to keep the guns firing. Trust me, there is nothing desirable about being aboard ship then. There's more safety ashore where one may dig.'

'We do not dig,' Burgess replied. 'We are light infantry.'

'Then we both stand an equal chance when it comes to getting our deaths,' Alan said. 'Not much to choose between them.'

'You speak from experience, sounds like.' Burgess sobered suddenly. 'Tell me of it.'

Alan did not mind bragging on himself, so the rest of the ride passed on the way back to their position in the hills as he related his successes in Ariadne, Parro and Desperate, even touching on the duel with the infantry lieutenant on Antigua over Lucy Beauman's honor. By the time they dismounted and turned their horses over to an orderly before seeing to their own supper, Burgess Chiswick was mightily impressed with his new companion as a fighting man who had seen more action than Burgess, or even his older brother Governour, who had been with the colors longer. But then Alan was, by that time, pretty impressed with his own prowess as well. And after a filling game pie and a mug or two of Burgess's corn whiskey, he was absolutely convinced of the fact that he was a devil of a fellow!

CHAPTER 9

'They are still there,' Alan said, borrowing Burgess's telescope to stare downriver. They had gone for a morning ride over to the river bluffs near the Star Redoubt to survey the work of the fireships. Cornwallis had filled four schooners entrapped in the anchorage with all the straw and flammables he could find, and had placed them under the command of a Loyalist privateer captain. The fireships had gone downriver and had frightened the hell out of the French for a time, driving them away from the mouth of the York, but the privateer captain's schooner had been set alight much too soon, and all the others lit themselves off at the same time as though it were the correct signal. One had blown up, one had gone aground in the shallows after being abandoned by her very well-singed crew of volunteers, and the total effect was nil.

'Well, a brave effort, damme if it wasn't,' Burgess said.

'We might try it again in a few days, though I doubt if they'll stand for it a second time,' Alan said, closing the telescope with a heavy click of collapsing tubes and handing it back to Ensign Chiswick. 'Wouldn't have done us much good, anyway. No one had called us to fetch back the artillery or prepare to evacuate with the fleet.'

'The bulk of the army would have gotten away to the eastern shore, but we could have still crossed over to the Gloucester side in barges and joined Tarleton to cut our way out,' Burgess informed him. 'Lauzun's Legion is perhaps six hundred men. Mayhap eight hundred French marines landed from the ships, and the Virginia Militia surely can't be much. Our troops used them like so many bears back in the spring. Still, I don't see what's stopping us from going downriver. There are only three enemy ships.'

'A third-rate 74, and two large frigates,' Alan told him. 'They're anchored so they can sweep all the main channel. And what you see as open water is really shallow. Even at high tide, it's not enough to float a ship of any size. You can see where the schooner went aground, and she didn't draw a full fathom, loaded as she was. We try to force them, make them cut their cables, they'll fire off signal fusees, and we'd never make it to the far shore before the main fleet near Cape Henry caught up with us.'

'But they cannot come up the river.'

'Thank Providence for small favors. I'd not attempt it without an experienced pilot, and then only in the smallest craft.'

'Then there is nothing for it but to put all our trust in Clinton and your Admiral Graves to get back here and rescue us,' Burgess said.

'Whenever that may be,' Alan spat, tugging at the reins of his mare to turn her about to face inland once more.

'Any guesses on that?' Burgess asked. 'I heard Colonel Hamilton say General Clinton had assured Lord Cornwallis that over four thousand men were ready to embark from New York, now there's no threat to the city.'

'Hmm, if Graves departed the coast on the tenth or so,' Alan said as they walked their mounts down from the bluffs to the Williamsburg road. 'With favorable winds, he would have gotten to New York on the fifteenth, even beating into a nor'east breeze. Ten days to refit and embark those troops… if he can work back across the bar off New York with all his ships. He could have departed yesterday on the twenty-fifth, and could be here by at least the thirtieth. Say the second of October on the outside. But he would still have to fight his way into the bay against the French as he should have the first time.'

'So by the second, we shall have four thousand more troops, more artillery and supplies and might succeed in forcing the French fleet to take shelter up the James River, reversing the odds against us.'

'Bide a minute, Burgess,' Alan said, pulling his mount to a stop. 'What did you mean about New York no longer being threatened. De Barras and his troops in Newport never threatened New York directly.'

'Oh, I am sorry, I thought you had already heard,' Burgess apologized. 'Washington and Rochambeau have abandoned their positions around New York and are reputed to be on the march for Yorktown.'

'Jesus Christ!' Alan shrieked, startling both mounts, who jumped about for a few minutes before they could calm them back down, tittuping and side-paddling and farting in alarm.

'I wish you would not frighten the horses so, Alan. This plug is skittish—not my usual mount,' Burgess complained.

'Fuck the horses. You just frightened the devil out of me!' Alan shot back. 'Is there anything else on the way you have not told me about? No expeditionary force from the Grand Moghul of India with fifty war elephants? No Mameluke cavalry from the Ottoman Empire?'

'From Clinton's letters, which were passed on to the colonel for his information, we should be about even in numbers and much stronger in cavalry should we needs break out,' Burgess said.

'Jesus Christ,' Alan repeated, though much more softly than before. 'We're going to get our arses knackered. We're going to lose this damned war if we keep this up. This is the last army of note in the Americas.'

'And the last Parliament would raise, most like,' Burgess agreed, so stoically calm about their future chances that Alan felt like hitting him. 'So there is no way that Graves or Clinton would leave us hanging in the balance for very long, is there?' Burgess reasoned. 'We can hold until relieved and sooner or later the hurricane season will force the French to sail away, and all this affair will be just another campaign that almost achieved something but didn't. Washington will have to go back north to the New York area, eventually, or stand still for General Clinton to rampage all over the upper Colonies and destroy all their work.'

'That sounds… logical, at any rate,' Alan had to admit, though he remembered his talk with Lieutenant Railsford in Desperate on their way to New York, and Treghues's rant about fleet strategy before the Battle of the Chesapeake. That had sounded eminently logical, too, and look where that had gotten them.