by James McGee
Tension lined Lawrence’s face but he smiled weakly. “What was that about a boat?”
He put a hand to his left side. Then, realizing that Hawkwood had seen the action, he tried to hide it by straightening.
And failed.
“God damn it,” Hawkwood said. “You are hurt!”
“It’s nothing,” Lawrence said quickly, though the way his lips compressed told otherwise.
“You’re a damned poor liar, Douglas,” Hawkwood said. “Show me.”
Lawrence sighed, but made no effort – or did not have the strength – to resist as Hawkwood stepped forward. Up close, Hawkwood saw the rent in Lawrence’s jacket and, when he lifted the garment away, a corresponding one in the sodden shirt beneath. Apprehensively, he peeled the material back. It wasn’t that easy to see, but his heart sank at the sight of the dark discolouration surrounding the puckered entry wound in Lawrence’s abdomen, just above his left hip.
“Christ, you’ve been shot!”
“I know,” Lawrence said, teeth chattering.
Hawkwood swore again. Before Lawrence could argue, he probed Lawrence’s lower back, breathing a sigh of relief when his fingers found the exit wound. Lawrence jerked at the touch. Hawkwood took his hand away and tried to recall the sequence of events.
Only two muskets had been fired during the skirmish. Determining the source of the shot, therefore, wasn’t difficult. It had to have come, Hawkwood realized, from the weapon he’d deflected.
“Well?” Lawrence said. “Will I live?”
“It didn’t hit bone, far as I can tell; just flesh and muscle. It went through, too, which is the good news, but there could be matter in the wound. Is there much pain? And don’t bloody lie.”
“Not much at the moment. I was lying earlier, but right now I’m half numb from that bath I’ve just taken. I can walk, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Looking across the river towards the camp, he shivered again. “We can’t stay here. Quade will be wondering if his execution squad completed their task. They don’t report back to him, he’s going to come looking.” He smiled wryly. “We should have buried them all in the bloody pit. That would have kept the bastard guessing.”
“Wagon and horses, too?”
Lawrence reached for his coat, grimacing as he leaned down. “I’d have got you to do the heavy lifting.”
Hawkwood unpacked his bundle and put on his socks. He watched anxiously as Lawrence unrolled his coat and stepped into his boots. They had survived the ordeal because, remarkably, the coat had escaped total submersion. It had also been wrapped tightly. As a result it was only slightly damp on the inside and therefore wearable. The same could not be said for Lawrence’s jacket and beeches, which had taken the brunt of the ducking. They were wet through.
“Wait,” Hawkwood said, as Lawrence went to fasten the coat. “Give me your scarf. Open your shirt.”
Lawrence did as instructed. Hawkwood took his own dry scarf and rolled the ends to create two pads which he pressed firmly on to the entry and exit wounds. Instructing Lawrence to hold them in place, he tied the second scarf around Lawrence’s waist to keep the makeshift wadding secure. “It’s a good job the water was so damned cold. It’ll help staunch the blood flow, at least for a while. We’d best find somewhere to set a fire and dry off. I can take another look at it then. I reckon we’ve got a bit of time; they won’t come after us before daybreak.”
“You’re positive they’ll come?” Lawrence asked, fastening his coat and re-attaching the strap to his musket.
“We’ve just bested another four of their men. It’s the second time we’ve made Quade look bad. He’ll be spitting blood.” Hawkwood hoisted his gun over his shoulder. “Plus we know about their invasion plan. They won’t want us reaching the lines with that information.”
“Even though we don’t know when they’re planning to launch?” Lawrence said.
“That won’t hold them back. If they can stop us, they will.”
“They might bring the date forward, knowing that we know.”
“They might. Either way, we’d best get going. Can’t stand here nattering all bloody day. Quicker we move, the quicker we’ll warm up.”
“Why, Captain Hawkwood,” Lawrence grinned, shouldering his musket, “I never took you for an optimist. Who’d’ve thought?”
A mile north of the river they came upon a cabin. Lying in a hollow and half-hidden by thick vegetation, at some time in its life a falling tree had demolished part of a side wall and a corner of the roof. The old stone chimney had survived intact and it had been its squared outline set against the natural tangle of the surrounding woods that had caught Hawkwood’s eye. Wary of disturbing any forest predator that might have chosen the ruin as its den – though any animal would have heard them coming a long way off – they approached with caution before finally ducking through the open doorway.
“Home’s home, be it never so homely,” Lawrence quoted softly as they surveyed the Stygian interior.
Ignoring the smell of mould and abandonment, and anxious to warm themselves, it did not take long to get a fire going in the old hearth. Despite the damp and the fetid odours, there was no shortage of fuel. Pieces of broken furniture littered the dirt floor: an up-ended table, a worm-eaten dresser splattered with droppings and splinters of wood that might have come from the back and sides of a rocking chair. The fire glow revealed decaying roof beams festooned in cobwebs, along with corners and ledges ankle-deep in twigs and leaves and dried animal scat.
Also strewn among the debris were the remains of smaller household articles: some holed and rusted pots, a wooden pail and shards of crockery that had looked like slivers of bone in the gloom. Several large metal hooks were embedded in the chimney breast, from which cooking pots had once hung. They made use of these to suspend their wet clothes above the flames to dry, though not before Hawkwood had made a careful study of the rents in Lawrence’s jacket and shirt.
Teasing the torn edges of the material around the entry hole in each garment back into their original position with his forefinger and thumb, Hawkwood examined how closely the edges fitted together. It was a crude way of judging if any material had been shorn off by the musket ball and forced into the wound. Thankfully, from what he could see, the volume of the material looked to be intact. It wasn’t a fool-proof method of detecting the possibility of foreign intrusion, but it was the only measure they had to go by, under the circumstances.
Inspecting the wound again, Hawkwood was relieved to discover that there didn’t appear to have been significant blood loss since the makeshift bandage was applied. The main concern now was the risk of infection. Having seen the state of the troopers and the encampment, there was no telling what manner of dirt had become engrained within the fibres of their clothing.
Both men understood the consequences of allowing wounds to go untreated. For now, though, they had no option but to deal with the injury as best they could with the materials available, which were precious few. The priority must be to keep the wound as clean and as dry as possible.
A further search of the cabin brought to light a treasure trove in the shape of a dented tin mug. Using water from one of the canteens to swill it out, Hawkwood refilled it and placed it at the side of the fire. When the contents began to bubble, he removed it from the ashes, waited a few minutes, then, taking a strip from Lawrence’s already torn shirt and dipping it into the water, he ignored his patient’s muttered expletives and swabbed the wound as best he could, before reapplying the pads and the make-do bandage.
Lawrence dug out the strips of pemmican he’d found and passed one to Hawkwood. Clad in their greatcoats and huddled over the fire, they chewed on them while they checked the arms and ammunition. The cartridges had been well packed in the troopers’ pouches and had retained their integrity. The muskets they dried and cleaned as best they could after their immersion in the river. As they worked, they felt the warmth returning to their bones.
When the time
came for them to depart, they did so with some reluctance, torn between the desire to linger in front of the fire and the knowledge that to stay would invite the risk of capture.
The good news was that both sets of breeches were dry, as was Lawrence’s shirt. His jacket still held some residual dampness, but it was wearable, if slightly scorched in places.
Extinguishing the fire, they made their exit. Outside, the night seemed twice as cold as it had before they had taken shelter, giving them one more pressing reason to keep moving.
As they left, Hawkwood took one last glance over his shoulder. A year or two and the ruin would be impossible to spot, even in the light of day. Perhaps that was how it should be. It was from the surrounding timber that the materials to make the cabin had been hewed, so it seemed only fitting that the forest should reclaim what had been taken now that the occupants had departed.
It turned out that the occupants had not travelled far. In a patch of moonlight less than thirty paces from the ruin, dwarfed by the trees looming above them, stood two simple wooden crosses. Canted and choked by weeds, they too would soon disappear, absorbed by the woodland as if they had never existed.
A memory of two other small wooden crosses, erected in the shadow of a spreading oak tree, flashed into Hawkwood’s mind. Were they still standing, he wondered, or had the forest moved in to claim them, too? It was too dark to see if these forgotten markers carried inscriptions. Had the people who’d dwelled here been buried in haste as well? Had there been anyone to speak over them? Though, in the grand scheme of things, what difference did it make? It wasn’t how you died that mattered; it was how you lived. And in the end didn’t Nature always have the last word, anyway?
“Matthew?” Lawrence enquired softly.
Hawkwood, half lost in thought, turned.
“Are you all right?”
As his mind returned to the present, Hawkwood nodded. “I’m fine.”
Lawrence peered at him, unconvinced.
At that moment, Hawkwood felt something cold alight upon his cheek. He glanced up. The air was filled with tiny white flakes. They were floating down through the trees in eerie, spectral silence. He felt the caress again, first upon his brow and then his eyelid. He blinked it away.
The snow had come.
“Christ in Heaven! Four men dead! And that’s not counting Greenbush! Who the hell are these bastards? They’re going through our boys like a two-man army!”
Colonel Cromwell Pearce was fuming.
While Major Quade was thinking feverishly.
The sick in the camp were dying at an increasing rate. Because of that, it had become impractical to conduct individual interments. It was customary, therefore, to bury collectively at first light the bodies of those men who’d died during the night, while the poor souls who’d expired during the day were laid to rest a couple of hours after dusk. It had also become the practice to store the bodies in one of the huts until the allotted times and from there to transport them in numbers to the burial ground in the backs of wagons.
Formal funeral services had also been suspended. In light of the steadily rising death toll, it had been decided that there was no longer a need for the men to gather to pay their respects en masse at every burial. The mood in the camp was grim enough without twice-daily funerals serving as reminders of the rapidly deteriorating conditions. For the sake of morale, the onerous duty of disposing of the dead was carried out with as little ceremony as possible. After the chaplain had performed a brief eulogy as the bodies were taken from the morgue hut and laid in the wagons, the burial detail would proceed unaccompanied into the woods to take care of the rest.
It had been the morning detail that discovered the troopers’ corpses out by the burial pit, whereupon the alarm had been raised.
And Quade had received his summons.
For when a corporal who’d risen to take a piss in the early hours reported seeing some winter-clad soldiers and a wagon parked outside the hut that housed the two British prisoners – who were then checked upon and found to be missing – the troopers’ deaths took on a whole new meaning, as did the two faint musket shots a number of the camps’ inhabitants later remembered hearing, though they hadn’t taken any notice of them at the time.
Quade had been ordered to report first to the tent adjacent to the medical hut where the bodies had been delivered. He did so in a state of stunned disbelief. It shouldn’t have been the troopers lying there. It shouldn’t have been anyone. His orders to the escort had been very specific. Wait until everyone in the camp was likely to be asleep. Remove the prisoners from their hut. Take them into the forest and kill them. Dispose of the remains. In other words, make them disappear. Four against two. How hard could it be?
The answer lay stretched out before him. All four, Surgeon Gilliland explained, had died from different causes. The first from a knife wound to the carotid. The second from a broken neck. The third, who at first didn’t appear to have a mark on him other than an injury to his cheekbone, upon further examination had suffered a contusion at the base of the skull; he had died of a haemorrhage inside the brain. As for the fourth man …
The gorge had risen in Quade’s throat when he’d seen the extent of the trooper’s disfigurement: a face so badly burned it looked as though each eyeball had been gouged out with a pair of fire tongs.
Surgeon Gilliland identified the damage as having been caused by a solution of lye, thrown, splashed or poured over the trooper’s face, a diagnosis confirmed by the burial detail’s observations at the killing site. Death had been caused by a swelling of the nasal passages due to ingestion of the same liquid, which had cut off the trooper’s air supply. Death, Gilliland had confirmed, would have been a merciful release.
Quade’s mind was in turmoil. How in God’s name had it come to this? How had two men, both of whom were fettered, managed to gain the upper hand over four armed soldiers and wreak such catastrophic damage? Thus preoccupied, he presented himself before the colonel to confirm the troopers’ identities; they were indeed the men he had charged with delivering the prisoners from Plattsburg gaol to the encampment and, subsequently, with guarding the prisoners’ hut.
At which point Colonel Pearce had let his feelings be known, forcefully.
Quade was reporting to Colonel Pearce because Colonel Pike was no longer in the camp. Upon the orders of Surgeon Gilliland, who’d diagnosed severe pneumonia, he’d been moved to a more comfortable billet in Plattsburg. Now under the care of a local doctor, he would be bled copiously and dosed with opium, antimony and digitalis until his illness subsided. Colonel Pearce, 16th Infantry, was Pike’s deputy. It was to him that command of the encampment had been transferred.
“Well, Major?” Pearce demanded. “Any Goddamned thoughts?”
Assuming a mystified expression, Quade shook his head. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I’m at a loss. Clearly, they were operating under some misguided initiative of their own.”
“Initiative?” Pearce growled.
Quade had prepared himself for a possible cross-examination, though not for the purpose of speculating on how four men had ended up dead. He’d assumed the alarm would be raised when the prisoners were reported missing and that he would be summoned on account of his previous contact with them; not because of this. This was the last thing he’d anticipated.
But while he’d been shaken by the troopers’ deaths and repelled by their injuries, he was also aware that, crucially, there was no one else left who knew that the men had been acting under his orders. So, while defeat appeared to have been snatched from the jaws of victory, Quade was at least secure in the knowledge that his role in the night’s events would never be known. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to distance himself further. It wasn’t as if the dead could retaliate, was it?
“The men were Fifteenth Infantry, sir. Colonel Pike’s regiment – same as the men killed at Greenbush. Perhaps, with the colonel indisposed, they weren’t prepared to wait for justice to be served upon the prisoners and decided t
o dispense their own brand of vengeance. Loyalty to the regiment’s a powerful incentive among the rank and file, Colonel. It’s what binds them.”
Quade was rather pleased with that last statement. There was, in fact, an element of truth in it. When he’d suborned the troopers into his scheme, he’d done so using Colonel Pike’s name. They had been led to believe that, prior to his confinement, the colonel had ordered the death of the British spies who had slain two members of the 15th Infantry. The troopers, aggrieved by the Greenbush slayings and intent on retribution, had not questioned the order. So far as they were concerned, it had come down from their colonel. Therefore they were not being asked to commit murder but to deliver justice.
Quade pressed on. “Or it could be, sir, that they were averse to the prisoners being housed in one of the huts while brave American soldiers were out in the cold with only a blanket to keep them warm.” Adding, with a helpless shrug, “Who knows what was going through their minds? I fear that’s something we may never fathom.”
“Meanwhile,” Pearce snarled, “we’ve two armed British spies running loose around the countryside! God damn their eyes!”
It was hard to tell from the colonel’s menacing glare whether the curse was aimed at the insubordinate dead troopers or the two men who were now on the run. Best to remain silent, Quade thought.
Never having dealt with Pearce, he found it difficult to read the man. He knew that the colonel was about his own age, though they were from different backgrounds. A widower, Quade had heard, and a descendant of Scots-Irish immigrants, Pearce had been a soldier for almost twenty years, serving mostly with volunteer units, rising eventually to the rank of Major General, 3rd Division of Militia. It had been President Madison who, a month after the outbreak of hostilities, had called upon his services and appointed him colonel of the 16th Regiment.
Quade was reflecting on what that said about the quality of regular senior staff officers when the door opened, allowing a cold blast of air to enter. A sentry poked his head in.
