Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(22)
Yes, he knew.
NEARLY TWO WEEKS later, just after full dark, they boarded the ships. The convoy included Admiral Holmes’s flagship, the Lowestoff; three men of war: the Squirrel, Sea Horse, and Hunter; a number of armed sloops; others loaded with ordnance, powder, and ammunition; and a number of transports for the troops—1,800 men in all. The Sutherland had been left below, anchored just out of firing range of the fortress, to keep an eye on the enemy’s motions; the river there was littered with floating batteries and prowling small French craft.
Grey traveled with Wolfe and the Highlanders aboard Sea Horse and spent the journey on deck, too keyed up to bear being below.
His brother’s warning kept recurring in the back of his mind—“Don’t follow him into anything stupid”—but it was much too late to think of that, and, to block it out, he challenged one of the other officers to a whistling contest. Each party was to whistle the entirety of “The Roast Beef of Old England,” the loser the man who laughed first. He lost, but did not think of his brother again.
Just after midnight, the big ships quietly furled their sails, dropped anchor, and lay like slumbering gulls on the dark river. Anse au Foulon, the landing spot that Malcolm Stubbs and his scouts had recommended to General Wolfe, lay seven miles downriver, at the foot of sheer and crumbling slate cliffs that led upward to the Plains of Abraham.
“Is it named for the biblical Abraham, do you think?” Grey had asked curiously, hearing the name, but had been informed that, in fact, the cliff top comprised a farmstead belonging to an ex-pilot named Abraham Martin.
On the whole, he thought this prosaic origin just as well. There was likely to be drama enough enacted on that ground, without thought of ancient prophets, conversations with God, nor any calculation of how many just men might be contained within the fortress of Quebec.
With a minimum of fuss, the Highlanders and their officers, Wolfe and his chosen troops—Grey among them—debarked into the small bateaux that would carry them silently down to the landing point.
The sounds of oars were mostly drowned by the river’s rushing, and there was little conversation in the boats. Wolfe sat in the prow of the lead boat, facing his troops, looking now and then over his shoulder at the shore. Quite without warning, he began to speak. He didn’t raise his voice, but the night was so still that those in the boat had little trouble in hearing him. To Grey’s astonishment, he was reciting “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
Melodramatic ass, Grey thought—and yet could not deny that the recitation was oddly moving. Wolfe made no show of it. It was as though he was simply talking to himself, and a shiver went over Grey as Wolfe intoned:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
“The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” Wolfe ended, so low-voiced that only the three or four men closest heard him. Grey was near enough to hear him clear his throat, with a small “hem” noise, and saw his shoulders lift.
“Gentlemen,” Wolfe said, lifting his voice, as well, “I should rather have written those lines than have taken Quebec.”
There was a faint stir and a breath of laughter among the men.
So would I, Grey thought. The poet who wrote them is likely sitting by his cozy fire in Cambridge, eating buttered crumpets, not preparing to fall from a great height or get his arse shot off.
He didn’t know whether this was simply more of Wolfe’s characteristic drama. Possibly—possibly not, he thought. He’d met Colonel Walsing by the latrines that morning, and Walsing had mentioned that Wolfe had given him a pendant the night before, with instructions to deliver it to Miss Landringham, to whom Wolfe was engaged.
But, then, it was nothing out of the ordinary for men to put their personal valuables into the care of a friend before a hot battle. Were you killed or badly injured, your body might be looted before your comrades managed to retrieve you, and not everyone had a trustworthy servant with whom to leave such items. Grey himself had often carried snuffboxes, pocket watches, or rings into battle for friends—he’d had a reputation for luck, prior to Crefeld. No one had asked him to carry anything tonight.
He shifted his weight by instinct, feeling the current change, and Simon Fraser, next to him, swayed in the opposite direction, bumping him.
“Pardon,” Fraser murmured. Wolfe had made them all recite poetry in French round the dinner table the night before, and it was agreed that Fraser had the most authentic accent, he having fought with the French in Holland some years prior. Should they be hailed by a sentry, it would be his job to reply. Doubtless, Grey thought, Fraser was now thinking frantically in French, trying to saturate his mind with the language, lest any stray bit of English escape in panic.
“De rien,” Grey murmured back, and Fraser chuckled, deep in his throat.
It was cloudy, the sky streaked with the shredded remnants of retreating rain clouds. That was good; the surface of the river was broken, patched with faint light, fractured by stones and drifting tree branches. Even so, a decent sentry could scarcely fail to spot a train of boats.
Cold numbed his face, but his palms were sweating. He touched the dagger at his belt again; he was aware that he touched it every few minutes, as if needing to verify its presence, but couldn’t help it and didn’t worry about it. He was straining his eyes, looking for anything—the glow of a careless fire, the shifting of a rock that was not a rock…Nothing.