Authors: Donna Thorland
Their weapons were impounded and they were refused entry. Only the friends of government were welcome in Boston. Suspected spies, Rebels, and instigators were not.
Benji looked ready to argue, but Mr. Cheap had been observing the way the unsmiling captain had been eyeing Sarah. He put a hand on Benji’s shoulder and turned the Wards back the way they had come.
The apologetic young ensign ran to catch up with them at the end of the causeway. Sarah, the ensign told them, out of breath from his sprint, might enter on her own, but—and now he looked around to make sure there was no one to overhear—he did not recommend it. He was delivering the message for his captain, who had taken an
interest
in her welfare.
“He must be married, then,” said Ned.
Sarah kicked him.
Mr. Cheap smiled his gold-toothed smile, and the ensign nodded and backed away, because the ensign was intelligent and intelligent men did not turn their backs on Mr. Cheap.
When he was out of earshot, Sarah, who had Mr. Cheap’s sword pistol under her hip roll, Benji’s practical hanger in her petticoats, and Ned’s favorite knife tucked into her pocket, laughed.
Mr. Cheap sighed. “We need to get Red inside.”
“Sparhawk would help us,” Sarah said, looking back the way they had come. “He told me to go to the Three Cranes in Charlestown. The landlord there will extend us credit in his name.”
Cheap nodded. Benji cast her a baleful look, but he shouldered his pack and led the way back down the isthmus, and on to Charlestown.
• • •
Sparhawk sat waiting in the wardroom of Admiral Graves’ fifty-gun flagship, the
Preston
, anchored at Boston’s Long Wharf. The journey from Salem had taken a day and a half and carried him through a hostile countryside furiously preparing for war.
He had been forced to abandon the carriage the last few miles, as the roads were choked with militia, but wearing Abednego’s old brown coat, he had been able to pass their lines unmolested.
More than unmolested. The country people had assumed his injury to have been acquired in their cause. A pretty young girl, no more than seventeen, had rushed out of a whitewashed farmhouse as he walked by and given him the handkerchief from around her neck for a sling. Her mother had given him sausages.
Sparhawk had spent the last twelve years defending the lives and property of Englishmen, but no one had given him sausages for it.
He had not been a spy in Salem, but here, on the road to Boston, with his uniform folded neatly inside the pack Sarah Ward had given him, talking to the Americans and taking their salt and eating their bread, he most certainly felt like one.
Every village he passed through offered him hospitality: a glass of cider here, a loaf there, even a chicken from a farmwife who told him that his country was proud of him and bade him look for her man when he got to Cambridge, where the militia were massing.
The wives and daughters he passed wished him well, told him to fight bravely, clucked over his arm, and pressed handfuls of bullets on him, still warm from their molds. When he stopped between villages and sat down under a tree to eat, he opened a napkin that he had assumed contained a pasty, only to discover a bundle of cartridges. Very well rolled they were too.
His instinct, when he reached town, had been to report directly to the admiral. If Graves had been a fighting officer like McKenzie, a man of action, that was what James would have done. But Graves was a seagoing bureaucrat, enamored of protocol, and Sparhawk knew that arriving at the
Preston
in a buccaneer’s coat covered in the dust of the road and smelling of sausages would not aid his cause or lend credence to his story.
And he would need all the help he could get with Graves, because two years ago in Portsmouth, when Sparhawk had not foreseen a day he might serve under this admiral, he had carried on a dalliance with the man’s pretty, bored young wife.
Such liaisons had offered physical satisfaction free of emotional entanglement that might divert him from his goal. There would be no such freedom with Sarah Ward. She had engaged him from the start, elicited his curiosity and admiration before his desire, though desire, when it struck him, had been all the more potent for it. While he was on the road to Boston, through a countryside bristling with rebellion, his mind had returned to her over and over. Sometimes he imagined what they might have done on the trundle in the keeping room had Micah Wild not interrupted, but other times he pictured them gathered together—Sarah, Ned, Abednego, even Mr. Cheap—and himself, at the table or beside the fire, listening to the old pirate’s stories. And this surprised and intrigued him.
He had always thought that a mistress would be an encumbrance, would slow his progress toward proving his identity. He had never considered that a woman might be a partner and an ally in his quest, but then he had never met a woman like Sarah Ward.
He would find her a house in one of the seafaring neighborhoods of Boston, convenient for him when the
Wasp
was in port, and where the Wards would feel at home. It would need to be something big enough for Ned and Abednego and Mr. Cheap. The sooner the better, lest Micah Wild make another attempt to force her into his keeping. But first, he must report to Admiral Graves.
He begged stockings, a shirt, and a neck cloth off the landlady at the Golden Ball. It was not his usual tavern, but he dined there when he was obliged to be in Boston. He washed and shaved and did the best he could with his salt-stained shoes. He also wrote a note to his prize agent instructing him to reimburse the landlady if Sparhawk was unable. With Boston almost surrounded, and the harbor to defend, every officer would be needed, and it was possible Sparhawk might be required to report directly to the
Wasp
from his meeting with Graves.
Now he sat on the other side of the bulkhead from the admiral’s great cabin, in his borrowed shirt and stockings, his hair brushed and tied at the back of his neck, observing the messengers who arrived nearly every quarter hour with fresh dispatches.
Finally he was summoned, the admiral’s secretary ushering him into the pretty paneled cabin with its carved pilasters and long row of windows, the view of Boston Harbor with Castle William, stark on its island, in the distance.
The admiral, it appeared, had just finished dining. A joint of beef lay half carved on the table, along with the remains of a pie and an untouched dish of bright green peas.
Sparhawk had passed the market at Faneuil Hall on his way to the Long Wharf and observed the effects of the Rebel siege firsthand. The tables had turned on the British in the blink of an eye. Their blockade had been meant to deprive the rebellious city of commerce and luxury. It had only constricted the flow, not stopped it. Boston Harbor was too riddled with smugglers’ coves and narrow inlets. The whole North American squadron was not equal to the task of patrolling her, let alone the six ships the admiral had on station.
Not so the land route, which the Rebels now controlled. Fresh produce had disappeared almost overnight. Half the stalls were shuttered. The rest sold only flour and salt meat. The situation was worse among the poor, which included the soldiery, and Sparhawk had seen more than a few deserting regulars on the road. It was impossible to blame the ones with families. Civilians attached to an occupying army would be the first to starve if the siege dragged on. And while the army, unlike the navy, was mostly made up of volunteers, these individuals had not volunteered to fight Englishmen.
The admiral’s table was not affected because the navy still controlled the harbor and Graves had begun foraging hay, fodder, livestock, and produce off the islands—at the ends of his guns—months ago, from Loyalists and Rebels alike. It had not made him a popular figure in town. Now he was studying a map of the local coastline. The chart lay on the dish-strewn table, pinned down at the corners by the port, the salt, the relish, and the untouched peas.
Someone had added notes in a fine flowing hand showing the positions of the Rebel batteries from Salem to Providence, as well as the obstructions they had sunk in those harbors, the hulks and chains and chevaux de frise. Boston Harbor was as yet relatively unmarred, only a few batteries dotting Cambridge. As for obstructions, the Rebels needed none. Boston Harbor, a warren of hidden shoals and ever-shifting sandbars, was tricky to enter even at high tide with the best of pilots. It did not help that the best pilots were American.
“Well,” said Graves, looking Sparhawk up and down, “what do you have to say for yourself, sir?” His eyes settled on the spot where one silver gilt button was conspicuous by its absence. “You look like a vagabond. And where in Hades is your hat?”
“I am lately come from Salem, sir, where I was taken by the smugglers”—not Rebels, he owed Sarah that much—“who abducted me. With the help of Loyalists in that town, I made my escape. My hat, I presume, is still aboard the
Wasp
.”
“You lost your ship, sir. On the eve of war, when we have need of every vessel.”
“But I sent the Rebel gold safe to Boston, with your nephew.” He knew, from the admiral’s secretary, that the
Wasp
had made Boston Harbor the evening Sparhawk had been captured.
“The gold,” said Graves, “is none of your affair.”
“I believe that to be for the prize court to determine,” said Sparhawk.
“Do you, by God?” said Graves, upsetting the salt as he rose. “Granny Gage has made a shambles of the powder affair at Lexington. Hancock and Adams have escaped. Gage could not even manage to bribe the popinjay smuggler with a title or the impecunious demagogue with a fortune. Now we are besieged by fifteen thousand Rebels, and that man sits idle, unwilling to do his duty and chastise these misled violent people, for fear of offending his American wife. He has four thousand soldiers but will not bestir himself to employ them. If he allows the Rebels to dig in at Charlestown and Roxbury, we will be completely cut off. Everything, firewood, fodder, hay, meat, will have to be supplied by the squadron, and we do not have the ships to do it. And you, sir, dream of Spanish gold and make light of the loss of your brig.”
“I do not make light of it,” said Sparhawk, trying to rein in his own temper, because he knew that Graves was incapable of doing likewise. “I merely said that the disposition of the gold was for the prize court to determine.”
“You will see a court-martial before you will see a prize court, sir. Since you gave up command of the
Wasp
so lightly, I have turned it over to my nephew.”
It was a blow. Sarah Ward had been right—the
Wasp
was a lubberly brig—but there were few enough seaworthy ships in the squadron, and none to spare. Unless an American vessel was captured and lawfully bought into the service—unlikely, cash-strapped as Graves was—Sparhawk might sit out the next year on half pay.
“Not so lightly as all that, sir,” said Sparhawk. He produced the
Sally
’s log from his pocket. He had hoped not to need it, as the Wards were named, but neither did he wish to spend the winter in the cells beneath Castle William. “I forbore engaging the smugglers in a fight on their schooner’s deck to avoid an incident that might lead to war.”
Someone on the green at Lexington had not been so careful.
“But I did not return empty-handed. The schooner’s log records the voyage’s investors. Some are innocent Loyalists. I can mark them out for you. Others, including Micah Wild of Salem, are not.”
Sparhawk laid the book on the table.
Graves ignored it. “I do not have the time to chase after Rebels in the hinterlands. We must strike a blow before the Americans take steps to fortify the harbor. They have intimidated most of the local pilots and are building batteries to turn upon our shipping. If you wish to have a command again this year, you will proceed to the
Somerset
and bring her guns to bear on Charlestown.”
The hair on the back of Sparhawk’s neck prickled. The skirmish at Lexington had occurred less than a week before. Only Parliament could declare war, and it would take six weeks at least for word to arrive in London and a reply to reach Boston.
Still, to disobey a direct order—lawful or not—was dangerous. He could be hanged for it. “Am I directed and required to do so?” Sparhawk asked, invoking the language of the Admiralty, in which lawful orders were always framed.
“Do you dare to question me?”
The
Somerset
was a seventy-gun ship of the line, beyond Sparhawk’s reach. La Cras had command of her. If La Cras was not commanding her guns, there was a reason for it.
The action was not lawful. The man who carried out such orders would be sacrificed, like poor old Byng, if it all went wrong and the Admiralty wanted someone to blame.
And it
would
go wrong. “I have just traveled fifteen miles through the Rebel lines. The people are angry about Lexington. Burning Charlestown,” he said carefully, “would only further inflame them.”
“You have carried out similar operations before. This is no different.”
“Boston Harbor is not the Barbary Coast.” Charlestown, in fact, was much like Salem, a busy little port town, just across the water from Boston, full of homes and warehouses and workshops. It contained the livelihoods not just of Rebels but of loyal British subjects and law-abiding colonists too stretched by hardship to play at politics. “Charlestown is not a North African slave port.”
“No?” said Graves. “And who, pray, brewed your coffee this morning, sir? These people talk of liberty and keep a tithe of their population in chains. They are damnable devious hypocrites, the lot of them, and Gage has coddled them for too long.”
“I am not certain I could with conscience burn a British port. Have I leave to consider the proposition?”
“You have leave, sir, to find a new hat. You will report to the
Somerset
tomorrow, you
will
fire hot shot, and you will burn Charlestown to the ground, or face trial,” he said, invoking the words that had condemned Byng, “for failing to do your utmost against the enemy.”