Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  Scammell’s eyes were fixed on Sam. The Sergeant clutched at his belly with his left hand, staggered forward, and probed with the bayonet in his right hand. He tried to speak, but no words came.

  Sam stepped back. Blood was dripping on the floor, puddling there, spreading, then, as if poleaxed, Scammell dropped to his knees. He looked in pathetic appeal at Sam, then fell forward. The musket clattered as he fell and as he moved and as he twitched in the sheeting blood.

  Sam knew there would be no mercy now. He knew it dimly, through the red sheets of his consciousness and through the pulses of pain that came from broken bone and bruised flesh. Sam had tried to kill, and maybe had killed, and the army would demand his punishment, and Captain Vane would encourage the punishment, and Sam instinctively twisted away from the bleeding and moaning man and called the stallion’s name.

  There was no time to find a bridle or a saddle. There was no time left. There was only a horse, and a man scrabbling in blood, and Sam led the beast down the long aisle and dragged the church door open with his left hand. He was sobbing with pain.

  And astonishingly, in the small evening rain, ordinary people beneath drab umbrellas went about their ordinary business in the ordinary street.

  Sam slowly and painfully climbed on to the horse’s bare back from the mounting block beside the church door. The first passers-by stopped to stare in astonishment at the bloody Redcoat who, ignoring them, slashed his heels into the horse’s flanks. He gripped a handful of black mane as the stallion surged forward.

  Sam was running.

  Forty-One

  Sam fled the city. The alleys and courtyards would have offered a fugitive better hiding, but Sam was a country boy, at home where leaves gave shelter, and so he let the stallion take him through the western hovels, across the Centre Commons, and down towards the bare stumps where once the Neck had been so pretty with trees. He rode bareback, without stirrups or bridle, but he had learned to ride horses thus in his childhood and the stallion, trusting Sam, obeyed the pressure of its rider’s knees.

  Sam checked the stallion by hauling on the broken headrope. He had taken shelter among stakes that had been pushed into the soil to support the string beans which soldiers had planted to supplement their meagre rations, and he paused in the scanty cover, feeling the rain’s spit on his bloodied face, and he tried to work out all his future in a moment’s pain-racked thought.

  He could ride to the city and throw himself on the mercy of Sir William, or he could cross the river.

  Sir William, Sam thought, was a kind man, but Sam must needs explain a murder in a church before the General would offer protection. Yet the temptation of a stable in England, far from all Redcoats and rebels, was strong, and made stronger by the thought of parents and home.

  Sam was wincing because of the pain in his right hand. He keened softly as he rocked back and forth in an attempt to dissipate the agony that lanced from his broken finger. The stallion shivered and Sam, without thinking, stroked its neck with his left hand.

  His whole life, Sam thought, had come to this rain-soaked moment in a vegetable patch. Nate’s moment had come on a battlefield, and Nate had chosen his freedom and taken a bullet in his spine as reward. That bullet was avenged now, but the vengeance meant that, unless Sam threw himself on the army’s mercy, he would be a hunted creature for the rest of his life. He could escape the army and, by begging and tramping strange roads, go north to Canada where Redcoat rumour had it that ships’ captains would offer a deserter passage home in exchange for work. But even if Sam reached his English village, his name would be posted in the church porch as a murderer and a deserter.

  He stared wildly about the ruined landscape of the Neck, where ragged stumps, weeds, and straggling vegetable patches had replaced the once gracious parkland. A few officers, braving the rain, exercised their horses, and Sam knew he must move before he caught their attention. Yet he feared to move. A part of him knew he must run, but he could only run to a future that was far from home. He was a stranger in a strange land, and the girl who could have drawn him into that wilderness was to marry another man. Sam would be alone.

  He would be alone with the knowledge that he had betrayed his red coat and his bright flag. At this moment, bareback on a frightened horse, Sam wanted to know what was the right thing to do. Captain Vane had done wrong, that much Sam knew, but Vane was not England. England was wintry mornings with the horses fretting to see the hounds unleashed after the fox. England was a line woven from horsehair that could tease a trout from a willow-shaded stream. England was laughter in the ale-house, and the sturdy friendship of villagers who knew, as surely as they knew the sun would rise, that they lived in the best of all countries. To Sam, England was the countryside, never the town with its grasping merchants and venal ambitions, and, after a winter in a great city, Sam suddenly yearned for the soft English countryside where the sun never sweltered and the snow never lay as deep as it did here. Sam wanted to go home.

  But Caroline was across the river, and Captain Vane would go to her home and Sam knew that what the Captain would do there in England’s name was wrong. And Sam did not believe he could stop the evil by going to Sir William, because the Commander-in-Chief, however kindly, could not listen to a private. The Private must make his own decision and, even if doing the right thing meant abandoning himself to loneliness in a strange wilderness, far from home, then it must be done. Otherwise a man could not live with himself. Sam could betray his flag, or he could betray the girl that he loved but who could never love him because there was another man.

  He turned the stallion’s head towards the south and clicked his tongue. Sam would miss England, so much that he could weep for the loss, but England would survive without Sam while Caroline would not. Sam would ride for love and perhaps, when his wounds were healed and the armies had marched on, he would risk the journey north to Canada and take his chances on a voyage home in the hope that his crimes would be forgotten. The stallion, its coat glossed by the rain, smelt other horses close by and whinnied.

  Sam twisted to see a group of mounted officers approaching him from the city. They were suspicious because of the disarray of his bloodied clothes. One of them called for Sam to halt, and Sam, fearing all questions, kicked his boots back and gave the stallion its head.

  The black horse galloped as though the Green Man himself were on its heels. It galloped with all the power and speed that Sam himself had put into the muscles with the long mornings of patient exercise, and now, beneath the rain, the stallion left its pursuers far behind. Sam rode south of the guardpost at Gray’s Ferry and did not haul the stallion’s head back until he had reached the undergrowth and shrubs which grew beside Schuylkill north of the Lower Ferry. There, and knowing he had bought a few moments’ peace, he slid from the horse’s back.

  Sam was half crazed with pain. He crouched among new leaves and took deep, calming breaths. The bruises could wait, and the split flesh would mend, but the broken finger was a torment. He took a deeper breath and closed his eyes.

  Slowly, gently, he closed his left hand over the broken finger. He squeezed till the pain was almost unbearable, then jerked the broken finger straight. The agony bent him over, misting his closed eyes with red, but at least the finger no longer stuck out like the bent bayonet that had hooked into Scammell’s guts. Sam could still feel the bone grating, but he took the roller from about his neck and, ignoring the pain, strapped the finger to its neighbour.

  He could hear the voices of the young cavalry officers behind him now. The army would search for him, for Sam had branded himself as a deserter, but these curious men, piqued by the strange sight of a bloody soldier, were just as great a danger as any formal search party. The inquisitive cavalry officers knew he was up to no good and would take pleasure in dragging a fugitive back to the guardhouse. Every man who had been Sam’s friend was now his enemy, and the flogging triangle would precede his death. Sam looked west and saw, with relief, how the light faded from the clou
ded sky. A rent in the grey pall was edged with crimson and, in the dying light, a scarlet bird flew across the river. Somehow that sight gave Sam hope.

  The stallion shivered and Sam muttered for it to be still. He could use the horse no longer, for now there was a river to cross.

  He slithered down the Schuylkill’s bank to the water’s edge and headed south. He had ridden the Neck almost every morning, and he knew where some engineer officers, quartered in one of the gracious summer houses beside the river, kept punts for duck shooting. He prayed that the rain had kept the sportsmen indoors.

  Sam clambered along the bank, slithering in the mud, forcing a way through brambles and careless of the poison ivy. He tried to understand what he had learned in the church – that Caroline had warned the fort of the Hessian attack – but he could not find it in himself to condemn her. Loyalty to England was confused by love, and Sam told himself that Caroline had never made a secret of her allegiance to the rebellion. She had not deceived Sam, even though Captain Vane had claimed that she had.

  Sam felt a surge of vicious anger at Captain Vane. A man looked upwards in this world for his security, but if the master was rotten, what hope was there for the man? So now the man was alone, cut off from all that had inspired and sustained him, and Sam would be forced to take Martha’s vaunted liberty for there was nothing else left.

  Then, breaking the train of his fevered thoughts, Sam heard the cracking of twigs above him, followed a moment later by an officer’s loud voice proclaiming the discovery of the stallion.

  But Sam had made his own discovery: two duck punts that lay in a muddy cove of the riverbank. The boats were chained. There were no quant poles or paddles, just the two empty and shallow vessels and their strings of crudely painted carved decoys with which the hunters lured the waterfowl down to the marshes.

  The chain was looped through iron fairleads that were bolted through the prow of each punt, then locked to a thick stake which was sunk in the soil at the bank’s top. Sam rugged the chain and winced for the pain in his right hand. He tugged again, risking the clangour of the rusty links, but both stake and chain were secure.

  He looked at the fairleads. One seemed loose, but not so loose that he could prise it off with his bruised left hand. He listened. He could hear the river running and the small rain falling, but no sound of horse or man.

  He lifted his right foot, paused for a second in fear of the noise he must make, then slammed the heel of his boot on to the looser fairlead. The punt leaped under the blow. He slammed again and again, crashing and thumping at the rusted iron, but the bolts were stubborn and the fairlead stayed put. The chain jingled with every blow.

  Hooves crashed through undergrowth above him. Sam, sobbing and gasping, ignored the pain in his right hand and seized the punt by both gunwales and, with all the strength left in his body, tugged it away from the stake.

  “Stop!” A mounted cavalry officer burst through the low bushes six feet above Sam’s head.

  Sam pulled again, given strength by desperation, and the fairlead’s bolts tore out of the wood so that Sam staggered backwards, the punt dropping, and he fell with the shallow craft into the river’s margin where the current caught the light punt and threatened to swirl it away. Sam drove his boots through the clinging mud, and, with one last heave, threw himself across the punt’s gunwale.

  The cavalry officer turned in his saddle. “For’ard away! For’ard away!”

  Sam had often heard that shout across the winter fields when a fox broke cover and the huntsman shouted to put the hounds on the trail as the horses clattered out of the brakes to follow the fleeing beast. Now Sam was the hunted beast, and the cry would bring the horsemen to his kill. Sam pulled himself into the boat and lay gasping with exhaustion on its bottom boards.

  The officer watched the punt circle. He drew a pistol from his saddle holster and pulled back the flint. He held the gun at arm’s length, allowed a foot for the ball’s dropping and another foot for the wind, and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet whipcracked over Sam’s head and drove a splinter from the punt’s gunwale.

  There were whoops from the bank. A half-dozen officers had joined the first man and, seeing an obvious attempt at desertion, they dragged pistols and carbines from their holsters. This was more joy than they had any right to expect of a rainy evening.

  Sam knelt and wrenched at a low shelf in the punt’s prow which supported the duck hunters’ aim. He tore it free and drove it through the water like a paddle. The Schuylkill was fast, its currents swirled and clashed, and he saw the speed with which the bank swept past. But the horsemen were faster, and their shots attracted more men from the houses on the riverbank.

  Bullets flecked the water. The range was long and growing, but some of the officers prized themselves on their marksmanship with the long-barrelled pistols. One bullet slashed across Sam’s back, tearing the red coat, while another cracked into the blunt bows to let a trickle of water leak into the shallow boat. One of the decoy ducks, struck plumb in its wooden belly, jumped and clattered on its tarred twine, but the laughter of Sam’s pursuers faded as the current swept him faster and faster away.

  Ahead now he could see the wide expanse of the Delaware, he could see the foam where the two rivers met to clash and break in tumbling waves. He pushed with his makeshift paddle, driving himself towards the great water, and only turned to watch the pursuit when the punt’s bluff bow juddered and reared into the eddying whirlpools.

  The cavalry officers had given up the hunt. Instead, in a splash of bright colours, they stood their horses by the battery at the Lower Ferry.

  Sam knew what was about to happen. He paddled desperately, but he could not fight the surge of clashing waters, and the punt turned in the maelstrom, almost tipping him over. Somehow he kept hold of the makeshift paddle, then saw the billow of white smoke blossom mighty from the parapet.

  Less than a second later the thunder of the gun crashed about Sam’s ears. The sound alone hurt, but the roundshot missed his head by a clear yard. Sam saw the fountain of water rise and fall to his right.

  He paddled again. The current was driving him downstream, but holding him against the Pennsylvanian bank. He forced his way eastwards, struggling for the calmer waters that flooded from the wider Delaware.

  Another pulse of thunder hammered his eardrums. He ducked instinctively and heard the ball’s passing like a second clap of thunder. The battery’s second gun fired, but its barrel was cold and the gunners had overcompensated by elevating their aim too high. Sam imagined the artillerymen sponging out, then ramming the joined sabot of ball and charge down the warmed bore. He counted the seconds, then drove the broken wood hard into the water.

  The two guns fired together. Their noise was like the banging of a door in hell, and the splash of water from the falling shot drenched Sam and added to the slopping coldness in the punt. But he was alive. He screamed a challenge for the joy of it, screaming that he lived, that he would win, that he would escape, that he would, God damn it, cross the river. He would not be beaten.

  The current was carrying him south towards the islands where the British garrison manned Fort Mifflin, but Sam forced the pain aside to kneel and drag back with the paddle, and every stroke carried him across the currents, across the river, and towards the low, dull, and muddy shore of New Jersey. There was no garrison in the abandoned Fort Mercer, no garrison closer than the Cooper River, and that, Sam knew, was horribly close to Caroline’s farm.

  A sloop, far down river, heard the gunfire and turned, sails shivering. Sam watched it, then saw a great spume of water spray up ahead. The droplets thrown up by the gun’s strike whipped across his face. But he was a small target, and getting smaller, and the gunners were losing him in the fading light. He felt the first elation of success, then Sam knew there could be neither success nor happiness unless Caroline was warned. Another young man on this same river had used the same girl as his talisman of safety, but Sam was ignorant of Jonathon
’s death.

  The guns fired for the last time, and Sam watched a black cannonball skip across the grey water like a skimming stone. The splashes died and the gunsmoke skeined thin. The sloop, puzzled by the gunfire, had not fired.

  Sam had been swept more than a mile downstream, far from Cooper’s Point where Caroline lived, but second by second his frail boat closed on the New Jersey shore. He drove the paddle furiously, not realizing that he moaned with pain each time his right hand took the strain. It seemed oddly quiet now that the guns had ceased their fire. He dipped the paddle for the last time and felt the bow of the punt bump on to land. For a second he remained motionless, in danger of the current sweeping him back into the river’s centre, then he collapsed over the low gunwale and let the cold river flow about his wounds. It was like the balm of Gilead.

  He climbed to the top of the river’s embankment. The dusk was thickening fast, making a threatening blackness beneath the trees which barred Sam’s northward path. He began to walk, stumbled, then lifted his battered face to see, clear across the river and the Neck, Philadelphia spread like a magical city in the gathering darkness. A myriad of lights glittered pale as the sun’s last light flared from wet roofs and windowpanes, and Sam, delivered from the river’s threat, stared as if he were in a trance.

  Then he shook himself free of the sight. Scammell’s body might already be discovered, and Captain Vane could guess where Sam would flee. Guard companies would be rousted from their billets and longboats ordered from the navy, and now it was a race between Sam and his erstwhile master to reach a rebel girl.

  The last sunlight went, and the clouds lowered heavy above the river. A dash of lightning, sudden and bright, stabbed at the far hills and the thunder sounded soft in the distance before the rain, with a careless malevolence, began to drive into Sam’s face. He faced a journey across miles of wet darkness, not for Liberty, nor for a republic, but for love. Sam went north.