New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [179]
“I’ve just been with Clinton,” her father announced one afternoon. “He’s convinced that Washington means to attack New York. He wants to bring Cornwallis’s main force back up here, but London’s all for Cornwallis’s damned Virginia adventure and won’t hear of it.” He shrugged. “Cornwallis has engagements with Nathaniel Greene and wins them, but each time he does so, he loses men, and Greene regroups and comes at him again. Our commanders still expect a great Loyalist rising, but it never happens, and Patriot partisans make raids against every outpost. Cornwallis is digging himself into a hole. Clinton’s told him to set up a naval base and send troops up here, but although Cornwallis says he’s creating the base at Yorktown, he hasn’t sent Clinton a single man.”
In high summer, the news that Washington longed for and Clinton dreaded came. A new fleet, under Admiral de Grasse, was coming from France. Soon, it appeared on the horizon. By July, Rochambeau, with his five thousand veteran French troops, had moved out of Rhode Island and come to meet Washington just above the city at White Plains. Washington was deploying his forces closer and closer now. British scouts reported: “We’ve seen the Americans. They could be here in hours.” Inside the city, the streets were full of drilling troops. The northern palisade was being strengthened. Young Weston was excited.
“Will there be a battle?” he asked.
“I don’t suppose so,” Abigail lied.
“Will my father come to protect us?”
“General Clinton has all the soldiers we need.”
“I still wish Father would come,” said Weston.
But strangely, nothing happened. The long days of August passed. The city was tense, but still the French and American allies made no move. They seemed to be waiting for something.
And then, late in the month, they suddenly went away. The French troops, the main body of Washington’s forces, the big French fleet, they all went off together. Evidently, there had been a change of plan.
“Perhaps they have decided New York is too difficult to take,” Abigail suggested. But her father shook his head.
“There’s only one explanation,” he said. “They think they can trap Cornwallis.”
But the fate of the British Empire did not rest upon the army. It never had. It never would. It was the British Navy that controlled the oceans, supplied the soldiers, and saved them when in need.
At the end of August, a dozen ships arrived in New York harbor. Admiral Rodney, a first-rate leader, had command. “But he’s only brought twelve ships,” Master complained. “We need the whole fleet.”
Learning of the threat to Cornwallis, and adding twelve New York warships to his own, Rodney set off at once for the Chesapeake. But it was not long before the sails appeared again in the bay, and his ships limped back into the harbor.
“There weren’t enough of them, Abigail. De Grasse beat them off,” her father said. “Rodney’s ready to try again, but he’ll have to refit.”
Meanwhile, a squadron of French vessels from the French base at Newport had appeared, waiting to pounce, out in the bay.
The refitting of the British ships was slow. They’d suffered considerable damage.
“Clinton’s heard from Cornwallis,” Master reported. “It seems he’s trapped all right, and he can’t get out.”
But still the shipwrights took their time, and it wasn’t until mid-October that the fleet set out again.
James Master stared toward Yorktown. It was just a small place, with modest docks, on the edge of the York River. Across the river lay a much smaller British encampment on Gloucester Point. The French and Patriot forces had Cornwallis enclosed in a large semicircle. If he had been stronger, he would have held four outlying redoubts that dominated his lines. But he had reckoned he couldn’t hold them, and so these were already occupied by the allies.
And allies they certainly were. When the French general, Rochambeau, had first met with Washington, he had immediately,