Rabble in Arms, page 34
When Nason at last arrived, Cap was more than ever like an enormous clumsy dog, wagging himself before Nason, patting him with his huge paws, and almost panting with joy. Unknown to any of us, he had (to use his own words) picked up four flasks of rum: and these he produced when Nason joined us.
“Stevie,” he said, his big face glistening with apprehension, “I hope to God you’re through running around with this feller Whitcomb I He ain’t a safe feller for you to be with! I ain’t had a minute’s peace since you went north the second time, knowing the risks he takes.”
Nason laughed. “Risks I I suppose you weren’t taking risks when you and Verrieul paid a visit to the British and came away with a keg of rum!”
Cap was scornful. “That’s different! We had to have that rum. Nobody has to have British generals. Whitcomb thinks he has to have British generals; but that ain’t no regular human need, like rum or shirts, or getting your feet warm. It’s just his imagination. Anyway, besides, we wasn’t hiding nothing, and we walked right up to ’em in the daytime. That’s different from getting around behind ’em and hiding in the bushes, the way Whitcomb does. That’s something I just can’t stand, Stevie—somebody hiding in the bushes and watching what I do—and I ain’t the only feller that feels that way! Hiding in the bushes is plumb risky, Steven, no matter where it’s done!”
“Where’s our fleet,” I asked Nason, “and how’s it look?”
“It’s moving south, hunting for a likely place to fight, and it might look worse—lots worse! General Arnold’s a seaman if ever I saw one, and he’s got another seaman to help him. His name’s Wigglesworth. He’s a colonel, but he used to sail ships for Nathaniel Tracy in Newburyport. I wouldn’t wonder if Arnold and Wigglesworth are better than anybody the British can produce.” Meditatively he added, “They’ve got some smart men, though, the British have. They’ve got a man named Schanck. He’s made himself a flat-bottomed boat that he can turn into a keel-boat in five seconds.”
“How, for God’s sake?”
“There’s a little slot of a well in the center of it,” Nason said. “There’s a board pinned in the well. If he takes out the pin, the board drops down and makes a keel, and then he can beat to windward. He calls it a centerboard.”
While I was storing this discovery in my mind for future reference, Cap Huff snorted. “Hell, that ain’t nothing! Anybody could ‘a’ thought of that—if he’d ever just a-happened to think of it.” He was almost right, and I was surprised it had never occurred to anyone before.
“Did you find out anything about the British fleet?” I asked Nason, little dreaming he had acquired information of even greater moment to me than the number of vessels we must fight.
Nason nodded. “They’ve got seven real vessels. They’re big, but we couldn’t be sure how big. It was hard to tell from where we were. Then they’ve got a lot of little gundelos, each one mounting a single heavy gun. Six of the big vessels are in the water, and one’s on the stocks still. Whitcomb says the one on the stocks wasn’t even started three weeks ago. They must have laid down her keel after they saw our vessels.”
“How many guns do the big ones carry?”
“We couldn’t be sure. There’s so many British troops around that it’s kind of risky to try to see all you’d like to see. There’s women, too, and children! Their regiments brought three hundred women from England with ’em: camp followers. Nearly every soldier brought a dog, and some of the officers brought two or three. Seemed as if you couldn’t get within a mile of the shipyard without falling over a camp follower or stepping on a dog! To tell you the truth, there were times when we felt kind of shaky, trying to keep those lobster-backs from catching us.”
“That ain’t such a hell of a lot of women!” Cap said. “Only three hundred?” Then he brightened. “What kind of looking women was they, mostly?”
Nason ignored him. “So far as we could make out, the two biggest vessels were schooner-rigged. We couldn’t tell about the new one. She looked deep enough to carry a lot of sail. If they started her less than three weeks ago, the way Whitcomb says, it’s hard to see how she’s going to be of much assistance to ’em this fall.”
I breathed more easily, but not for long.
Cap eyed Nason coldly. “I s’pose you was hiding in the bushes when you caught those two fellers.”
“Of course we were,” Nason said. “We went up past St. John’s, and out on the Laprairie road, between St. John’s and Montreal.”
“Gosh!” Cap cried. “Whitcomb went right back where he shot Gordon!”
Nason nodded. “Yes: he figured that was the safest place. He hid in the same clump of bushes that he shot Gordon from. He said the place was so well known that nobody’d ever expect to see him there, and he was right.”
“Gosh all hemlock!” Cap bawled. “I wouldn’t have nothing to do with a feller as reckless as that Whitcomb! Who were these fellers he took?”
“One was quartermaster of the 29th Foot—name of Saunders. The other was his servant: a corporal. Not bad men, once they got broke to our ways.”
“I s’pose they was born out of wedlock,” Cap said, “like so many in the British army.”
When Nason eyed him sternly, Cap assumed a jovial air. “Listen, Stevie; there ain’t no earthly use getting touchy over these fellers. There ain’t nothing I can say about ’em, no matter how hard I try or how dirty I talk, that’ll be half as bad as the things they’ll say about us when they go home. Prob’ly this Saunders offered you half a dollar to turn him loose.”
“Well,” Nason admitted, “they offered us twenty dollars apiece to let them go, but we didn’t see fit to accept.”
“I should hope not!” Cap said virtuously. “They’d ‘a’ given you counterfeit money!”
“I doubt it,” Nason said. “They seemed good men: as good as you’d want to meet. We had to swim across a couple of rivers; they couldn’t swim for sour grapes, but they had no complaints. They didn’t even complain when we had to go two days without food.”
“Why would they?” Cap demanded. “Would I ‘a’ complained if I’d been in their boots? Not by a damned sight! The recollection of what happened to that General Gordon would have kept me awful polite and helpful.”
“I sort of hated to leave ’em,” Nason said. “They were pleasant to talk to. Some of the things they claimed to know about America would almost make you die laughing. Whitcomb and I, we had considerable trouble keeping our faces straight.”
Cap looked politely interested. “I s’pose they think we got six toes on each foot, and all our womenfolks follow the army, and it’s a half hour’s walk from Maine over into Virginia, and it takes a whole afternoon to row around Rhode Island.”
“Yes, just about,” Nason said. Then he added something that made my flesh crawl. “They think nobody in America can build ships except people from Maine. They told us they knew we’d never be able to build a fleet that amounted to anything, because we couldn’t get enough Maine men to build it.”
At this Cap slapped his huge thighs and bellowed mirthfully; and at the sound of his laughter everyone laughed with him—Tom Bickford, Doc Means, Joseph Marie Verrieul, and Nason too. They drank from the rum bottles, choked, coughed and laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks; but I, remembering the thoughtless extravagance of my speech to Ellen Phipps, dimly sweet on the doorstep of the farm house in Skenesboro in the dark of a hot July night, found nothing at which to laugh.
My lips stiffened with horror at this final proof of all I had long feared and known, but had refused to face squarely, as is the way with most of us. Hopefully I had told myself that I might be wrong: that Nathaniel might not be in danger: that there might be two Marie de Sabrevoises. Now there could be no more such hopes.
I heard again the words of idle bombasto with which, thinking to bring a smile to her lips, I had replied to Ellens question as to how long it would take us to build the fleet.
“If we can get enough men from Maine,” I had told her, “we’ll build it in a month.”
And when she had scoffed at the abilities of men from Maine, I had added, with more than a little truth, “They know how to build ships, and that’s more than can be said for a lot of the men they’re sending us.”
And now here were these words, these idle, jesting words, incapable of being uttered by any American in sober truth, brought out of St. John’s by two Britishers, one of them a high officer, free to have access to the highest.
I knew exactly what had happened. Ellen, having performed her aunt’s commission in Albany, had been taken by her brother back to St. John’s—back to Marie de Sabrevois. No doubt, in all innocence, she had carried letters with her from the Loyalists that infested Albany, making life hideous for Schuyler with the same sort of lying rumors that had been spread about Arnold. Reunited with her aunt, whom she loved and trusted, she must have told her all that had happened during her travels—how she had almost been forced to remain in Skenesboro until enough men from Maine could be obtained to build the fleet. Possibly she had said she feared she might be forced to remain there forever, waiting for men from Maine who would never come. And Marie de Sabrevois had told the British! In no other way could my words have reached the officer captured by Whitcomb and Nason!
I was right: I had always been right. Marie de Sabrevois was a spy. She had used Nathaniel and Ellen to further her own ends; and thus information had been given to the enemy through Ellen’s act and through Nathaniel’s.
I was thankful for the dim light in our small cabin—the faint yellow flame of a single candle, that cast fantastic wavering shadows of my companions on the rough walls; for otherwise they must have seen in my face that I was afraid. And I was afraid; afraid of what would happen to Nathaniel and to Ellen if this knowledge, strangely shared by me with a woman from my own town—a woman who had once attempted to make a traitor of Steven Nason—should become public property.
XXXIII
THE Trumbull left us in a week, a low craft, long and raking. Her dark red sides and her two big triangular sails, with yards that slanted backward like twin quill pens held by invisible hands, gave her a foreign air, so that she seemed out of place amid the flaming foliage of these rugged northern headlands. She might have been a pirate from Algiers, stealing into the north on some desperate adventure, except for the ragged beat of her twelve long sweeps. So roughly did these scrabble her over the water that she looked more like a giant red bug, confused by her own ungainliness.
Why Waterbury, Captain Thatcher and I didn’t become stark, staring lunatics in the week after her departure, I can’t say. Everything went wrong. The Gates galley had failed to join us, for every last ship carpenter in Skenesboro had fallen a victim to the flux and intermittent fever. Our own efforts to outfit our vessels seemed merely laughable, for most of the things we wanted couldn’t be located, while such things as could be found weren’t the right ones. Gates himself came down the hill to show us a despatch from Arnold, who had taken post on the western or inner side of Valcour Island. The galleys, he insisted to Gates, must be sent—they must be sent!
When we heard Arnold’s peremptory words, we knew we must make shift with anything we could get. We seized whatever we could lay hands on: shouted ourselves hoarse for rope and more rope: for rammers and hand-spikes: wads, priming-wires, tubes: worms, ladles, gun tackles: for cartridge paper, sponges, grape shot, round shot: for breeching-hooks, cartridge boxes, musket and pistol cartridges: for powder and more powder: for rum, provisions, extra spars, seizing, spun yarn, water-kegs.
On the 5th of October Wilkinson brought us word that Arnold could wait no longer: willy nilly we must sail as we were; so we worked all that night with blazing pine-knots lashed to the bulwarks, and at dawn we set sail for Valcour.
After the blinding sweat, the unending turmoil, the ceaseless labors of the past three months, the silent reaches of this narrow lake seemed a part of some new land—unreal, even, with the endless ragged wall of snow-clad mountains to the east, and the glaring colors with which the shores were painted—the bands of golden yellow, blazing orange, silvery greens and blues, patched here and there with furry browns that had the look of huge animals sprawled asleep among the rolling hills. Splattered on the browns and golds were gouts and smears of crimson and scarlet, as if a stricken giant had tramped, bleeding, high and low, hunting those who had come with guns and swords and axes to put the curse of war upon him.
I wished with all my heart that it might prove unreal indeed—that we might cruise on and on, out of these constricted waters and into the open sea, away from the raggedness, hunger, disease, cruelty, tumult and death that must come crowding up around us as soon as we ceased to sail.
… Valcour lies halfway between Ticonderoga and St. John’s, on the New York side of the lake; and by noon on that peaceful October Sunday we raised the high hogback of the island. It looked, from a distance, like a shaggy prehistoric buffalo, standing belly-deep off shore to feed.
For a time I thought there had been a mistake as to the whereabouts of the fleet, even though Waterbury, a mile ahead of us in the Washington, held his course due north, straight into the insignificant passage between Valcour and the mainland. I saw no fleet in the passage, nor anywhere near it.
Then I saw Waterbury haul his wind. At the same moment a puff of white bloomed amid the reds, greens and yellows of the island. Another white ball blossomed, and another, and the heavy boom of great guns struck against us. By looking hard I found a mast. Then, as if that one had been a key to a puzzle, a whole grove of them was visible, and the dull gray of furled canvas.
The guns roared on, saluting the Washington. She slid in among the masts. As her sails came down, she, too, seemed almost to vanish.
The men, hunkered beneath our low bulwarks for the warmth denied them by their torn and scanty garments, grumbled among themselves. I think Cap Huff spoke an almost universal thought when he dropped from the mainmast look-out steps with a thud that shook the quarterdeck, declaring violently that you might as well cooper a fleet in a hogshead as hide it behind an island where nobody could see it.
Tom Bickford had been exercising the men on the furling and lashing of lateen sails. He hurried back to the quarterdeck, his face all smiles. “Well, sir,” Tom said, “that’s the smartest anchorage ever I saw! How’d you like to have to root them out, Cap’n Peter?”
Nason turned on him. “Look here! If you haven’t anything good to say, don’t say it.”
“That’s right!” Cap bawled. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s sarcasm! If you got anything to say, say it—unless it ain’t fitten to say, as Stevie says.”
Tom took the tiller from the helmsman. “I better take her in, Cap’n Peter,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to make any kind of mess: not with everybody there watching.” He turned a puzzled gaze on Cap Huff. “Sarcasm? When was I sarcastic? I don’t aim to be sarcastic about anybody.”
“No, I s’pose not!” Cap Huff said. “I s’pose when you called that the smartest anchorage you ever saw, you just wanted to utter a Christian sentiment.”
“What’s the matter with the anchorage?” I asked.
Cap eyed me doubtfully: then turned to peer into the channel between Valcour and the main. By now we were in it, almost, running fast before the smart south wind. With each passing moment we saw more clearly how the fleet was ranged.
Midway of Valcour a shoulder juts out toward the New York shore. South of the shoulder is a cup-shaped bay; and it was across the mouth of the bay that the fleet was stretched in half-moon formation.
“The matter with it?” Cap asked. “Why, look at it! How would they get out of that corner, if they had to get out in a hurry? Considering the sailors they’ve got aboard, they’d be too busy bumping into each other and running ashore to do anything else. Do you think they could ever run out and chase the British?” He laughed hoarsely.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” I said. “Those vessels have been cruising for a month. It doesn’t take long to make a sailor, not if you’ve got seamen in charge. A man soon learns the ropes, when he knows he’s going to get a rap with a belaying pin if he doesn’t. If that’s your only objection to the anchorage, stop worrying about it.”
“That anchorage ain’t worth a hoot!” Cap said coldly. “Can’t I see what it is? Once you’re in there, you wouldn’t know what was happening anywhere! You might as well be up on the Chaudiere as behind that island!”
“Not quite,” I said. “Not quite. I hate to mention this in your hearing, but it takes a seaman to understand ships, just as it takes a tailor to make a coat. You pay eight hundred dollars for a keg of rum because Congress printed money without knowing anything about money. They printed it the way they’d print newspapers, and that’s why it’s worth no more than newspapers.”
Cap breathed heavily. “Newspapers! Money! Eight hundred dollars! What’s that got to do with this anchorage?”
“It’s got this to do with it. That anchorage was selected by a seaman. Look at it carefully. A squadron coming down from the north can’t even see this fleet, not unless a scout boat should be sent right down the channel and into the jaws of the crescent.”
“Ain’t that just what I say?” Cap demanded.
“Wait. You don’t understand. The British won’t move against us unless they have a favorable wind—a wind from the north. Once they’ve got it, they’ll keep all their vessels together, probably, and expect to find us lying out in the open somewhere. They’d never think of looking in here for us, because from the north this channel looks like nothing at all.”
