Redcoat by Bernard Cornwell

Author:Bernard Cornwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141949246
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-02T14:30:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

The Revd MacTeague, knowing that all Loyalist hopes had been dealt a savage blow by the extraordinary events in the northern wilderness, chose Ecclesiastes 7, verse 6 as his text for the next Sunday. “For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.” The unseemly joy, he preached, with which a few in the community had greeted the sad happenings at Saratoga, was of no more account than a burning thornbush. Their vanity would be punished and their cackling joy turned into lamentation. But it was a sermon of small comfort to Loyalists whose belief in the invincibility of the king’s army had been so broken.

Hunger added its misery to Loyalist defeat. The cargo ships, still barred from the city by the rebel forts, languished in the Delaware Bay while the convoys of army wagons, dragged from the Chesapeake Bay across roads that had been turned into morasses of mud by the autumn rains, could not bring a tenth of the food the city needed. Indeed the wagons’ priority was powder and shot for the siege guns, not food for hungry bellies, and so the city’s larders emptied and prices doubled. Some produce arrived from the countryside, but many farmers were scared of the rebel patrols that willingly enforced George Washington’s decreed punishment of two hundred and fifty lashes for any man or woman caught trading with the enemy. Such farmers, unwilling to sell their food for the paper money of the rebels, hid their harvests until the red-coated forage parties arrived with British gold.

The Revd MacTeague, invited to dine with Abel Becket some two weeks after the dreadful news of Saratoga, picked moodily at the salt pork. “I cannot conceive how these disasters could have happened, truly I cannot.”

“The Calvinists,” Becket said darkly, “intimate divine intervention.”

“Watermelons were the cause of Saratoga!” Hannah Becket declared.

“Watermelons, ma’am?” The Revd MacTeague was accustomed to Mrs Becket’s frequent references to food, but he failed to make any cogent connection between the disaster at Saratoga and watermelons.

“It is an incontrovertible fact, Mr MacTeague, that watermelons provoke the fever. The most eminent physicians will assure you of it! It is my belief that the rebels arranged for General Burgoyne’s men to partake of watermelons!”

The minister sensibly chose not to argue with such wisdom. “It sounds most plausible, ma’am.”

“Not that a watermelon could be had here,” Hannah Becket, an ample woman, was now well launched on her favourite topic, “even if a body had a taste for one! What are we to do for food? Salt tongue at three shillings a pound! Buckwheat almost gone! Cod, none! Are we to live on mere aspirations?”

“The forts will be taken,” her husband said.

“So you say, and so we pray, but molasses? None. Cheese? Mere shreds! A shilling a tierce for dried peas, cone sugar quite gone! Calves’ feet? A very delicacy these days, and I am partial to a jelly.”

“I saw some very fine cucumbers, ma’am,” MacTeague suggested diffidently.

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