by Tamara Gill
Sean, who was eyeing her with that bemused look that usually made her realize she’d gone too far, indicated the location of the canteen with a nod of his head.
Jaclyn stood up. The world tilted for a second or two, then righted itself and she walked carefully over to where the canteen rested against Sean’s backpack.
“What is cholesterol?” Sean asked when she was once more sitting beside him.
Warning bells went off in Jaclyn’s head. Cholesterol was definitely a concern of the twenty-first century. “It’s, um, stuff in fatty foods like meat.”
Sean ate some beef and regarded her.
The potatoes she was eating were rather dry. Jaclyn raised the canteen to guzzle down some much needed water. Nothing came out. She moved the canteen away from her lips and peered inside. “It’s empty.”
Sean shrugged and offered her the cup.
“I can’t drink that!”
“Well now, it’s all I’ve by way of having right now. If you want to fill the canteen, go ahead.”
Jaclyn thought about the creek that was now little more than a muddy, polluted stream. It didn’t take long for a thousand men to make a substantial impact on a micro-environment. If she hauled water from Frenchman’s Creek she’d have to boil it before she drank it, which wouldn’t work. She needed liquid now. She took the cup.
This time she sipped, but the hooch still burned as it went down.
Sean offered her another piece of beef. She shook her head and ate more potato. Then drank more hooch. After more potato and more of Fort Erie’s finest, she found herself finishing off the last of the beef. How had that happened?
Bessy’s big soft eyes reproached her as she chewed. Even worse, when she swallowed she thought she heard the cow’s melancholy moo. She closed her eyes and leaned her head on Sean’s shoulder to try to escape thoughts of Bessy’s sad fate.
She had no intention of falling asleep. She’d just shut her eyes for a minute, until Bessy could be chased away, back where she belonged.
Just for a minute.
Only a minute...
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jaclyn’s head didn’t thump when she woke up. She thought that a blessing, considering the impact the raw whisky had had on her. She lay for a moment with her eyes still closed, reluctant to move. Gradually she became aware of things around her—the hardness of the ground, the warmth of the blanket that covered her, the gentle caress of the early morning sun, the utter silence. Her eyes flew open and she sat up abruptly.
The Fenians were gone. Oh, there was still a scattering of men flaked out in the ruined orchard, but seventy-five or a hundred Fenians were nothing compared to the thousand who had been camped here when Jaclyn fell asleep. She swore, loudly and with considerable heat. Sean had got her drunk, damn him, then slipped away during the night. She envisioned his vivid blue eyes laughing at her and she wanted to hit him.
She’d had it all planned. For heaven’s sake, she knew what the Fenians were going to do. If only Sean had cooperated, just a little, she’d be with them now, instead of sitting in this debris littered wreck of an orchard feeling mad at the world, and at Sean O’Dell and herself in particular.
She scrambled to her feet then grabbed the blanket to fold it. A loaf of bread tumbled to the ground with Sean’s canteen falling behind it. Jaclyn’s stomach grumbled and she grinned. Bless the man for knowing she would need food when she woke up and have no way of getting it. She tore a strip off the loaf of bread and chewed as she brushed bits of leaves and dirt from blanket and clothes.
After O’Neill shut down the party on the night of June first and sent the Fort Erie residents home, he had mustered his men, packed up his camp and departed Newbigging’s orchard for a site some three miles distant on another little stream called Black Creek. There the Fenians had rested and sobered up. At dawn the next morning—this morning!—they were on the move again, far away from where they were supposed to be and heading toward the small town of Ridgeway.
By dawn the Canadian Volunteers in Port Colborne were on the move too. Divided into two groups, the bulk of the force under Colonel Alfred Booker from Hamilton were on a train heading toward Ridgeway. A smaller detachment under Colonel John Stoughton Dennis was on the tug Robb sailing down the Niagara River looking for the Fenians.
In Chippewa, Colonel George Peacocke was the only player not on the move by dawn. Peacocke was a methodical man who liked to do things by the book. Armed with prejudice and expectations he assumed the Fenians would be flaked out in Newbigging’s orchard and that all he would have to do to defeat them was to march down the River Road and round them up. He saw no reason to rush and continued with his preparations in a meticulous, orderly, and very slow fashion.
Jaclyn looked around Newbigging’s basically empty orchard and laughed to herself. Peacocke was in for a shock. Then she sobered. The Canadians who were on the way from Port Colborne were in for a shock too.
She looked up at the sky. The sun was brightening. Another hot day was in the works and she needed to get moving. She guessed it was pretty early, well before seven a.m. It wouldn’t be long, though, before the Fenian stragglers started to rouse. Shortly after, Dennis and his small contingent on the Robb would reach Frenchman’s Creek and begin rounding up those the Fenians who remained. She needed to be washed up and on her way before that happened.
The Robb belonged to a small unit called the Dunnville Naval Brigade. Called up, the Naval Brigade had reported to Dennis at ten-thirty in the evening on June first. Dennis liked the idea of having the Robb available for reconnaissance, but the Naval Brigade had unaccountably left their tug in Dunnville. Dennis ordered them to return to Dunnville and bring the Robb down to Port Colborne.
Shortly after this, Colonel Alfred Booker of the Thirteenth had taken command of the volunteer forces from Dennis. This left Dennis in a difficult position. He was not the regular commanding officer of the Queen’s Own, but had been inserted into the position at the last minute. He didn’t know the regiment and, in fact, had never trained with them.
Dennis was not an infantry soldier at all. In private life he was a surveyor and his command experience in the volunteer forces had been, for the most part, leading a battery of field artillery. He’d been described as a good office man, well versed in the army’s red tape, but useless as a soldier. He was also said to be ambitious, a man anxious not to let any opportunity pass him by.
When Dennis arrived in Port Colborne on the afternoon of June first he expected to be in command of all of the Canadian volunteers assembling there. Then the train from Hamilton carrying the Thirteenth arrived and he found himself outranked by Booker. Not satisfied with being second banana, Dennis looked for an independent command of his own.
Peacocke had sent preliminary orders that the Port Colborne troops were to join up with his column on June second, but news of a wild Fenian celebration was brought to Port Colborne late on the evening of June first. The messengers were reputable men, the Superintendent of the Railway and the local Collector of Customs stationed in the town of Fort Erie. Their words carried weight.
Booker and Dennis decided that this changed everything. They reasoned that Peacocke’s orders had been written before anyone realized that the Fenians were drunk and passed out, ripe for the picking at Newbigging’s farm. This information warranted a change of plan that would take advantage of the Fenians’ debilitated state. It was also provided the perfect opportunity for Dennis to operate on his own.
Dennis’ new strategy focused on the Canadian volunteers, of course, giving them the most prominent role in ending the Fenian menace. Not surprisingly, it was the Robb, the Canadian column’s mobile arm, which would play the most important part in the capture.
The tug, commanded by Colonel Dennis and manned by the Dunnville Naval Brigade and the Welland Canal Field Battery—which had arrived at the Port Colborne without their artillery piece—would move against the Fenian camp swiftly, capturing the enemy before they were fully awake. Booke
r, with the majority of the volunteers would take the train to Fort Erie, recapture the town, then march to Frenchman’s Creek along River Road. There he would meet Dennis and the Robb and together they would completely defeat the Fenians. Peacocke, also marching along River Road, but from the opposite direction, would meet them in Frenchman’s Creek and provide back up.
The plan was an enticing one. The Fenians would suffer a decisive defeat and the Canadians would all be heroes. Dennis would garner the greatest part of the glory.
The grand strategy couldn’t begin until the Robb reached Port Colborne. No one knew how long it would take to the prepare the tug, then sail her down the coast of Lake Erie to Port Colborne, all in the dark.
Back in Chippewa Peacocke knew nothing of the planning going on in Port Colborne. While Dennis dreamed of trouncing the Fenians, Peacocke made detailed plans of his own. He chose the interior town of Stevensville as the point where his British force and the Canadian Volunteers would join together. Located at a crossroads, Stevensville was ideally situated for the combined force to sweep down on the Fenian position at Frenchman’s Creek.
By midnight on June first Peacocke had finished his plans. He could have sent a detailed telegram to Port Colborne, but he did not. He didn’t trust volunteer soldiers. To his mind they were poorly trained, impulsive and unreliable. He decided to send an officer, one Captain Akers, to carry the orders and make sure they were correctly carried out.
Akers was a Captain of Engineers and he didn’t have much of a role to play in Peacocke’s column, but he was a professional soldier and by Peacocke’s definition, trustworthy. Peacocke briefed him on what was expected and told him that the Canadians must keep to the timetable Peacocke had set up. Otherwise the clean sweep Peacocke had planned would fail. Timing was critical. It was Aker’s job to ensure it was carried out.
Akers arrived in Port Colborne about two in the morning armed with Peacocke’s orders and full of his own contemptuous views on volunteer soldiers. Booker and Dennis were bickering with each other over the plan to split the Canadian column, confirming his expectations. Akers delivered Peacocke’s orders, which were very clear that the Canadian contingent was to meet up with him on the Stevensville Road.
Then Dennis outlined his plan for the Robb.
Booker, who was against the plan, thought Akers would be an ally, but John Stoughton Dennis must have been a charming, well-spoken sort of guy. Akers quickly bought into the plan, despite his prejudices and his orders. With Akers, their commanding officer’s personal emissary, endorsing the plan, there was little Booker could do to stop it from happening. He did, however, insist that Peacocke be telegraphed the change in plan.
At two a.m. the Robb hadn’t arrived in Port Colborne yet. Some sources said the tug finally reached Port Colborne at four a.m. Others claimed it was an hour earlier, at three in the morning. Jaclyn suspected that it was three that the tug showed up, for that was when Booker telegraphed Peacocke with the proposed changes.
Akers, Dennis and the men of the Welland Canal Field Battery piled onto the tug with the Dunnville Naval Brigade and they set sail without waiting for a reply from Peacocke. Booker ordered his force onto the trains for their trip to Fort Erie and then he waited.
Not for long. His men had finished loading by three forty-five. Peacocke’s reply telegram arrived at three-fifty. It was devastating. Stick with the original plan, it said, and meet me in Stevensville.
Akers, Dennis and the Robb were long gone. Booker had no way of contacting them. This was a disaster.
It got worse. Peacocke believed volunteer troops were disorganized, so all of his orders had been pushed back an hour to allow for systems to be put in place and method to prevail. Akers thought an hour wasn’t enough. He’d added an extra half-hour of his own to the timetable. Booker, with the men of the Thirteenth Battalion already on the train, keyed up, restless, anxious, added an extra half-hour of his own, leaving Port Colborne at five am instead of the six o’clock that Peacocke had ordered and the seven am that he expected.
Finding a sheltered spot to wash up, Jaclyn took a brief look around before she stripped off her shirt and knelt down by the stream. She cupped her hands to sluice water over her face, shoulders and arms, then briskly rubbed as much grim from her skin as she could manage before she used Sean’s blanket to dry herself. Sean was like a cat, she thought. He didn’t like to be dirty and he kept himself and his things clean. Even after her rudimentary wash she was probably dirtier than his blanket was.
Thoughts of Sean made her hurry. She had to remember she was an observer in this time period and that she wanted to make sure she could move around freely. That meant she had to avoid the earnest men on the Robb as they sailed up the Niagara River seeking their enemy.
An explosive splash broke the absolute stillness, startling Jaclyn out of her reverie. There was the sound of a body thrashing about in the water downstream, then a man’s voice cursing with remarkable fluency. Jaclyn hastily pulled on her shirt then buttoned it. The Fenian stragglers were starting to wake. The Robb with Dennis and his small command would not be far behind.
Jaclyn tucked her shirt into her pants and slung the canteen over her shoulder. There were more voices now, some laughing at the still cursing Irishman in the creek. She draped the blanket and her vest over the canteen and set off at a trot. Inland, away from the dangers of Fenian stragglers and joy-riding Canadian volunteers. Inland, toward the Ridge Road where a battle between the Canadian volunteers and the Fenians would decide the outcome of this whole mismanaged campaign.
For the Canadians in Port Colborne were not the ones who were disorganized and running behind. On June second it was the professional soldier, George Peacocke, who couldn’t make his deadlines. At seven a.m. he sent a telegram to Port Colborne ordering Booker to leave an hour later, at eight a.m. Unaware that Booker had departed two hours before, Peacocke continued with his slow, methodical preparations.
The Fenians were the unpredictable reality in the carefully constructed structure of assumptions Peacocke and Dennis had built. They hadn’t stayed put as they were supposed to. Instead they were on the march.
Jaclyn came up to the imposing substance of Thomas Newbigging’s house. This morning there was no Newbigging daughter out feeding the chickens, no Sean to tip his hat and shout a polite greeting, no Fenian soldiers to make the girl scream and run inside. This morning there was just Jaclyn, hoping she’d find the route Sean had used that would take her cross-country to the Bailey’s farm and the Ridge Road beyond it.
The fields around the Newbigging house all looked the same to her, brown earth greening with new shoots, tall trees edging the tilled fields. She thought wistfully of her car. When she’d toured the area in her own time she’d whizzed up the Garrison Road, now a four lane regional highway, at eighty klicks an hour. It had been a short drive from the outskirts of Fort Erie to the crossroads that lead to the little town of Ridgeway. It would be nice to hop in to the car now, drive up to Ridgeway and meet the Canadian volunteers as they disembarked from the train that had brought them there from Port Colborne. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about being late and missing the battle, or of getting captured by J. S. Dennis and his gang aboard the Robb.
One of the fields looked familiar as if the earth edging it had been beaten down recently. She set off at a brisk pace, still chewing the last of her bread. She had no more time to waste if she wanted to be in on the Battle of Ridgeway.
***
She was lost. Jaclyn stopped for a minute, considering. She’d always thought of the farms in the Niagara area as being little farms. After all, when she drove past the fields doing eighty klicks they looked small. Walking across one was another matter. Yesterday, when she’d followed Sean, she hadn’t been paying much attention, but it had seemed to take a hell of a long time to reach Grandpa Bailey’s place. Now she wished she’d thought about yesterday before she set out on her travels this morning.
She looked about her. All she could se
e was a flat expanse of plowed earth with green shoots poking through the dirt and the occasional row of trees that served as wind breaks. From her vantage point there was no highland to be seen and no woodlands. That meant she was nowhere near Ridge Road where the battle took place. She sighed and started walking again.
Time passed. The sun burned off the last of the night cool and heated the air. Jaclyn’s feet began to swell in her boots and sweat trickled down between her breasts. There was one good thing about the absence of people—she didn’t have to wear her vest. That was a definite advantage.
She guessed it was about seven o’clock when she finally saw some houses in the distance. Her spirits immediately rose and her steps quickened, but as she walked more buildings came into view. There were too many to belong to one farm compound. She’d come to a town.
Now the problem was, which town? If she was really lucky it would be the village of Ridgeway where the train full of Canadian volunteers stopped and disembarked. There were too many houses, though, and no train tracks that she could see. Reluctantly, Jaclyn concluded that she had reached Fort Erie.
Her plodding steps brought her to the edge of a garden and from there to a street. She shrugged on her vest and buttoned it up, sighing as warmth enveloped her.
She confirmed that it was indeed Fort Erie when she saw the silver width of the Niagara River below her. She realized she was up on a height above the main part of the town. Below to her right she could make out the derelict buildings of old Fort Erie, nothing more than a few ruined walls surrounded by a dry moat. She could also see the main road into town, River Road, and the pier where the International Ferry that travelled between Buffalo and Fort Erie docked. She knew that later today the Fenians and the Canadian volunteers from the tug, Robb, would clash on that pier, but for now all was quiet.
