Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sir William’s servant appeared in the garden with a full chamberpot. “Good morning, sir!”

  Vane, knowing that to be greeted so cheerfully by Tom Evans was a sign of acceptance in Sir William’s military family, groaned dramatically. “It’s a foul morning, Evans.”

  “Be all right with a tot of rum inside you, sir.” Tom Evans tossed the pot’s contents on to the lawn, then frowned as another fusillade muttered and cracked. “They’re a bit frisky this morning?”

  “It’s the fog. It unsettles people.”

  Hamlet, Sir William’s dog, came wagging into the swirling mist, barked for Vane’s attention, then happily went off to explore the new smells around the once-pretty garden.

  Vane bent to the pump and splashed his face with water. The musketry died, then splintered again, this time reaching a crescendo of noise that was sustained like thunder. Vane stood, water dripping from his face, and stared helplessly northwards into the fog. He could scarce see the shapes of trees thirty yards away.

  “Kit! Kit!” Sir William’s voice called from an upstairs window.

  “Sir!” Vane ran into the house. “Smithers! Smithers! Leave the eggs. Saddle the mare!” He raced upstairs, buttoned his jacket and buckled on his sword. He could not find his pistol and cursed as he searched among the fallen blankets, but finally found the weapon inside a spare boot. Otto Zeigler gaped from his tangled blankets on the floor. “What’s happening?”

  “Either the picquets have gone mad or it’s an attack. My hat? Oh God, oh fuck! My hat!”

  “Here.” Zeigler had been using it as a pillow.

  Vane seized the hat, threw himself through the door and collided with Sir William who was still buckling on a sword as he made his way to the stairs. A messenger, smeared with mud, had already found the General who, oddly calm in the panicked atmosphere, checked Vane’s haste with a raised hand. “Go to the Beggarstown outpost, Kit. Find out what’s happening. I’ll join you there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Smithers was still tightening the girth of Vane’s mare. He cupped his hands for his master to use as a mounting stirrup. “Orders, sir?”

  “I’m going to Beggarstown. Bring me some food if you can.”

  Lord Robert, jacket unbuttoned and hat in his hand, ran towards the stables. “You were right!” he shouted, but Vane had no time to reply. Instead, he raked his heels back and turned his horse’s head towards the long, poplar-edged drive. The mare’s hooves spattered great gobs of mud from the road as Vane scattered troopers from his path.

  He sawed on the reins at the Skippack Road and spurred northwards. The market place milled with confused troops, none accoutred for battle, and Vane shouted at them to get out of his way as he headed up the main street in the ever-thickening fog.

  He galloped past the Chew House, the northern limit of the British billets, then spurred on towards the incessant crackle of musket fire that came from the heavy picquet line. He felt for the watch in his waistcoat pocket and found it missing. He cursed, but guessed it was around five in the morning. A dog raced out of the Meeting House yard and yapped at his mare’s galloping heels, then, sudden and heart-stopping, a musket ball whiplashed from the blind fog to crack past Vane’s face. A wounded Redcoat, trailing blood from a shattered thigh, crawled back down the road. The first signs of battle.

  Vane galloped past two more wounded men dragging themselves to safety then, dimly to his right, he saw a company of Redcoats formed in front of a grove of trees. He swerved off the road, jumped a flooded ditch, and galloped to the company’s rear. The men were in their three ranks, as tightly locked together as the pieces of a child’s jigsaw puzzle. “Fire!” their Captain shouted and a volley stabbed smoke and flame into the fog. The skunk stench of burnt powder assailed Vane’s nostrils. “What’s happening?”

  “Rebel skirmishers, sir!” a sergeant at the rear of the company answered. A captain was giving the firing orders, as calmly as though he stood on a parade ground at home. The men, their faces already blackened by the flashing of powder in the lock pans by their faces, bit open new cartridges. They had scraps of red cloth in their hats as marks that this was one of the Light Companies that had taken part in the action at Paoli’s Tavern two weeks before.

  “What rebels? Where?” Vane’s question seemed suddenly superfluous, for a flicker of musket balls slashed into the ranks. A corporal screamed and went down, another man pitched back with a hole in his forehead.

  “Close up! Close up!” The sergeant ignored Vane.

  “Present!” the captain shouted. “Fire!”

  Another British company, beyond the road, was still in skirmish order, the men picking targets in the fog and firing from a kneeling position. Vane wrenched at his reins and spurred his horse back to the road.

  The fog was obscuring understanding, and Christopher Vane knew that his job as an aide-de-camp was to help his master comprehend the battle. Thus he went forward towards the enemy and ahead of the foremost British troops. He had no idea if he was supposed to go so far forward, but he was intent on doing all that Sir William had asked and more. Captain Vane, plucked from regimental obscurity, would prove himself to be the best aide that any general could wish for.

  He walked the mare forward, always ready to screw the beast around and slash back with his spurs. Foot by nervous foot he advanced, and Vane could feel his horse quivering in apparent fear. Her ears were pricked, reacting to every hissing bullet in the grey, wet fog. Vane wondered if the horse fetched her nervousness from him, but then decided that even to think of the question was proof that he was not afraid. Once more the odd, calm joy of battle, which he had first known at Brandywine, surprised and pleased him. He felt brave, immortal, blessed by a charmed life; but then a sudden swirl of wind lifted the fog and, in the momentary gap, he saw the brown, red-faced uniforms of the rebel army. The enemy troops were in open order, but Vane had an impression, nothing more, of a mass of men further back marching beneath a gaudy banner. There were flecks of white in their hats.

  Then dawn’s silence gave way to angry noise and flurry. A bullet drove a splash of mud up beside the right shoulder of Vane’s horse, and another bullet hissed behind his head as he turned, kicked back, and let his mare gallop him away. Rebel taunts followed him, but Vane had done his job and seen the enemy. He galloped past the British skirmishers and saw a knot of mounted men spurring up the road. They were Sir William’s other aides. “The General?” Vane shouted.

  “Over there!” A dragoon major pointed towards the company Vane had first visited, and Vane swerved in that direction. The company had shaken into loose order to make itself less of a target, but so much fire was now pouring from the dark, smoke-thickened fog that the men were giving ground and taking cover in the trees.

  “Form up! Form up!” Sir William, showing a rare flash of anger, was behind the retreating men. “It’s only a scouting force. We don’t run from scouts! Form up! Captain! Form your men, if you please, sir! Let me see firmness!”

  Sir William saw Vane, waved, then suddenly a cannon ball fired from the rebel front smashed into the branches above the Commander-in-Chief’s head. Twigs, leaves, and scraps of wood showered down as Sir William’s horse reared and twisted. Another cannon ball tore open a Redcoat’s chest, splaying his ribs as clean as if a butcher had used a filleting knife.

  “Not a scouting party, sir! They’re formed and in force.” Vane shouted to Sir William who, smothered in fallen leaves, brought his horse under control. “I saw them, sir. Coming straight down the road!” Musket balls hummed around them, clipping at leaves, hissing, whipcracking, and thumping clean splinters from trunks.

  “Back!” Howe shouted it at the man who, a moment before, he had ordered to stand and fight. “Back! Inform your flanks, sir! Form on the Meeting House!”

  “You must go, sir!” Vane tried to seize the bridle of Howe’s horse, but the General jerked away. He was staring into the dirty, grey, half-light of the fog-shrouded dawn as the Light Company
filed hurriedly towards the rear.

  “My God, this is rich, Kit!” Howe was oddly elated as he watched the first rebels appear in the fog. Their bayonets were the brightest thing in all the dawn, brighter even than the scraps of white paper they all wore in their hats. Sir William, who liked all things American, was predictably impressed by his enemy. “They come on damned well, Kit, damned well! Don’t they look well?”

  Vane tried to place himself between the General and the enemy, but Sir William insisted on an uninterrupted view. Vane finally seized the bridle and turned the General’s horse by main force. “Back, sir, I do beg you!”

  The British outpost line was in full retreat now. The wounded were being dragged towards the village, while the dead were left where they had fallen. On either side of the road, colours high, the rebels advanced with bared bayonets.

  Howe let himself be drawn back out of the enemy’s sight. “I’ll form Musgrave to hold those rogues up! You fall back with these fellows. Keep an eye on the flanks!” Sir William lightly punched Vane’s upper arm. “I wish you joy of the day, Kit!”

  “And you, sir!”

  Sir William smiled and, bearing a charmed life in the bullet-ridden gloom, spurred away with his entourage, passing a single horseman who, riding toward the enemy, smiled in relief when he saw Vane.

  “Breakfast, sir?” It was Private Peter Smithers, Vane’s servant, who was mounted on Vane’s new horse, the young and expensive black stallion with its three white socks and bright white blaze. Smithers held out two slices of bread between which he had put the fried eggs. “Breakfa – ” He could not finish the word because a rebel cannon ball, fired blind into the fog, had taken off his head as neatly as if a headsman had swung an axe. One second Smithers was grinning with pleasure, and the next there was a glossy fountain of blood and a stub of white bone amidst the astonishingly scarlet flesh.

  Smithers brains spattered across Vane’s face as the breakfast fell into the mud. The blood, spurting lower, drenched Vane’s white breeches, then the headless corpse thumped on to the mud in which the egg yolks had spilt bright yellow. The nervous young stallion, frightened by the smell and by the crack of bullets, reared high with eyes white and teeth bared.

  “Jesus Christ!” Vane stared aghast at his servant’s headless trunk. “Peter? Peter?” He had the insane urge to dismount and comfort the dead man, then he looked up to see the stallion bolting into the fog bank. Christopher Vane thought of the money he had borrowed and he turned the mare to follow his terrified stallion, then a rebel shout of triumph, too close behind, made him rake back his heels and turn the mare’s head towards safety. Damn and damn and damn. The loss seethed in him, galled him, and was made worse by the thought that a damned rebel might find his expensive stallion. He turned in the saddle as he galloped away, smeared the grey jelly from his eyes, and saw the faces of his enemies’ success. They seemed to jeer as they advanced, then a swirl of the drifting vapour closed down once more.

  The enemy had come from the fog in the dawn, and between them and Philadelphia was nothing but a bewildered army who had been surprised. Mister Washington had his battle.

  Ten

  Martha Crowl was woken by the distant crackling of burning thorns punctuated by a deeper percussion that seemed to softly punch the chilly and vaporous air. It was the far-off sound of battle; the thornlike crackling was musketry, and the deeper throbs were artillery. The sound made Martha pull on a woollen robe and run downstairs to the kitchen.

  Jenny shook her head. None of the servants had any news, except a stablehand who said he had heard that the British were attacking the river forts.

  “Not to the north, they’re not,” Martha said. “The sound is coming from the north, isn’t it?”

  She went to her front door, opened it, and saw that her neighbours were also standing on their steps listening to the far-off sound. A troop of cavalry, part of the city’s garrison, clattered north on Fifth Street while Redcoats were marching on Fourth; all going towards the sound of the guns and evidence that whatever had happened was alarming enough for Sir William to have summoned help.

  Cheered by that thought, Martha went back into the house, dressed, and took breakfast with Lydia, who wished to know if the percussive gunfire meant that the lobsters were being roasted. Martha pretended to misunderstand the question, insisting that Lydia read from her primer instead. The lesson was interrupted by a hammering on the front door, a hammering so insistent that Martha jumped with alarm and wondered if the British had at last come to arrest a prominent Patriot.

  Instead it was her uncle, Abel Becket, dressed in his customary black, but with a face made pale by anger. Jenny showed him into the upstairs parlour where, without any greeting, he thrust a letter towards Martha. “Did you know?”

  “Good morning, dear uncle. Say good morning, Lydia.”

  Lydia gave a curtsy. “Good morning, great-uncle.”

  Abel Becket, faced with the child’s courteous innocence, managed a calm response. “Good morning, child. Did you say your prayers?”

  “Yes, sir.” Lydia, whose black hair was twisted in curling papers, smiled at her great-uncle. “I prayed that the lobsters would be roasted.”

  “You did what?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Martha said hastily. “Would you like some tea, uncle?”

  Abel Becket refused, instead demanding to speak privately with his niece, then waited impatiently as Jenny was summoned to take Lydia down to the kitchen. “Did you know?” he again asked angrily when the child, clutching books and rag dolls, was gone.

  Martha carefully poured herself some tea. She wore a morning dress and a lace-fringed mobcap over her dark hair. She took her time with the strainer and teapot, trying to compose herself, for, though she was not her uncle’s responsibility, nor, indeed, had she ever lived beneath Abel Becket’s roof, his anger frightened her. “If you mean, did I know about my brother, yes. Has he written to you? I told him he should.”

  Her calm words seemed to fluster Becket who, the crumpled letter still in his hand, paced to the window which vibrated in sympathy with the guns’ hammering. “He may be your brother, girl, but he is no longer my nephew.”

  Martha shrugged, as if she did not care.

  Becket threw the letter across the room. “Read it!”

  “I think I know its contents, uncle. Are you sure you won’t have tea? The leaves were smuggled past the British blockade so have an added piquancy?”

  Becket ignored her provocation. “Jonathon tells me, ma’am, that after prayerful consideration he has no choice but to fight for the traitors! He then suggests that I buy his inheritance and give the proceeds to you!” He paused, as if to underline the outrageousness of the request. “I will not reply, but you may, Martha, you may. You will tell him that he has forfeited his rights, that he is a traitor, and that I will pay no money to traitors. He has no inheritance!”

  “The law,” Martha said carefully, “may not agree.”

  “Do you think,” her uncle asked passionately, “that the law will forgive a rebel? If he even lives to attempt to secure its forgiveness?”

  Martha heard the distress in her uncle’s voice. She knew how proud he had been of Jonathon’s aptitude for commerce, and knew how hurt he must be by his seeming rejection. “If the rebellion succeeds,” she said calmly, “the law may not forgive the Loyalists.”

  “Succeed!” Abel Becket pounced on the word. “And if it did, Martha, just what kind of country would it breed? Have you ever thought of that? For one moment, in all your heady nonsense, did you ever think what disasters the lawyers would fetch on us?”

  “Liberty?” Martha suggested sweetly.

  “Liberty!” The word stung Abel Becket into fury. “Were we so unfree before the rebels stirred? How many warehouses has liberty filled? We made money here. Men made fine farms and built good roads and made houses like this! Were you so unfree, my girl, when you moved into this house? It was built by work, not by mouthing fine words. And
where will our work be without England? Will France offer us markets? Spain? Must we indenture ourselves to Popish states in the name of liberty?”

  Martha wondered what had turned her uncle, who had once been a man of nimble amiability, into a man ridden by faction. She shrugged. “There was a time when you were as fervent for the colonists’ rights as any man. You signed the protests, you refused to trade in tea, you marched against the Governor. Yet now you’re one of them. I don’t understand, truly.” Martha spoke gently, but she could have accused him of harsher ills. She could have reminded Abel Becket how, in the years of rebel rule in the city, he had supplied the Continental Army and taken the rebels’ money and never once showed the courage that had put other Loyalists into prison for daring to express their views. “Why do you risk ruin for a foreign king?”

  Abel Becket stared at his niece as though he doubted her sanity. “You understand nothing,” he said finally, “nothing! I protested against restrictions on trade, and I would protest again if it were necessary. But I did not, nor will I ever, fight for some dreamer’s madness called independence. Life is commerce. We work to live, to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. We live, we work, and we worship God!” He spoke now with a fervent intensity. “I know more of this world than you. I know the British. There is corruption and sin in London, God knows, but there are also godly men and traders who could buy this city and every city in America besides! Are we to set up as their rivals? Are we, out of jealous men’s pique, to defy all authority for that?” He gestured towards the sound of the guns. “Your head’s been turned by fools who think the death of our young men will buy them a vote! A vote for what? To make lawyers rich?”