Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 20

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“There you are,” Arnold said. “Orders and commission, too. You’re a captain now. I’ve got no right to appoint officers. Only Congress can do that; but if I need officers, I don’t know how to get ’em unless I appoint ’em. Go ahead, now! Get men; and if they won’t work, beat ’em! I don’t propose to have my soldiers sacrificed because a lot of damned renegades refuse to take orders. You can work with Cap Huff. He——”

Outside the window Arnold’s black horse, tied to one of the posts beside the entrance, whinnied shrilly. Far off we heard the clatter of hoofs. Arnold went to the window. “Ho!” he said. “Here’s a friend of yours with something on his mind.”

The sounds of hoofs grew noisy and came to a scurrying stop. Arnold threw up the window. “Send him in here,” he shouted. “Come in here!”

It was Joseph Marie Verrieul, one-time student of the Revrint Doctor Wheelock at Dartmouth College, who opened the door. He smiled at Arnold confidingly. “They told me you might be here, or maybe at Sorel or Nicolet,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here, because I’m near beat out.”

“What’s your news?” Arnold asked.

“It’s the British,” Verrieul said, almost happily. “It was difficult to find out about them because of the cloud of Indians around them, most of them drunk. Oh, very drunk! It’s a good thing for unworthy Joseph Verrieul that he learned at Dartmouth College how to hold a quantity of liquor.”

“I’ll take your word for that,” Arnold said. “What about the British?”

“Yes,” Verrieul said, “the British. I thought it best to wait until I learned definitely about them. Now I know. They have just arrived at Three Rivers, all of them. They’re starting up stream at once, a great fleet. Sixty vessels, there are. A fine armament.”

“How many men?” Arnold asked. “How much of an army?”

“How much of an army?” Verrieul repeated vacantly. His eyes roamed around the room before they fixed on Arnold’s face. “There was never anything so fine. There’s nothing they haven’t got! A hundred and twenty-five thousand gallons of rum! Plenty for everybody. Cannons and muskets, everything polished, so the sun glitters on them, and the red coats.” As an afterthought he mumbled, “Silver facings on the Germans. Blue with silver lace and facings, all shining.”

Arnold slapped his desk sharply. “How many men?”

“Eight thousand, they say,” Verrieul said. His voice wavered. “I think ten thousand, counting Canadians and Indians.”

Arnold kicked his chair closer to the deal table, slid into it and picked up his pen. “Captain Wilkinson!” he shouted. “Captain Wilkinson!”

The door opened and Wilkinson’s grave face appeared, the muscles over his jaws working like the gills of a fish.

Arnold jerked his pen at Verrieul. “Take this boy out and get him some food and a place to sleep. He’s half starved.”

As the door closed behind them he raised an eyebrow at me without looking up. “Your orders are changed,” he said. “I want you to take this letter to General Sullivan. Sit right where you are.” His quill travelled over the paper with a faint sound of scratching.

I stared at the mosquitoes dancing helplessly against the dirty window-pane. A cold breeze seemed to blow across the back of my neck. Eight thousand troops—all shining—nothing they haven’t got! Eight thousand! The number of kisses Marie de Sabrevois had sent to Montgolfier, the man who received information from all parts of Canada and Europe! No: she had sent the kisses to Ellen Phipps: not to Montgolfier. Why had she dragged Montgolfier’s name into it? There was something wrong; but if Arnold didn’t know, neither did I.

Eight thousand troops! The end was not difficult to see, with sickness ranged against health, destitution against plenty, defeat against confidence, paper against gold!

I thought of our house at the bend of the river in Arundel. The mid-June run of pollocks would be on. All along the river road there would be fish-frames, with split pollocks on them, raising havoc with the scent of sweet-grass and new-cut hay. Swallows would be hovering before their clay nests under the eaves or the tool sheds in the shipyards, trusting to God knows what that nobody would lift a pole and knock their whole world to dust. We and the swallows, I dimly perceived, had much in common.

Eight thousand men! Cannon and muskets! Everything polished! And deserters going through, fifty a day! Where was Nathaniel, I wondered, and how would this news affect him? I could almost hear my mother’s voice saying: “Look out for Nathaniel.”

Arnold picked up his letter and flapped it before him, drying it. “You’ll have to read this,” he said. “In case anything happens to it, you’ve got to be able to repeat what’s in it.” He tossed it across the table and at once went to writing another. I ran my eye over the one he had given me. It was an appeal to Sullivan to retreat immediately from Sorel.

The British had at least ten thousand men, Arnold wrote; to risk a battle against such numbers would only result in the loss of everything. “I am content,” he told Sullivan, at the end, “to be the last man who quits this country, and fall, so that my country may rise. But let us not fall together.”

I read it again: then folded it and put it on the rickety deal table.

Arnold threw down his pen and dried his second letter. His face, when he spoke, was dark and sullen, with a queer lumpy look to it. “Sullivan doesn’t want to go! He wants to stay right where he is, and fight the British. He thinks they’ll do what he wants them to do; but they won’t! If he stays where he is, they’ll sail past him up the St. Lawrence. He can’t seem to realise the St. Lawrence turns south, beyond Sorel, so that for every mile the British sail, once they’re past him, they’re a mile in his rear as well!

“If they pass him before he starts to retreat, he’s lost—he and his men and his guns and his stores! We’re all of us lost—ruined! They’d capture every last man of us—every last man! There’d be nothing between them and Albany! All they’d need to do would be to go there, march down the Hudson, join Howe, cut Washington’s forces to pieces, and start hanging rebels. They’d have nothing to worry about except which of us to hang!”

He jumped to his feet, snatched his sword from the table and fastened it to his belt. “Well, they won’t do it, not if I have anything to say about it! I’m going back to Montreal. I’ll do what I can to protect Sullivan’s rear until I’m ordered out or wiped out. I can’t do much with three hundred men—not against ten thousand; but I might delay ’em a little!” He laughed, and a light seemed to glow behind the swarthiness of his face. “I’ll kick up a dust somehow!”

He pulled on his gauntlets. “Get a horse somewhere! Seize it if you have to! Take that letter to Sullivan; and on your way, stop at Chambly and give this”—he pushed his second letter to me—“to Colonel Hazen. He’s to move all his supplies and stores back here at once! At once!” He growled a little under his breath, so that I knew he was thinking how Hazen had flouted his orders on other occasions.

He bolted from the room. By the time I reached the front door, his black horse was pelting down the river road at a gallop; and Captain Wilkinson, his jaw-muscles working busily, was still hard at work freeing his own brown mare from a hitching-post.

My heart and head, I knew, should have been filled with martial and patriotic emotions; but what I felt was a great wistfulness, wholly personal to me. I was ordered to Chambly and thence to Sorel, with an ache inside of me that longed for me to carry it back to St. John’s—St. John’s and Ellen Phipps, who had blushed and assented when Marie de Sabrevois asked her whether she didn’t like my brother Nathaniel.