“Mrs. Fraser!” He greeted me cheerfully. “I suppose I shall be a free man again shortly. Hope the army brings me some food; I think there’s not much chance of supper here tonight.”
“I suppose you will,” I said, unable not to smile back at him. “You’ll take care of the other British prisoners, will you? General St. Clair is leaving them behind.”
He looked mildly offended at this.
“They’re my men,” he said.
“So they are.” In fact, Guinea Dick, almost invisible against the stone wall in the dim light, was crouching beside the captain’s bed, a stout walking stick in his hand—in order to fend off would-be looters, I supposed. Mr. Ormiston was sitting up on his own cot, pale-faced but excited, picking at the binding on his stump.
“They’re really coming, are they, ma’am? The army?”
“Yes, they are. Now, you must take good care of your wound and keep it clean. It’s healing well, but you mustn’t put any strain at all on it for another month at least—and wait at least two months before you have a peg fitted. Don’t let the army surgeons bleed you—you need all your strength.”
He nodded, though I knew he’d be lining up for a fleam and a bleeding-bowl the moment a British surgeon showed up; he believed deeply in the virtues of being let blood and had been slightly mollified only by my having leeched his stump now and then.
I clasped his hand in farewell, and was turning to go when his own grip tightened.
“A moment, ma’am?” He let go my hand, fumbling at his neck, and withdrew something on a string. I could barely see it in the gloom, but he put it into my hand and I felt a metal disc, warm from his body.
“If happen you might see that boy Abram again, ma’am, I should take it kind if you’d give him that. That’s my lucky piece, what I’ve carried for thirty-two years; you tell him it will keep him safe in time o’ danger.”
Jamie was looming up in the dark beside me, radiating impatience and agitation. He had a small group of invalids in tow, all clutching random possessions. I could hear Mrs. Raven’s distinctive high-pitched voice in the distance, wailing. I thought she was calling my name. I ducked my head and put Mr. Ormiston’s lucky piece around my neck.
“I’ll tell him, Mr. Ormiston. Thank you.”
SOMEONE HAD SET fire to Jeduthan Baldwin’s elegant bridge. A pile of rubbish smoldered near one end, and I saw black devil shapes running to and fro along the span with chisels and pry bars, ripping up the planks and throwing them into the water.
Jamie shouldered a way through the mob, me behind him and our little band of women, children, and invalids scurrying at my heels like goslings, honking in agitation.
“Fraser! Colonel Fraser!” I turned at the shout, to see Jonah—Bill, I mean—Marsden running down the shore.
“I’ll come with you,” he said, breathless. “You’ll need someone can steer a boat.”
Jamie didn’t hesitate for more than a fraction of a second. He nodded, jerking his head toward the shore.
“Aye, run. I’ll bring them along as fast as I can.”
Mr. Marsden vanished into the dark.
“The rest of your men?” I said, coughing from the smoke.
He shrugged, a broad-shouldered silhouette against the black shimmer of the water.
“Gone.”
Hysterical screams came from the direction of the Old French Lines. These spread like wildfire through the woods and down the lakeshore, people shouting that the British were coming. Panic beating its wings. It was so strong a thing, that panic, that I felt a scream rise in my own throat. I throttled it and felt irrational anger in its place, displaced from myself to the fools behind me who were shrieking and would have scattered, had they been able to. But we were close upon the shore now, and people were pressing toward the boats in such numbers that they were capsizing some of the craft as they piled in, higgledy-piggledy.
I didn’t think the British were at hand—but I didn’t know. I knew that there had been more than one battle at Fort Ticonderoga… but when had they occurred? Was one of them going to be tonight? I didn’t know, and the sense of urgency propelled me to the shore, helping to support Mr. Wellman, who had contracted the mumps from his son, poor man, and was doing very badly in consequence.
Mr. Marsden, bless him, had commandeered a large canoe, which he had paddled a little way out from shore to prevent its being overrun. When he saw Jamie approaching, he came in, and we succeeded in getting a total of eighteen people—these including the Wellmans and Mrs. Raven, pale and staring as Ophelia—into it.
Jamie glanced quickly back at the fort. The main gates hung wide, and firelight shone out of them. Then he glanced up at the battery where he and I had stood a little while before.
“There are four men by the cannon trained on the bridge,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the red-bellied billows of smoke rising from the interior of the fort. “Volunteers. They’ll stay behind. The British—or some of them— will certainly come across the bridge. They can destroy almost everyone on the boom, and then flee—if they can.”
He turned away then, and his shoulders bunched and flexed as he dug the paddle hard.
MOUNT INDEPENDENCE
Mid-afternoon, July 6
BRIGADIER FRASER’S MEN advanced upon the picket fort at the top of the mount, the one the Americans ironically called “Independence.” William led one of the forward parties and had his men fix their bayonets as they drew close. There was a deep silence, broken only by the snap of branches and shuffle of boots in the thick leaf mold, the stray clack of a cartridge box against musket butt. Was it a waiting silence, though?
The Americans could not fail to know they were coming. Did the rebels lie in ambush, ready to fire upon them from the crude but very solid fortification he could see through the trees?
He motioned to his men to stop some two hundred yards short of the summit, hoping to pick up some indication of the defenders, if defenders there were. His own company halted obediently, but there were men behind, and they began to push into and through his own company without regard, eager to storm the fort.
“Halt!” he shouted, aware as he did so that the sound of his voice presented almost as good a target to an American rifleman as would the sight of his red coat. Some of the men did halt but were at once dislodged by more behind them, and within seconds the whole of the hillside was a mass of red. They could not stop longer; they would be trampled. And if the defenders had meant to fire, they could not ask for a better opportunity—and yet the fort stayed silent.
“On!” William roared, throwing up his arm, and the men burst from the trees in a splendid charge, bayonets held ready.
The gates hung ajar, and the men charged straight in, heedless of danger—but danger there was none. William came in with his men, to find the place deserted. Not only abandoned, but evidently abandoned in an amazing hurry.
The defenders’ personal belongings were strewn everywhere, as though dropped in flight: not only heavy things like cooking utensils, but clothes, shoes, books, blankets… even money, seemingly cast aside or dropped in panic. Much more to the point, so far as William was concerned, was the fact that the defenders had made no effort to blow up ammunition or powder that could not be carried away; there must be two hundredweight, stacked in kegs! Provisions, too, had been left behind, a welcome sight.
“Why did they not set fire to the place?” Lieutenant Hammond asked him, looking goggle-eyed round at the barracks, still fully furnished with beds, bedding, chamber pots—ready for the conquerors to move straight in to.
“God knows,” William replied briefly, then lunged forward as he saw a private soldier come out of one of the rooms, festooned in a lacy shawl and with his arms full of shoes. “You, there! We’ll have no looting, none! Do you hear me, sir?”
The private did and, dropping his armful of shoes, made off precipitately, lacy fringes flapping. A good many others were at it, too, though, and it was clear to William that he and Hammond would be unable to stop it. He shouted above the increasing din for an ensign and, seizing the man’s dispatch box, scribbled a hasty note.
“Take that to General Fraser,” he said thrusting it back at the ensign. “Fast as ever you can go!”
Dawn
July 7, 1777
“I WILL NOT HAVE these horrid irregularities!” General Fraser’s face was deeply creased, as much with rage as with fatigue. The small traveling clock in the general’s tent showed just before five o’clock in the morning, and William had the oddly dreamy feeling that his head was floating somewhere over his left shoulder. “Looting, theft, rampant undiscipline—I will not have it, I say. Am I understood? All of you?”
The small, tired group of officers gave assent in a chorus of grunts. They had been up all night, chivvying their troops into some form of rough order, keeping back the rank and file from the worst excesses of looting, hurriedly surveying the abandoned outposts at the Old French Lines, and tallying the unexpected bounty of provisions and ammunition left for them by the fort’s defenders—four of whom had been found when the fort was stormed, dead drunk by the side of a primed cannon, trained on the bridge below.
“Those men, the ones who were taken. Has anyone been able to talk with them as yet?”
“No, sir,” Captain Hayes said, stifling a yawn. “Still dead to the world—very nearly dead for good, the surgeon said, though he thinks they’ll survive.”
“Shit themselves with fear,” Hammond said softly to William. “Waiting all that time for us to come.”
“More likely boredom,” William murmured back without moving his mouth. Even so, he caught the brigadier’s bloodshot eye and straightened up unconsciously.
“Well, it’s not as though we need them to tell us much.” General Fraser waved a hand to dispel a cloud of smoke that had drifted in, and coughed. William inhaled gently. There was a succulent scent embodied in that smoke, and his stomach coiled in anticipation. Ham? Sausage?
“I’ve sent word back to General Burgoyne that Ticonderoga is ours—again,” the brigadier added, breaking into a grin at the hoarse cheer from the officers. “And to Colonel St. Leger. We shall leave a small garrison to take stock and tidy things up here, but the rest of us … Well, there are rebels to be caught, gentlemen. I cannot offer you much respite, but certainly there is time for a hearty breakfast. Bon appetit!”
RETURN OF THE NATIVE
Night, July 7
IAN MURRAY PASSED INTO the fort without difficulty. There were rangers and Indians aplenty, mostly lounging against the buildings, many of them drunk, others poking through the deserted barracks, occasionally chased away by harassed-looking soldiers set to guard the fort’s unexpected bounty.
There was no sign of slaughter, and he breathed easier. That had been his first fear, but while there was mess—and to spare—there was no blood and no smell of powder smoke. No shot had been fired here in the last day or so.
He had a thought and went toward the hospital barracks, largely ignored, as it held nothing anyone would want. The smells of urine, shit, and old blood had decreased; most of the patients must have gone with the retreating troops. There were a few people there, one in a green coat who he thought must be a surgeon, some plainly orderlies. As he watched, a pair of stretcher-bearers came out through the door, boots scraping as they negotiated the shallow stone steps. He leaned back into the concealment of the doorway, for following the stretcher was the tall form of Guinea Dick, his face split in a cannibal’s grin.