Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(26)
Malcolm lived, long enough to make it to the rear of the lines, where the army surgeons were already at work. By the time Grey and the other officer had turned him over to the surgeons, the battle was over.
Grey turned to see the French scattered and demoralized, fleeing toward the fortress. British troops were flooding across the trampled field, cheering, overrunning the abandoned French cannon.
The entire battle had lasted less than a quarter of an hour.
He found himself sitting on the ground, his mind quite blank, with no notion how long he had been there, though he supposed it couldn’t have been much time at all.
He noticed an officer standing near him and thought vaguely that the man seemed familiar. Who…Oh, yes. Wolfe’s adjutant. He’d never learned the man’s name.
He stood up slowly, stiff as a nine-day pudding.
The adjutant was simply standing there. His eyes were turned in the direction of the fortress and the fleeing French, but Grey could tell that he wasn’t really seeing either. Grey glanced over his shoulder, toward the hillock where Wolfe had stood earlier, but the general was nowhere in sight.
“General Wolfe?” he said.
“The general…” the adjutant said, and swallowed thickly. “He was struck.”
Of course he was, silly ass, Grey thought uncharitably. Standing up there like a bloody target, what could he expect? But then he saw the tears standing in the adjutant’s eyes and understood.
“Dead, then?” he asked, stupidly, and the adjutant—why had he never thought to ask the man’s name?—nodded, rubbing a smoke-stained sleeve across a smoke-stained countenance.
“He…In the wrist first. Then in the body. He fell and crawled—then he fell again. I turned him over…told him the battle was won, the French were scattered.”
“He understood?”
The adjutant nodded and took a deep breath that rattled in his throat. “He said—” He stopped and coughed, then went on more firmly. “He said that in knowing he had conquered, he was content to die.”
“Did he?” Grey said blankly. He’d seen men die, often, and imagined it much more likely that if James Wolfe had managed anything beyond an inarticulate groan, his final word had likely been either “shit,” or “oh, God,” depending upon the general’s religious leanings, of which Grey had no notion.
“Yes, good,” he said meaninglessly, and turned toward the fortress. Ant trails of men were streaming toward it, and in the midst of one such stream he saw Montcalm’s colors, fluttering in the wind. Below the colors, small in the distance, a man in general’s uniform rode his horse, hatless, hunched and swaying in the saddle, his officers bunched close on either side, anxious lest he fall.
The British lines were reorganizing, though it was clear no further fighting would be required. Not today. Nearby, he saw the tall officer who had saved his life and helped him to drag Malcolm Stubbs to safety, limping back toward his troops.
“The major over there,” he said, nudging the adjutant and nodding. “Do you know his name?”
The adjutant blinked, then firmed his shoulders.
“Yes, of course. That’s Major Siverly.”
“Oh. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?”
ADMIRAL HOLMES, third in command after Wolfe, accepted the surrender of Quebec five days later, Wolfe and his second, Brigadier Monckton, having perished in battle. Montcalm was dead, too; had died the morning following the battle. There was no way out for the French save surrender; winter was coming on, and the fortress and its city would starve long before its besiegers.
Two weeks after the battle, John Grey returned to Gareon and found that smallpox had swept through the village like an autumn wind. The mother of Malcolm Stubbs’s son was dead; her mother offered to sell him the child. He asked her politely to wait.
Charlie Carruthers had perished, too, the smallpox not waiting for the weakness of his body to overcome him. Grey had the body burned, not wishing Carruthers’s hand to be stolen, for both the Indians and the local habitants regarded such things superstitiously. He took a canoe by himself and, on a deserted island in the St. Lawrence, scattered his friend’s ashes to the wind.
He returned from this expedition to discover a letter, forwarded by Hal, from Dr. John Hunter, surgeon and anatomist. He checked the level of brandy in the decanter and opened it with a sigh.
My dear Lord John,
I have heard some recent conversation regarding the unfortunate death of Mr. Nicholls, including comments indicating a public perception that you were responsible for his death. In case you shared this perception, I thought it might ease your mind to know that in fact you were not.
Grey sank slowly onto a stool, eyes glued to the sheet.
It is true that your ball did strike Mr. Nicholls, but this accident contributed little or nothing to his demise. I saw you fire upward into the air—I said as much to those present at the time, though most of them did not appear to take much notice. The ball apparently went up at a slight angle and then fell upon Mr. Nicholls from above. At this point, its power was quite spent, and, the missile itself being negligible in size and weight, it barely penetrated the skin above his collarbone, where it lodged against the bone, doing no further damage.
The true cause of his collapse and death was an aortic aneurysm, a weakness in the wall of one of the great vessels emergent from the heart; such weaknesses are often congenital. The stress of the electric shock and the emotion of the duello that followed apparently caused this aneurysm to rupture. Such an occurrence is untreatable and invariably fatal, I am afraid. There is nothing that could have saved him.