'Jus'a minute more, Mister Lewrie?' Fletcher whined, as usual. 'We bin 'ard at it, sir, an' it's 'at tahred we are.'
'Come here, Fletcher,' Alan commanded with a good imitation of a quarterdeck rasp. The man approached, close enough for Lewrie to smell the scent of rum on his breath.
He took him by the front of the shirt and drew him closer. 'You will assemble your boat crew and get back to work right this instant, and you will work chearly for Mister Carey or I swear to God above, I'll see you flayed open like a Yarmouth bloater for drunkenness and insubordination, if I have to chase you down in hell!'
'Aye, Mister Lewrie, sir. Aye, aye, sir!' Fletcher bobbled, agog at being seized and shaken so roughly. His perennial game of baiting, of walking the fine edge of insolence, had never gotten a response such as that.
'Very well, carry on, Fletcher.'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
'How many boats here?' someone asked from the dark.
'Two.'
'Three!' another voice said. 'That you, Mister Lewrie?'
'Aye, that you, Mister Feather?'
'Aye, sir,' the quartermaster's mate replied, beaching his boat.
'Three, then,' Alan said as an officer approached him.
'Lieutenant, bring your people down here. There are three boats for you.' The officer was calling out to a pack of men further up the beach.
'How many men in this unit, sir?' Alan asked. 'I can normally take thirty in each boat, but the tide is slack and the current is getting stronger. And I don't care for the wind, sir.'
The wind had indeed been rising in the last few minutes, stirring the boats to grinding on the shingle and making tiny whitecaps appear on the dark water, reflected in the glow of fires and shellbursts inland. There were also some flashes in the sky to the west that were not man-made, a display of lightning every few seconds that portended very nasty weather before morning.
'Some sixty all told, I believe,' the officer said, coming up within visible distance. He was a major from Cornwallis's staff, one Alan had seen briefly the time he and Railsford had gone ashore together.
'Perhaps twenty men per boat would be best, sir, considering.'
'Very well. Ah, here you are.'
'Hello to you, sailor, how do you keep?' Lieutenant Chiswick cried, reaching out his hand to shake with Alan.
'Lieutenant Chiswick, sir, how good to see you!' Alan replied. 'Is Burgess well?'
'Aye, just behind me a bit. Von Muecke and some of his Jagers, too. Do you have room for us all?'
'Only twenty men to a boat this trip, sir, sorry. But I believe there are more boats up toward the piers should we run short of room.'
'Good. Mollow, eighteen men and yourself in this boat,' the Loyalist officer said, pointing to Alan's boat. 'I'll take passage with you, if you have no objections, Mister Lewrie.'
'None at all,' Alan told him, genuinely glad to see the Chiswicks once more, even if they and their unit did appear even scruffier than they had in past acquaintance.
'Burgess, it's Lewrie, come to ferry us 'cross the Styx,' Governour told his brother. 'Do you take eighteen men and the corporal with you in this next boat. Sar'n't, there's a boat to the left for you and your men.'
'For me,
'Up near the piers, Mister van Mook-ah,' Alan instructed.
'Fon Mehr-keh, gottverdammt!' the man complained, and Alan was sure he was wetting down that famous mustache in the dark, once more.
Alan noticed that in most cases, the North Carolina troops were each carrying an extra Ferguson rifle as they boarded the boat and settled down amidships. 'Dead men's weapons, too valuable to leave,' Governour informed him. 'We'll be needed back home and there's no way to get more rifles. Else the new troops we raise will have to do with Brown Besses.'
'You'll be marching the wrong way for the Carolinas.'
'If any troops are going to get all the way to New York, it will be us,' Governour assured him. 'I cannot speak with any hope for the rest of this army.'
Alan shrugged, unwilling to face the thought of total defeat and surrender of the last army England would raise, or could raise, for the war in the Colonies. What the Chiswicks would face in an America with Rebel forces victorious did not bear thinking about, so partisan was the prevailing mood on both sides.
'Loaded, Mister Lewrie,' Feather told him. Carey admitted the same. There was nothing for it but to shove off for another trip across the York.
'Your crew is rested, Feather?'
'Aye, Mister Lewrie, on t'other side. I 'ave a boat compass.'
'You lead off, then, and we shall steer in your wake. Shove off!'
The boats were manhandled off the beach and the men sprang back aboard, wet to the waists as the current plucked the barges right from the start and began to swirl them about like wood chips. The oars were shipped into the rowports quickly, and they had to stroke hard just to regain the distance they had lost.
Once out from behind the shadow of the northernmost spit of land and into deeper water, Lewrie realized they were out on a new and more dangerous river. The current was building up, possibly the result of a heavy rain inland from all that lightning and thunder that had not been distinguishable over the sound of the cannonading. Whitecaps were more prominent now, and the barges made a lot more leeway than they had on the last crossing. Alan took hold of the tiller bar with a firmer grip in fear of the water and the tendency of the ungainly barge to want to tip to leeward, steering more westerly to keep them from being blown out into the wider reaches of the river below Gloucester Point.
'You soldiers, shift your weight to larboard!' he shouted.
'Up 'ere, you silly buggers!' Coe directed. 'Up ta the 'igh side.'
There was a flash of lightning that lit up the entire river, and Alan could see that he was already to leeward of Feather's barge. He added a bit more lee helm to the tiller, pinching up the bows more toward the wind, which was also rising and beginning to moan across the water.
'Put your backs into it!' Alan ordered his oarsmen. 'Pick up the stroke, Coe!'
'Aye, sir,' Coe grunted.
They had barely gotten a quarter of the way across the narrows, and then the thunderstorm burst on them for real. Lightning crackled across the sky with greater and greater frequency, and the claps of thunder that followed seemed shockingly loud and close behind the flashes. The wind got up even more, strong enough to strip hats from people's heads, strong enough to hinder free breathing. And the wind smelled ominously wet, pregnant with rain to come.
Oh, Jesus, I am going to drown out here! Alan thought for the first of many times that night, his face as white as his waistcoat in his rising terror. He could easily see Feather's boat now in all the rivulets of lightning that split the darkness, pointing almost fully upriver to try for an eventual landfall on the distant point. They had the point on their right abeam, but were not making much headway, he realized, hard as the hands might strain at the oars. Governour Chiswick sat in the middle of the sternmost thwart before Lewrie, and even he was looking a bit worried.
'Should we put back in?' he shouted.
'Best to keep bows on to this,' Alan shouted back. 'We're committed now!'
He took off his cocked hat before he lost it overboard and stowed it under the stern thwart, just as the first truly fat drops of rain began to pelt at them with some force. Lewrie looked astern to Carey's boat and saw that he was close up still, with another boat behind him bearing what looked like a party of Jagers. The lightning was so continuous that he now had no trouble seeing in any direction.
'Goddamn!' Alan cried as the rain began in earnest. It came down in buckets; rather, it did not come down, but slanted in from the west at such an acute angle that he was almost blinded, and he envied the oarsmen who had their backs to it. His clothing was soaked right through in seconds as though he had just plunged into the river. Lightning or not, he was blinded by the force and volume of the rain and had to mop his face with a sodden sleeve. The wind picked up velocity and began to whine, and the boat began to pitch most alarmingly as it butted into the
