The French Admiral

'I was going to give you some guineas, to pay for what we had to requisition, but I would admire if you used it instead to pay the surgeon who comes and perhaps to put up a small marker for our dead, along with the militiamen and French who died here today.'

'That is good of you, sir,' Mrs. Hayley whispered. 'I…'

'This was a pointless, useless battle that no one'll remember in a year, most like,' Alan went on coldly. 'Had we gotten clean away, none of these poor men would have died. It solved nothing, it meant nothing.'

'I'm sorry!' Mrs. Hayley wailed, no longer able to bear his words of reproach, knowing full well that she had given her son her consent to carry word down the Neck, scheming happily to get him away unseen so he could play a hero's part and she could be a patriot as well, never having seen the cost of patriotism firsthand.

'What happened to Rodney?' Nancy Ledbetter asked, her face ashen.

'I have no idea, nor do I particularly care,' Alan said. 'He may be safe up the Neck, or he may lie dead out in the fields or woods. 'Tis all one to me. He brought it on himself if he was hurt or killed.'

'You're a brutal young man, sir.' Nancy wept, clutching the small bag of coins he offered her along with the paper. 'How can you go through life so uncaring about others?'

'Think on this, Mistress Ledbetter,' Alan said. 'You and your scheming and spying killed nigh on a hundred men, maybe your own nephew, too. How brutal were you, my dear? Would you have wept a tear on my corpse? I doubt it. You'd have bedded me if you thought there was anything more to gain by it, all to bring this about. How can you live with yourself, I ask you, instead? Good-bye, Mistress Ledbetter.'

He turned to go, but she clutched at his sleeve. 'Forgive us!' she pleaded. 'We did not know…'

'Take it up with God. He's better at forgiveness than I am.'

So saying, Alan made his way down to the boat landing, stopping to give what cheer he could to the wounded sailors and those soldiers he recognized in one of the slave huts where they had been installed to heal or die, as God willed.

He got down to the boats, where the small party waited to board for the escape across the bay. The tide was running out rapidly now, and the sun was almost gone. The barges twitched at the end of their painters as the inlet emptied with the outrush to the sea. They floated high instead of canting over with their keels in the tidal flats.

'Coe, take charge of the first boat,' he ordered his senior hand. 'Corporal Knevet, better get your party aboard with Coe, here.'

'Yes, sir,' Knevet replied, wading out to the boat with the sailors.

Sir, Alan thought. The bastard actually called me 'sir'!

There was a sharp pop up the creek, which had everyone diving for their rifles and a spot of cover from which to fire, but after a moment Governour and Burgess came out of the gloomy thickets to join them, the heavy dragoon pistol in Governour's hand still smoking.

'What was that?' Alan asked.

'Nothing much,' Governour replied. 'We ready to depart?'

'Aye. Burgess?'

Burgess wore a bandage about his head and one arm was in a sling, but he shouldered past Alan to splash out into the shallows without one word, tears running down his face.

'Let's go, then,' Governour said.

There was no need to pole or row out of the inlet, for the wind was out of the south-east, so once past the mouth of the narrow inlet, with the lug sails set, they could wear up on the wind to beat through the pass at Monday Creek and get out into the bay far above the watching frigates in the mouth of the York. With the leeboards down in deep water, they were making a goodly clip, lost in the first of the night, dark sails and tarred hulls indistinguishable from the almost moonless waters.

'We want to keep a heading east-nor'east, Burgess,' Alan told the soldier, who was seated in his boat. 'Keep an eye on the compass for me.'

'Yes, I will,' Burgess snuffled.

'What happened back there?' Alan asked, leaning close.

'God save us, it was George all over again,' Burgess said with a catch in his voice as he tried to mutter too soft to be overheard.

'George? Oh, your younger brother? What was?'

'We caught that Hayley brat,' Burgess told him. 'Governour said he owed him a debt of blood, and he shot him in the belly, so he'd take days dying. We left him out there in the brambles, out of sight.'

Alan waited for a sense of shock, but his nerves were about out of the ability to be shocked by much of anything after all he had seen or done. He pondered how he felt about this revelation.

'Oh? Good,' Alan finally said, 'serves the little bugger right.'

'God, Alan!' Burgess shuddered. 'That makes us no better than the bastard who killed George. What does it matter, anyway? We've lost the army, mayhap lost the whole damned war here in the Chesapeake. All we had left was our honor, and now that's gone, too. What's a gentleman without his honor?'

'Alive,' Alan told him evenly. 'And, if he's not caught with his breeches down or the weapon in his hand, he is still a gentleman to everyone else. I'd have shot the little shit-sack myself if I'd run across him first. Now you and Governour have these men to look after, and your family down in Wilmington to worry about. Forget it.'

'I'll never.'

'Hard times'd make a rat eat red onions,' Alan quoted back to him. 'You do what you have to. This war has all cost us most of our decency, and it's not through with us yet. Like our sailing master says, the more you cry, the less you'll piss. Buck up and swear you'll never do it again, but it's done, and it wasn't your hand done it. Governour's still your brother. Worry about how he's dealing with it.'

'You're trying to make me feel good about it?' Burgess marveled.

'Let me know when you do.' Alan grinned in the dark. 'Now keep an eye on that compass. There's just enough moon to steer by. What's our heading?'

'Um… just a touch north of east.'

Alan looked to the eastern horizon above them and found a star to steer by, swung the tiller slightly until he was on a close reach to the south-east breeze and leaned back, blanking his mind to what Burgess had just told him, blanking his mind to everything except getting across the bay before sunrise.

CHAPTER 14

'So you made it out past Cape Charles on the night of the 21st, sheltered on Curtis Island, coasted to Chingoteag the next night, and were finally picked up by the brig Dandelion on the 24th,' Admiral Hood's flag captain said after reading the report before him.

'Aye, sir,' Alan replied.

The flag captain looked up from the written account that Alan had penned once ferried over to the Barfleur. It was an amazing document of raw courage, unbelievable bravery, and clever extemporizing to make the river barges seaworthy. Had there not been corroborating reports from the Loyalist Volunteer officers and the surviving seamen's testimony, the captain would have dismissed it as the work of a fabulist, much on a par with the adventures of a Munchausen.

He studied the young man that stood before his desk, swaying easy to the motion of the flagship. The flag captain was of the common opinion that the finest intelligence, the best character, and the most courage were usually found in the most attractive physical specimens, and he found nothing to dissuade this opinion in Midshipman Lewrie. The uniform was stained and faded, but that did not signify; the lad's hair was neat and clean, shorter than the usual mode and not roached back into such a severe style, the queue short and tied with a black silk ribbon, a pleasant light brown, touched blonde where the sun reached it from long service in tropic sunshine. The face was not too horsey and long, regular in appearance, the jaw not too prominent, but it was a firm jaw. The skin was tanned by sea service, and in the dim cabins, with only swaying lamps for illumination, the face was relaxed from the permanent squint sailors developed, showing the whitish chalk marks of frown lines and wrinkles- to-be in later years, held so squinted the sun could not stain them as it did the rest of the skin. And the eyes, which at first the captain believed to be aristocratic gray, now seemed more pale blue, of a most penetrating and