United States of Atlantis

Chapter 22

"Damn the Englishmen!" Victor said when he'd ridden around the redcoats' new lines in front of Croydon. "God butter them and Satan futter them, they dig like skinks."

"Comment?" inquired the Marquis de la Fayette, who'd ridden the circuit with him. "Like what do they dig?"

"Like skinks," Victor repeated. De la Fayette's question puzzled him: the simile was common enough in Atlantis. Then he decided it might be common only in Atlantis. He cast about for a European equivalent, which he found after a moment: "Like moles, you might say."

"Ah. I see." The French nobleman did indeed look enlightened. But then he asked, "What are these skinks?"

"Why, lizards, of course. Peculiar lizards, though-I will say that," Victor Radcliff answered. "They're short and stout as lizards go. They have no eyes, but their front feet are broad and strong and their tongues uncommonly long and clever. They dig through dirt after worms and bugs-only in summer in these northern lands, but year-around farther south, where the weather stays milder. They can be pests in gardens or on well-mown lawns, on account of the furrows they leave."

"They do sound like moles," de la Fayette said, "save that they are of the reptile kind rather than being furry. But has Atlantis no true moles?"

"No more than we have any other viviparous quadrupeds except bats," Victor replied. "We have now the usual domestic beasts, and rats and mice plague our towns and houses. Deer and foxes course the woods, along with wild dogs and cats. Settlers brought all those beasts, though: this was a land of birds and scaly things before they came."

"And yet Terranova, beyond Atlantis, has an abundance of productions much like Europe's," de la Fayette said. "How could this be so?"

"The first man who learns the truth there will write his name in large letters amongst those of the leading savants of his day," Victor said. "But what that truth may be, I have not the faintest idea. I am more interested in learning how to winkle General

Cornwallis out of Croydon."

"You do not believe we can storm this line?"

"Do you?" Victor didn't like answering a question with a question, but he wanted to find out what the Frenchman thought

De la Fayette's shrug held a certain eloquence. "It would be… difficult."

Victor sighed. Steam puffed from his mouth and nostrils: the day was chilly. "They do have good engineers." The new English line before Croydon took advantage of every little swell of ground. It was also far enough outside the town to keep Atlantean and French field guns from bearing on the harbor. That meant the attackers couldn't keep the Royal Navy from resupplying Cornwallis. "Heaven only knows what kind of butcher's bill we'll pay to break in."

"One larger than we should desire, without doubt," de la Fayette said, and Victor could only nod glumly. The marquis added, "Our best course, then, appears to be to proceed by saps and parallels."

Formal European siege warfare had had little place in Atlantis. Victor and Cornwallis had invested Nouveau Redon, but they hadn't advanced towards it a line at a time. Cornwallis' clever engineers had stopped the spring instead, which made the defenders abandon the town for a sally with scant hope of success.

"That will take some time," Victor said.

"Are you urgently required elsewhere?" de la Fayette inquired.

"Well, no," Victor admitted. "But if the English choose to reinforce their garrison while we dig, we shall have wasted considerable effort."

"So we shall. What of it?" de la Fayette said. "We shall also have wasted considerable effort-and just as much time-if we merely encircle the English position. Better to do our utmost to force a surrender, n'est-cepas?"

"Mm," Victor Radcliff said. "When you put it that way-"

"How else would you have me put it?" the marquis asked. "And, once we have demonstrated to the English commander that we are capable of making the approaches effecting a breach, how can he do anything but surrender?"

"Is that the custom in Europe?" Victor said.

"Most assuredly," de la Fayette replied. "Continuing the battle after a breach is made would be merely a pointless effusion of blood, don't you think?"

"If you say so," Victor replied. If de la Fayette thought that way, Cornwallis likely would, too: they fought in the same style Victor thought there were times when he would keep fighting as long as he had one man left who could aim a musket. But he was only an Atlantean bumpkin-in the eyes of Europeans, just a short step better than a copperskin-so what did he know?

"I do say so," de la Fayette insisted.

"Saps and parallels, then," Victor said, and the Frenchman nodded.

Saps and parallels were part of a soldier's jargon. Even Victor Radcliff, who'd never used them or even seen them used, knew of them. And they were always mentioned that way: always saps and parallels, never parallels and saps.

In the field, though, the parallel always came first. People could argue about the chicken and the egg, but not about the sap and the parallel. One evening, under the profane direction of their engineers, French soldiers began digging a trench aligned with the stretch of enemy works the army would eventually assail. That was how the parallel got its name.

The Frenchmen threw up the dirt they excavated on the side where it would protect them from English fire. At that range- four or five hundred yards-only a lucky shot could hit anyone, but the game had its rules. And, when the redcoats realized what was going on, so many shots would fly through the air that some were bound to be lucky.

Realization came at sunrise the next morning. Cornwallis knew the same tricks as de la Fayette. They might have sprung from different kingdoms, but it was as if they'd attended the same college As soon as Cornwallis saw that growing parapet protecting the first parallel, he did what any other commanding officer in his unpleasant position would have done: he started shooting at it with everything he could bring to bear.

Musketeers banged away. By the lead they expended, they might have been mining the stuff under Croydon. Most of the bullets either fell short or thumped into the dirt of the parapet. A few, more likely by luck than by design, just got over the top of the parapet and into the trench it warded. Wounded men went howling back toward the surgeons. One unfortunate fellow caught a musket ball in the side of the head and simply fell over, dead before he hit the ground.

English field guns also opened up on the parallel. The parapet swallowed some cannon balls, but others got through. Some skipped harmlessly between soldiers. That was uncommon luck; a cannon ball could knock down three or four men, and too often did.

Cornwallis stayed busy back in Croydon, too. His men soon found or made mortars, as the Atlanteans had outside of Hanover. Mortars had no trouble at all throwing their shells over the parapet and down into the parallel. At least as often as not, that didn't matter. English fuses were as unreliable as the ones Victor Radcliffs artillerists used. Sometimes the mortar bombs burst in the air. Very often, they failed to burst at all.

Every once in a while, though, everything would go as the artillerists wished it would all the time. Then the shell would go off just when the gunners had in mind, and the exploding powder would work a fearful slaughter. But it didn't happen often enough to keep men out of the trench.

When the first parallel got long enough to satisfy de la Fayette's engineers, they-or rather, French soldiers (and now Atlanteans with them)-began digging a zigzag trench toward the English outworks: a sap. Because of the way the sap ran, it was harder to protect than the parallel had been. More mangled men went off to the surgeons. Some would get better after their ministrations'-although a good many of those, no doubt, would have got better without those ministrations. Others would get wounds that festered, and would slowly and painfully waste away. So war was; so war had always been; so, as far as Victor Radcliff could tell, war would ever be.

"Are the redcoats likely to sally?" Victor asked as the sap snaked closer to the enemy line.

"I don't think so, not yet," de la Fayette answered. "Look how much open ground they would have to cross before they could interrupt us. Our musketeers and your fine riflemen and the cannon would slaughter too many of them to make it worthwhile. When we draw closer… That may prove a different story."

Victor grunted. Like so many things de la Fayette said, the Frenchman's explanation made such good sense, Victor wondered why he hadn't thought of it himself. Of course Cornwallis would wait till they'd dug another parallel or two before trying to disrupt the excavations with his foot soldiers. Victor would have done the same thing himself.

He rode back to a high point so he could survey Croydon and his harbor with his spyglass. The Royal Navy frigates were gone, but several tubby merchantmen had taken their place. Tiny in the distance even through his lenses, stevedores carried sacks of grain off the ships and into the town. Victor swore under his breath. Atlanteans and Frenchmen would have to break through the defenses in front of Croydon, for they would never starve the redcoats out.

"No big guns there, then. No nasty warships, neither," Blaise said when Victor gave him that bit of intelligence. He added,

"Where did the Royal Navy go? When will it come back?"

"If I knew, I would tell you," Victor replied. "And, if you are about to ask me why the frigates set sail, I also know that not."

Blaise chuckled. "I could have done that well myself."

"So could any man here," Victor said. "Perchance, those frigates may return. Or first-rate ships of the line may take their place. Or, then again, the English may prove content with wallowing scows like the ones now tied up in Croydon. They give Cornwallis and his redcoats their necessary victuals and, no doubt, a copious supply of powder and lead."

"They have been shooting enough of it," Blaise agreed.

"Too much!" Victor said. "Damn me if they have not. Well, we did not think this war would be easy when we began it Most Atlanteans, I daresay, failed to believe we could win it"

"You did not always believe that yourself," Blaise reminded him. "You went around preaching that we must not lose, that so long as we stayed in the fight England would tire of it sooner or later."

"I did?" Victor Radcliff had to think back to what now seemed very distant days indeed. After a sheepish chuckle, he found himself nodding. "I did, sure enough. It may yet come to that, you know. Even if we beat them here, the English can mount another invasion-if they have the will to attempt it."

"What if they do?" the Negro asked.

Victor shrugged. "We fight on. We stay in the field. We refuse to own ourselves beaten, come what may. You see? The same song I sang before. We Radcliff's are a stubborn clan, say whatever else you will of us."

"Then you need someone stubborn enough to stay beside you," Blaise said, and tapped the chevrons on his arm. Smiling,

Victor slapped him on the back.

The second parallel. As before, the soil went up on the side facing Croydon's defenses. This trench being closer to the redcoats' works, the Frenchmen and Atlanteans who manned it took more casualties. The English artillerists got as good with their mortars as anyone could with those balky weapons. The besiegers dug shelters into the sides of the trench, and dove into them when the shells came hissing down.

Then it rained-not so hard as it had on the day when Victor's attack went awry, but hard enough. The rain softened the dirt, which should have made digging easier… but who wanted to dig when he sank ankle-deep in mud if he tried? The parapet in front of the trench displayed an alarming tendency to sag, too.

Firing from the English trenches slackened, but it didn't stop. The redcoats had had plenty of time to strengthen their works while their foes dug. Some of their men fired from shelters adequate to keep their powder dry. Some of their mortars still tossed hate into the air.

One shell splashed down into a puddle that doused its fuse. "Drown, you son of a bitch!" shouted the closest Atlantean infantryman. Within a day, half the Atlanteans were telling the story. So were a quarter of de la Fayette's French soldiers-it was easy enough to translate.

The rain changed to sleet, and the sleet changed to snow. The ground went from too soft to work with conveniently to too hard to work with conveniently, all in the space of a couple of days. Atlanteans and Frenchmen shivered in huts and tents. No doubt the redcoats were chilly, too, but they had Croydon's snug houses in which to lodge.

Watching smoke rise from chimneys in town, Victor said, "Sooner or later, they'll run short of firewood."

"Soon enough to do us any good?" Blaise asked.

"I don't know," Victor admitted. "How much wood did they have before the siege began? How cold will the winter be? How many of the Croydonites' chattels will the redcoats bum to keep from corning down with chilblains?"

"As many as they need to," Blaise said without hesitation.

"I shouldn't wonder," Victor said. Shivering Atlanteans would do the same-he was sure of that. Instead, they had plenty of timber close by. But wood freshly cut would smoke horribly when it went onto the fire. That wouldn't stop his men from using it, but the soot would make them look like Negroes if they kept on for very long.

"We need more picks, fewer shovels," de la Fayette said a couple of days later. "We are chipping at the ground more than digging through it."

"Well, so we are," Victor said. "Unless your blacksmiths feel like beating spades into picks-an eventuality of which the Good Book says nothing-I know not where we shall come by them."

"Off the countryside?" de la Fayette said hopefully.

"Good luck," Victor replied. "Maybe we can get a few. But unless we pay well for them, our own farmers will start shooting at us from ambush."

"They would not do that!" the marquis exclaimed.

"Ha!" Victor said, and then again, louder, "Ha!" That done, he proceeded to embellish on the theme: "Your Grace, chances are you know more about how they fight in Europe than I do. You'd better. But I promise you this-I know more about Atlantean fanners and what they're likely to do than you've ever imagined."

"It could be. Very probably, it is. French peasants, however, would not behave so," de la Fayette said.

"Next time I campaign in France, I'll remember that," Victor said. "For now, you need to remember you're campaigning in Atlantis."

"I am not likely to forget it," the French nobleman replied, tartly enough to suggest that, while he conceded he wasn't lost on the trackless prairies of northern Terranova beyond the Great River, he also didn't see himself as being so tar away from those buffalo-thundering grasslands. After pausing just long enough to let that sink in, he continued, "One reminder is the weather. How soon can we resume our excavations, even if we obtain picks? Will we be able to do so at all before spring?"

"Well, I don't exactly know." Victor held up a hand before de la Fayette could speak. "Nobody exactly knows the weather-I understand that. But I don't even approximately know. I do not spring from this part of Atlantis, and I have not spent sufficient time up here to have a good feel for what's likely to come."

"Some of your men will, though?" de la Fayette suggested.

"Can't hurt to ask," Victor said, and instructed one of his messengers.

Grinning, the youngster said, "I'd make my own guesses, sir, but I'm from down in Freetown myself, so they wouldn't be worth an at-" He broke off, flushing to the roots of his hair. "They wouldn't be worth much, I mean. I'll go fetch somebody who was born around here." He dashed away as if his breeches were on fire.

Victor Radcliff stared sourly after him. Wouldn't be worth an Atlantean, the messenger hadn't quite swallowed. When the Atlantean Assembly's own followers scorned the paper the Assembly issued… When such a thing happened, you knew that paper had lost more value than you wished it would have.

The messenger quickly returned with a sergeant who gave his name as Saul Andrews and who said, "I come from a farm about twenty miles from here. Never strayed far from it, neither, General, not till I picked up a musket and went to war with you." Sure enough, he used the flat vowels and muffled final fs of a Croydon man.

"Good enough," Victor replied. "How long do you expect this harsh cold spell to last?"

Andrews glanced up at the sky. Whatever he saw there only made him shrug. "Well, now, sir, that's a mite hard to calculate," he said. "If it's a hard winter, it could stay this way till spring. I've seen it do that very thing. But if it's not so hard, we'll get some warm spells betwixt and between the freezes. Which I've also seen."

"If you had to guess-?" Victor prompted.

Sergeant Andrews shrugged. "The good Lord knows, but He ain't told me. Only thing I can say is, we got to wait and see."

"All right, Sergeant. You may go," Victor said, stifling a sigh.

Andrews departed with almost as many signs of relief as the messenger had shown a few minutes earlier. Try as Victor would, he couldn't get angry at the man. Custis Cawthorne had tried using barometer and thermometer-both of which he'd had to make himself-to foretell the weather. And sometimes he'd been right, and sometimes he'd been wrong. Anyone who'd lived out in the open long enough to grow up could have done as well without fancy devices. So people delighted in telling Cawthorne, too, till he finally gave up and sold the meteorological instruments for what the glass and quicksilver would bring.

"He does not know?" De la Fayette's English was imperfect, but he'd got the gist.

"No, he doesn't." This time, Victor did sigh. "I don't suppose anyone else will, either. As he said, we just have to wait and see."

"Very well." By the way de la Fayette said it, it wasn't But even a young, headstrong nobleman understood that a Power higher than he controlled the weather. "We shall just have to be ready to take advantage of the good and do our best to ride out the bad."

Victor Radcliff set a hand on his shoulder. "Welcome to life, your Grace."

In due course, the parallel advanced again. Then a blizzard froze the ground hard as iron, and digging perforce stopped. The wind howled down from the northwest. Snow swirled and danced. The redcoats' defensive works and their foes' saps and parallels vanished under a blanket of white.

Almost everything vanished, in fact. While the storm raged, Victor had trouble seeing out to the end of his arm. He wondered if he could turn that to his, and Atlantis', advantage. Cornwallis' men would have trouble seeing, too. Attackers might be able to get very close to their works before getting spotted. If anything went wrong as they approached, though…

Since he had trouble making up his mind, he held a council of war to see what his officers-and the French, most of whom needed translation-thought of the idea. As he might have guessed, they split pretty evenly.

"If anything goes wrong-even the least little thing-you've spilled the thundermug into the stewpot," one major said.

"If things go the way we want them to, we walk into Croydon," a captain countered. Both those notions had been in Victor's mind. His officers had as much trouble weighing them one against the other as he did.

"The glory of victory complete and absolute!" de la Fayette said enthusiastically. Whether his officers were or not, he was ready to attack.

He seemed so very ready, in fact, that he made "Baron" von Steuben stir. "We have in hand the game," the German veteran said. "With saps and parallels, sooner or later we are sure to win, or almost. An attack, even an attack in Schnee-ah, snow-and we all this risk. Why take the chance?"

"Only a snake could look at things in a more cold-blooded way," de la Fayette said-not quite the insult direct, but close. A touchy officer might have called him out for it.

Von Steuben only smiled and bowed. "Do not down your nose at snakes look, your Grace," he said. "There are in this world of them a great many, and most of them seem uncommonly well fed."

"I should rather fight like a man," de la Fayette said. "No one says to on your belly crawl to the redcoats' lines and bite in the leg an English sergeant. This is more likely you than him to poison," von Steuben replied. The Atlantean officers laughed right away. After the joke was translated, so did most of the Frenchmen. Even de la Fayette smiled. Von Steuben went on, "Yes, you should like a man fight. But you should also like a smart man, not like some dumbhead, fight, is it not so?"

Plainly, de la Fayette wanted nothing more than to tell him it was not so. Just as plainly, the Frenchman couldn't, not unless he wanted to make a liar of himself. All but choking on the words, de la Fayette said, "It is so."

"Good. Very good." Von Steuben might have been patting a puppy on the head, not talking to his nominal superior. "You can things learn. Give yourself a chance longer to live, and you will more things learn."

De la Fayette looked more affronted than von Steuben had when the French noble-the genuine French noble, Victor reminded himself-called him cold-blooded. But all von Steuben had accused him of was being young. Time would cure that… unless he did something foolish enough to get himself killed before it could.

The council of war went on a while longer after the exchange between von Steuben and de la Fayette. As Victor soon saw, though, men on both sides of the question were only kicking it back and forth in the same track.

That left it up to him. Well, it had always been up to him, but now he had to look the fact square in the face. "We'll wait," he said. "We'll go on digging, as best we can. If matters develop differently from the way we now expect… Well, in that case, chances are Croydon will see another blizzard before winter's out."

"You took that German cochon's word over mine," de la Fayette said hotly as the council broke up.

"I will take good advice wherever I can find it," Victor replied. "He was right: failure would cost more than we can afford, whilst success is apt to come down without the attack, if rather more slowly."

"Are you a general or a bookkeeper?"

"I've been both," Victor said. "One is not the opposite of the other."

De la Fayette's response was funny, sad, and pungently obscene all at once: very French, in other words. Then he added, "I wish I could change your mind."

"A lot of people have said that down through the years," Victor answered, with a shrug far more resigned than the ones he'd got from Saul Andrews. "Not many of them have done it, though. Radcliff's are good at going straight ahead or stopping short, not so good at turning."

"Good at stopping short when you should go straight ahead," de la Fayette observed, and walked off with the last word if not with what he wanted.

Bright sunshine greeted Victor when he got up the next morning. Squinting against its glare off snow, he knew his men would have got slaughtered had they tried to storm the English works. Even had he agreed to the attack the night before, he would have had to call it off now. Sometimes what a man wanted or didn't want had nothing to do with anything: he simply had to make the best of the hand he got dealt.

Victor set his men to shoveling snow out of the entrenchments that worked toward the redcoats' lines. Once they'd thrown out enough so they could move around fairly freely, they started hacking away at the frozen ground. The parallel advanced again.

Cornwallis' soldiers shoveled snow out of their trenches, too. They made it as plain as they possibly could that they wouldn't give up without a fight. They went right on shooting at the diggers in the parallel. Every so often, they hit somebody. Being able to go back to Croydon when they weren't on duty, they had better quarters than the Atlanteans and Frenchmen investing their lines. English ships kept coming into port, too, which meant the redcoats were bound to be better supplied than their foes.

But the English soldiers remained shut up in one tiny corner of Atlantis. Cornwallis didn't seem to think they had the strength to break out against Victor's army. If they could be beaten here, they would have to try some massive new invasion to make the war go on. If…

In due course, the French engineers pronounced themselves satisfied with the second parallel. A new sap angled toward the English line. With muskets and mortars, the redcoats showed how little they appreciated the compliment.

Then a fresh snowstorm shrieked down from the north. The digging had to stop for several days. Victor Radcliff swore and fumed, but he could do no more about the weather than Blaise or Sergeant Saul Andrews or any other mortal. All he could do was hope the storm blew itself out before long-and hope his troops stayed healthy long enough to let them attack the Englishmen. He could do no more about that than he could about the weather.

"At least the weather is cold," Victor said to Blaise. "There seem to be fewer sicknesses at this season than in warmer times."

"What about chest fever?" the Negro retorted. "What about catarrh? What about tire-what do you call it?-the grippe?"

"Well, those are troublesome," Victor admitted. "But I was thinking of fluxes of the bowels, and of the plague, and even of smallpox and measles. They are seen more often in spring and summer-especially the first two."

"They probably stay frozen in this snow and ice, the way meat does." Blaise rolled his eyes. "Who would have thought you could keep meat fresh as long as you froze it? In the country I come from, we have to smoke it or salt it or dry it or eat it right away. I never saw ice-I never imagined ice!-till you white men dragged me here."

"Kind of you to admit ice is good for something," Victor said. "You are not always so generous."

"If you could keep it in a box and use it for what it is good for, that would be fine," Blaise said. "When it lies all over the countryside and tries to freeze off your fingers and your toes and your prong, then that is too much." His shiver was melodramatic and sincere at the same time.

"We will be warmer once we break into Croydon," Victor said. "I have said the same to the men advancing the sap. I can think of nothing better calculated to inspire them to dig."

"It would inspire me, by the Lord Jehovah!" Blaise exclaimed. "But some of you white men like this weather. I have heard some of you say so. If you tell me now that these men are not mad, I will not believe you."

"I also think they are." Victor could take it no further than that, as he knew too well. Some Atlanteans-and some Frenchmen, too-did relish winter for its own sake. He liked cold weather himself, he liked coming in out of it, warming himself in front of a roaring fire, and sipping from a flagon of mulled wine or flip, the tasty concoction of rum and beer. Spending much time in it was a different story, as far as he was concerned.

Time dragged on. The sap moved closer to the redcoats' line, which meant they sent all the more musket balls and mortar shells and roundshot at the men digging it. The third parallel would be very close indeed. The sap that led out from it would break into the English works. After that, and after a clash and a show of resistance, General Cornwallis could yield with honor.

He could, yes. But would he? In a fight to the finish, his men had at least some hope of beating the Atlanteans and Frenchmen opposing them. Since he led the last English force in Atlantis, mightn't he feel obligated to fight as hard as he could? If he did win, he kept the war alive.

Every time Victor tried to decide what Cornwallis would do, he came up with a different answer. The English general certainly was conscious of his honor; Victor had seen that in the fight against the French settlers. Was he also conscious of the political demands his position imposed on him? How could he fail to be? And yet people weren't always sensible or clever-far from it. There was no sure way to judge till attackers swarmed into the breach.

Then the Atlantean commander found something new to worry about, for a courier from Hanover brought him a letter in a hand he found far too familiar. He'd never dreamt he would recognize Marcel Freycinet's script so readily. No matter what he'd dreamt, he did.

The letter was cheerful enough. Freycinet assured him that Louise was doing well, and that the slave and her owner both anticipated her safe passage through birthing time. Take heart, Monsieur le General, and be of good cheer, Freycinet wrote. Such things have happened since the days of Adam and Eve. You have nothing to be ashamed of; rather, pride yourself on your virility.

Victor would have been happier to do that had any of the children Meg gave him lived to grow up. He could not wish for Louise's baby to die untimely… but neither could he wish his sole descendant to be sold on the auction block like a cow or a sheep. Nor could he buy the child himself, not when doing so would show his wife he'd been unfaithful.

That left… Victor burned Monsieur Freycinet's letter on the brazier in his tent. It left nothing he could see. Nothing at all. He'd been scrabbling for a way out since he first learned his bedwarmer was with child. He had yet to find one, scrabble as he would.

Since he couldn't do anything about what was going on far to the south, he threw his energy into the siege of Croydon. Even in the snow, he kept digging parties hacking away at the hard ground. A thaw came just after New Year's Day. As the last one had, it turned saps and parallels into morasses and made parapets slump.

No doubt the redcoats were similarly discommoded. But their works were already in place. They weren't trying to extend them and trying not to drown at the same time.

"Confound it, there has to be something between ground that's rock and ground that's soup!" Victor complained.

"What you want for it to be is summer again," Baron von Steuben said. "And soon enough it will be."

"It will be, yes, but not soon enough," Victor said.

"For fighting? Maybe not. For anything else… Summer comes sooner every year," the German said. "So does winter."

He wasn't much older than Victor was himself, which didn't mean he didn't have a point. Victor had noticed the same thing himself. Years used to stretch out deliciously ahead of him. Now each one seemed shorter than its predecessor. Before he had time to get to know it, it disappeared. And once time was gone, could even God call it back again?

Before long, Louise's light brown baby would be born. Before long, the boy-or would it be a girl?-would be sold. Marcel Freycinet would pocket considerably more than thirty pieces of silver. Everyone would be happy… except Victor, and probably the little child who was flesh of his flesh.

Baron von Steuben said something. Whatever it was, Victor missed it. "Crave pardon?" he murmured.

The German pointed out to sea. "Here come more English ships," he repeated. "May the woodworms eat them all below the waterline."

"That would be splendid," Victor agreed. "Devil take me if those be not first-rate ships of the line, too. From close in to shore, their guns may even reach the spot where we hope to breach Cornwallis' lines. A ball from a long twenty-four-pounder can do horrid things to a man."

"So can a ball from a musket," von Steuben said, which was true but had scant flavor to it. His hard, weathered features folded into a frown. "It does not seem as if they hope to tie up."

"So it doesn't," Victor replied. "I wonder why not."

"They have to be more stupid than you would expect, even from an Englishman," von Steuben said. Victor Radcliff wondered what kind of opinion General Cornwallis' held about the German soldiers of fortune from Hesse and Brunswick and other petty states who took King George's silver and fought for England. Similarly low? He wouldn't have been surprised.

He watched the men-of-war working their way toward Croydon against mostly contrary breezes. When all of them presented their broadsides to the town at the same time, a sudden mad hope caromed through him. He ducked back into his tent for the spyglass. Aiming the long brass tube out into the Atlantic, he drew out the slimmer part to bring the warships into focus. And when he saw them clear…

When he saw them clear, he began to caper like a fool, or like a man possessed. "They're French ships!" he shouted. "French, I tell you! French!"

"Wassagen Sie?" von Steuben demanded, though Victor didn't know how he could have made himself any clearer. A moment later, all the ships fired together. Tons of hot flying iron crashed down on Croydon.