The Fort. Bernard Cornwell

I pray otherwise,’ Moore said.

      ‘Really?’ Bethany sounded surprised. She turned to look at the young lieutenant as if she had never really noticed him before. ‘You want there to be a battle?’

      ‘Soldiering is my chosen profession, Miss Fletcher,’ Moore said, and felt very fraudulent as he said it, ‘and battle is the fire in which soldiers are tempered.’

      ‘The world would be better without such fire,’ Bethany said.

      ‘True, no doubt,’ Moore said, ‘but we did not strike the flint on the iron, Miss Fletcher. The rebels did that, they set the fire and our task is to extinguish the flame.’ Bethany said nothing, and Moore decided he had sounded pompous. ‘You and your brother should come to Doctor Calef’s house in the evening,’ he said.

      ‘We should, sir?’ Bethany asked, looking again at Moore.

      ‘There is music in the garden when the weather permits, and dancing.’

      ‘I don’t dance, sir,’ Bethany said.

      ‘Oh, it is the officers who dance,’ Moore said hastily, ‘the sword dance.’ He suppressed an urge to demonstrate a capering step. ‘You would be most welcome,’ he said instead.

      ‘Thank you, sir,’ Bethany said, then pocketed the ravaged dollar and turned away.

      ‘Miss Fletcher!’ Moore called after her.

      She turned back. ‘Sir?’

      But Moore had no idea what to say, indeed he had surprised himself by calling after her in the first place. She was gazing at him, waiting. ‘Thank you for the supplies,’ he managed to say.

      ‘It is business, Lieutenant,’ Beth said evenly.

      ‘Even so, thank you,’ Moore said, confused.

      ‘Does that mean you’d sell to the Yankees too, miss?’ Corporal Brown asked cheerfully.

      ‘We might give to them,’ Beth said, and Moore could not tell whether she was teasing or not. She looked at him, gave a half-smile and walked away.

      ‘A rare good-looking lassie,’ Corporal Brown said.

      ‘Is she?’ Moore asked most unconvincingly. He was gazing down the slope to where the settlement’s houses were spread along the harbour shore. He tried to imagine men fighting there, ranks of men blasting musket fire, the cannons thundering the sky with noise, the harbour filled with half-sunken ships, and he thought how sad it would be to die amidst that chaos without ever having held a girl like Bethany in his arms.

      ‘Are we finished with the ledgers, sir?’ Brown asked.

      ‘We are finished with the ledgers,’ Moore said.

      He wondered if he really was a soldier. He wondered if he would have the courage to face battle. He stared after Bethany and felt lost.

      ‘Reluctance, sir, reluctance. Gross reluctance,’ Colonel Jonathan Mitchell, who commanded the Cumberland County militia, glared at Brigadier-General Peleg Wadsworth as though it was all Wadsworth’s fault. ‘Culpable reluctance.’

      ‘You conscripted?’ Wadsworth asked.

      ‘Of course we goddamn conscripted. We had to conscript! Half the reluctant bastards are conscripted. We didn’t get volunteers, just whining excuses, so we declared martial law, sir, and I sent troops to every township and rounded the bastards up, but too many ran and skulked, sir. They are reluctant, I tell you, reluctant!’

      It had taken the fleet two days to sail to Townsend where the militia had been ordered to muster. General Lovell and Brigadier-General Wadsworth had been hoping for fifteen hundred men, but fewer than nine hundred waited for embarkation. ‘Eight hundred and ninety-four, sir, to be precise,’ Marston, Lovell’s secretary, informed his master.

      ‘Dear God,’ Lovell said.

      ‘It surely isn’t too late to request a Continental battalion?’ Wadsworth suggested.

      ‘Unthinkable,’ Lovell said instantly. The State of Massachusetts had declared itself capable of ejecting the British on its own, and the General Court would not look happily on a request for help from General Washington’s troops. The Court, indeed, had been reluctant to accept Commodore Saltonstall’s aid, except that the Warren was so obviously a formidable warship and to ignore its presence in Massachusetts waters would have been perverse. ‘We do have the commodore’s marines,’ Lovell pointed out, ‘and I’m assured the commodore will willingly release them to land service at Majabigwaduce.’

      ‘We shall need them,’ Wadsworth said. He had inspected the three militia battalions and had been appalled by what he found. Some men looked fit, young and eager, but far too many were either too old, too young or too sick. One man had even paraded on crutches. ‘You can’t fight,’ Wadsworth had told the man.

      ‘Which is what I told the soldiers when they came to get us,’ the man said. He was grey-bearded, gaunt and wild-haired.

      ‘Then go home,’ Wadsworth said.

      ‘How?’

      ‘Same way you got here,’ Wadsworth had said, despair making him irritable. A few paces down the line he found a curly-haired boy with cheeks that had never felt a razor. ‘What’s your name, son?’ Wadsworth asked.

      ‘Israel, sir.’

      ‘Israel what?’

      ‘Trask, sir.’

      ‘How old are you, Israel Trask?’

      ‘Fifteen, sir,’ the boy said, trying to stand straighter. His voice had not broken and Wadsworth guessed he was scarcely fourteen. ‘Three years in the army, sir,’ Trask said.

      ‘Three years?’ Wadsworth asked in disbelief.

      ‘Fifer with the infantry, sir,’ Trask said. He had a sackcloth bag hanging at his back and a slender wooden pipe protruded from the bag’s neck.

      ‘You resigned from the infantry?’ Wadsworth asked, amused.

      ‘I was taken prisoner, sir,’ Trask said, evidently offended by the question, ‘and exchanged. And here I am, sir, ready to fight the syphilitic bastards again.’

      If a boy had used that language in Wadsworth’s classroom it would have provoked a caning, but these were strange times and so Wadsworth just patted the boy’s shoulder before walking on down the long line. Some men looked at him resentfully and he supposed they were the men who had been pressed by the militia. Maybe two thirds looked healthy and young enough for soldiering, but the rest were miserable specimens. ‘I thought you had a thousand men enrolled in Cumberland County alone?’ Wadsworth remarked to Colonel Mitchell.

      ‘Ha,’ Mitchell said.

      ‘Ha?’ Wadsworth responded coldly.

      ‘The Continental Army takes our best. We find a dozen decent recruits and the Continentals take six away and the other six run off to join the privateers.’ Mitchell put a plug of tobacco in his mouth. ‘I wish to God we had a thousand, but Boston doesn’t send their wages and we don’t have rations. And there are some places we can’t recruit.’

      ‘Loyalist places?’

      ‘Loyalist places,’ Mitchell had agreed grimly.

      Wadsworth had walked on down the line, noting a one-eyed man who had some kind of nervous affliction that made his facial muscles quiver. The man grinned, and Wadsworth shuddered. ‘Does he have his senses?’ he asked Colonel Mitchell.

      ‘Enough to shoot straight,’ Mitchell said dourly.

      ‘Half don’t even have muskets!’

      The fleet had brought five hundred muskets from the Boston Armory that would be rented to the militia. Most men at least knew how to use them because in these eastern counties folk expected to kill