Arundel (65 page)

“Now,” he said, “don’t spoil this by shouting or shooting. Be very quiet. Patrol boats pass between the frigates each hour. When one of us is discovered, we’re all discovered. If we’re
not
discovered, we can take Quebec this night. I hope by the grace of God we can do it; but if we can’t, then we’ll cut off its provisions and take it later. If ever any men earned the glory of taking this city, it’s you! I believe no other men in the world could have endured what you have, and come as far as this, ready and willing to fight.”

He went into the canoe with Lieutenant Church, Lieutenant Steele, Daniel Morgan, and a Mr. Halsted, who had come out from Quebec through friendship for Colonel Arnold and was now confident of leading us to a landing place at Wolfe’s Cove, whence we could mount to the Plains of Abraham. Riflemen and musketmen packed themselves into the canoes, helter-skelter, until there were four in each besides the paddlers.

We slipped off after Arnold. I, paddling bow, could just see the glimmer of white at Steele’s left shoulder, where his shirt had been torn so his skin showed through. There was no sound, only the sucking of the current at the canoe and the lapping of ripples against the sides; little to see save a fleck of light here and there on the far shore.

I so closely watched Steele’s shoulder that my heart jumped into my throat when he sheered suddenly downstream, and there loomed on my left the blacker bulk of one of the British frigates, so near that a sailor, standing at her bulwarks, might have spat on us.

All in all, the crossing would have been peaceful, with nothing to distract me from thinking of Mary Mallinson and from framing the words I should say to her when we had at last entered Quebec—nothing except schools of villainous white porpoises, which Natanis said cruised perpetually in that tremendous stretch of waters.

These porpoises didn’t roll languidly, as they roll on summer days near Arundel, but whizzed through the water in every direction in twos and fives and twenties, as if desperate to get somewhere.

There was a pale streak above each fish, like foam with moonlight glinting on it, a streak of cold, wavering, bluish-white fire. I have heard since that the antics of these white porpoises are admired by travelers, but when they darted between Steele’s canoe and our own, I wished them all in hell.

Somehow the porpoises, and the cussedness of them, set me to thinking of Phoebe. I knew I must do something about her, lest she be left on the wrong side of the river and have to go to living in one of those whitewashed farms with a lot of long-tailed Frenchmen, so that she would turn all shriveled and leathery from their stinking pipes.

We came into smooth water where there were no more porpoises. I could feel, rather than see, a high bulk of land hanging over us. Canoe-bottoms grated on pebbles, and men splashed in shallows.

When we slid in beside Steele he whispered hoarsely: “Wolfe’s Covel” and there came to my mind that distant day when my father had drunk to red-headed James Wolfe for scaling the cliff from this very cove and taking Quebec.

I remember thinking to myself it ought to seem a mighty strange business, coming to this spot in the dead of night, following in the footsteps of James Wolfe; but it didn’t seem strange at all: only a commonplace occurrence, like sculling down a guzzle at Swan Island to kill geese.

We could hear canoes coming in, upstream and downstream from us. Since we had three trips to make, we pushed off at once, and went back faster for being unloaded. Cap Huff was waiting patiently, watching over Phoebe and Jacataqua. I told him to have them ready for the third trip, and to say, in case of questioning, that both of them had been ordered to report to Arnold’s headquarters at once.

Cap asked whether I had seen the frigates. When I said I had, he asked hoarsely whether it would be possible for a few of us to board one of them. I sniffed, thinking he must have stolen a keg of Spanish wine and drunk it all himself, and so become inflamed in the head. But it has occurred to me since that if he had known of a cash customer for a frigate, he might have found some way to acquire one that night.

It was after midnight when we set down our second load in Wolfe’s Cove. There was a moaning of the wind in the tree branches above us: signs of breaking in the clouds that covered the moon—two portents I misliked, for I had no wish to be spilled into this bottomless river, nor any desire to be shot by a frigate’s crew. Therefore we made haste on our third trip, knowing it would be our last.

Cap and his charges were waiting for us, and we took them aboard. Phoebe came close up behind me for warmth, and when she put her arms around my waist I could feel she was wearing her leather-bound shot on her wrist. When I asked her whether she had used it she said nothing, only put her head against the small of my back and shivered. I heard Jacataqua’s yellow-faced dog climb in while she and Ivory and Noah were settling themselves, and then Burr’s voice declaring he might as well go with us.

Having an overloaded canoe as it was, I told him to keep away lest I slap him with the paddle, calling to Natanis at the same time to push off. There were some things about Burr that were beginning to set ill on me, particularly when I was cold and hungry.

The wrack of clouds, whipped by a rising wind from the northwest, was thinner, so there began to be light from the hidden moon—a light that let us see other canoes faintly; and there was a wicked chop that slapped and slapped at our canoe, slapping water into our faces. I clung close to Steele, knowing he had a knack of coming through troublous times without taking hurt.

It’s said we only remember pleasant things, but I’ve never forgotten that last crossing and there was nothing pleasant about it. Each of us had taken in more than was safe, knowing we couldn’t get back that night. I could hear Natanis grunting with each stroke of his paddle, forcing the canoe against the bitter wind.

We slipped safely between the frigates; and it seemed to me the worst was past, when a school of white porpoises came suddenly on us, groaning and blowing spray as if contemptuous of our puny strivings, cutting through the water like mad things and lighting themselves on their way with streaks of pale blue fire.

While I cursed and struck at them with my paddle there came a half-strangled shout from Steele’s canoe. I saw the two ends fly into the air. There was a sound of rattling and scrambling from it; and in an instant every man was in the water. The canoe, broken in the middle by a blow from one of those damnable, nonsensical fishes, wallowed half sunk and useless.

We were among the men at once. Jacataqua leaned over and took one of them by the neck—a tall Virginia rifleman, George Merchant by name, a reckless devil from Morgan’s company.

The others caught the thwarts of canoes, or were held by men in them. We still followed Steele’s torn shirt when we went on; for he had passed his arms over the stern of a canoe, and the paddler sat on them, so that when he was numbed by the icy water he couldn’t lose his hold.

These men could not be taken into canoes in midstream and so we dragged them.

We were little more than halfway across; and our best speed, with the rising wind and the added weight, was poor enough. Phoebe sat far to the left, hanging over the water, so that Jacataqua could hold to her Virginian on the other side without swamping us; and hang to him she did, refusing to let Noah or Jethro come to her help. It may have been for the best. I could hear Jacataqua talking to this rifleman, and I could hear him answer, low and reckless. Once, hearing Phoebe sniff, I looked around, and it seemed to me Jacataqua’s lips were closer to his than necessary; but it may be she made the blood run more rapidly in his veins than would have been the case if Noah or Jethro had held him, and that he was saved from a quinsy or from the sad fate of poor McClellan.

When we came ashore at last these poor men could not move their legs. Arnold, seeing what had happened, gave orders for the kindling of a fire in an empty house that stood near by, though he had forbidden fires to all others lest we be discovered. When this had been done and the castaways held before it, they soon thawed out.

We had crossed with no time to spare; for even as we made ready to mount the path to the Plains of Abraham there came, from the river, the sound of oars grinding between thole-pins. It drew nearer and nearer, and proved to be a patrol from a frigate, coming to see what had made our fire. One of our men shouted to the boat to come in, at which the rowing stopped. In the light of the pale moon we could dimly see the small craft drifting downstream. After a little it started to move out again, whereupon the rifles of the Virginians spat fire, and a crying and groaning arose from the boat, which continued to move outward, nevertheless.

We scrambled up a steep path, Colonel Arnold leading us, and came breathless to the top of the cliff to find ourselves on a snow-covered plain. Ahead of us, throngs of vague specters milled and muttered. They were forming into companies. I said to myself that we had done what we started to do, almost: we had reached Quebec, and now there was nothing left to do but take it. There was no excitement in the thought. After the cold and hunger and weariness we had endured, there was, it seemed to me, no excitement in anything.

A company of riflemen, headed by Captain Smith, came out of the gloom at our right, where there was a mass of houses or walls too distant to be distinguished, and I heard him report to Morgan that he had been the length of the walls, and that there was no suspicion of our presence. He added, too, that all the gates were tight shut, with no sentries in sight. Even while I listened I heard the cry of the watch in Quebec, shouting: “Five o’clock and all’s well!”

Now I served in the army for some few years, at Quebec and later at Saratoga, where Arnold, with his wild courage and the help of Daniel Morgan and this same Henry Dearborn whose black dog was taken away by Asa Hutchins to be eaten, gave Burgoyne the drubbing that took America from the British forever. In that time I heard strange tales, most of them false; for few persons know so little concerning what they are doing, or what is going on about them, as soldiers, unless it be sailors or hairdressers, both of whom brim with misinformation. Among these tales is one that went abroad among us within a day or so of the time when we set foot on the Plains of Abraham, when deserters and spies had come out to us from the city: the tale that St. John’s Gate in the city walls had stood open all that first night, so that we might have walked in and made ourselves masters of Quebec.

It is God’s truth that if we could have brought our scaling ladders across on our canoes—the scaling ladders our carpenters and blacksmiths had made in the five days we lay at Point Levis, waiting for the wind to die down—we would have scaled the walls that night; and as sure as we had scaled them the city would have fallen; for if ever men were desperate, our men were. So, too, were Colonel Arnold and Daniel Morgan; and I care not what any man may say of those two soldiers; or how he may point to what he may think they have been at this time or at another, or to what they may have done under one circumstance or the other circumstance. I knew them both, and I say this: neither among the Americans nor among the British during all our long war was there any leader after Washington who approached them in daring or recklessness, or exceeded them in bravery, ever.

And though I am sick of “ifs,” and weary of listening to folk who tell what they would have done had they been twenty years younger or had events fallen out differently, I cannot help but set down what is the truth. Could we have finished our march a few days earlier we would have walked into the city and taken it, for it had neither defenders nor leaders worth the mentioning until the fifth of November, when a frigate and one hundred and fifty men came to Quebec from Newfoundland, followed on the twelfth by Colonel Allen McLean, who came down the St. Lawrence and into the city with another one hundred and sixty men, all of them recruits.

Yet these things are beside the mark. What I am getting at is this: Matthew Smith led his riflemen the length of the walls in the blackness of that bitter November morning, and he returned with the news that the gates were fast shut. I have no love for Matthew Smith, because of what he did at Conestoga and at Lancaster Gaol. None the less he was a fighter, reckless of the odds against him. So, too, were his riflemen, all of them willing to engage a regiment of men or devils, and all certain of success because of the deadly accuracy of their rifles. Therefore I say there was no gate open into Quebec that night; for if there had been Matthew Smith would have found it and gone in, for that was the sort of man Smith was.

While I was hunting Goodrich’s company in the dark, Burr came up to me, grumpy and sour.