The Fort by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page A

he added grimly.
    So the trumpet call would have to wait.
    Captain Henry Mowat stood on Majabigwaduce’s beach. He was a stocky man with a ruddy face now shadowed by the long peak of his cocked hat. His naval coat was dark blue with lighter blue facings, all stained white by salt. He was in his forties, a lifelong sailor, and he stood with his feet planted apart as though balancing on a quarterdeck. His dark hair was powdered and a slight trail of the powder had sifted down the spine of his uniform coat. He was glaring at the longboats which lay alongside his ship, the Albany . “What the devil takes all this time?” he growled.
    His companion, Doctor John Calef, had no idea what was causing the delay on board the Albany and so offered no answer. “You’ve received no intelligence from Boston?” he asked Mowat instead.
    “We don’t need intelligence,” Mowat said brusquely. He was the senior naval officer at Majabigwaduce and, like Brigadier McLean, a Scotsman, but where the brigadier was emollient and soft-spoken, Mowat was famed for his bluntness. He fidgeted with the cord-bound hilt of his sword. “The bastards will come, Doctor, mark my word, the bastards will come. Like flies to dung, Doctor, they’ll come.”
    Calef thought that likening the British presence at Majabigwaduce to dung was an unfortunate choice, but he made no comment on that. “In force?” he asked.
    “They may be damned rebels, but they’re not damned fools. Of course they’ll come in force.” Mowat still gazed at the anchored ship, then cupped his hands. “Mister Farraby,” he bellowed across the water, “what the devil is happening?”
    “Roving a new sling, sir!” the call came back.
    “How many guns will you bring ashore?” the doctor inquired.
    “As many as McLean wants,” Mowat said. His three sloops of war were anchored fore and aft to make a line across the harbor’s mouth, their starboard broadsides facing the entrance to greet any rebel ship that dared intrude. Those broadsides were puny. HMS North , which lay closest to Majabigwaduce’s beach, carried twenty guns, ten on each side, while the Albany , at the center, and the Nautilus , each carried nine cannons in their broadsides. An enemy ship would thus be greeted by twenty-eight guns, none throwing a ball larger than nine pounds, and the last intelligence Mowat had received from Boston indicated that a rebel frigate was in that harbor, a frigate that mounted thirty-two guns, most of which would be much larger than his small cannon. And the rebel frigate Warren would be supported by the privateers of Massachusetts, most of whose craft were just as heavily gunned as his own sloops of war. “It’ll be a fight,” he said sourly, “a rare good fight.”
    The new sling had evidently been roved because a nine-pounder gun barrel was being hoisted from the Albany ’s deck and gently lowered into one of the waiting longboats. Over a ton of metal hung from the yardarm, poised above the heads of the pigtailed sailors waiting in the small boat below. Mowat was bringing his port broadsides ashore so the guns could protect the fort McLean was building on Majabigwaduce’s crest. “If you abandon your portside guns,” Calef inquired in a puzzled tone, “what happens if the enemy passes you?”
    “Then, sir, we are dead men,” Mowat said curtly. He watched the longboat settle precariously low in the choppy water as it took the weight of the cannon’s barrel. The carriage would be brought ashore in another boat and, like the barrel, be hauled uphill to the site of the fort by one of the two teams of oxen that had been commandeered from the Hutchings farm. “Dead men!” Mowat said, almost cheerfully, “but to kill us, Doctor, they must first pass us, and I do not intend to be passed.”
    Calef felt relief at Mowat’s belligerence. The Scottish naval captain was famous in Massachusetts, or perhaps infamous was a better word, but to all loyalists, like Calef, Mowat was a