Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [518]
For ’tis clear to me that the most foolish thing we ever did was to beat the French so handsomely. The gentlemen of the colony, having no great threat made against them any more will soon be grown indifferent to England for whose army, and the expense thereof, they will think themselves no longer in need. There’s the rub. Excuses will be found, but they’ll not pay taxes across the ocean.
And then – the government will try to compell them. ’Tis there that you will next fight.
But today it was a far more important letter he was awaiting.
She had been his mistress for nearly a year. It was a situation that suited them both. But, as she had said to him quite frankly, it was time that she married again. And since, she pointed out, there appeared to be no prospect of her doing so on Dominica, it was time for her to move on.
“I shall go to a French island,” she told him, looking into his eyes a little sadly.
The message could not be clearer. If he wished to marry her, he must say so. But on a lieutenant’s pay and her tiny income, it was impossible.
On a captain’s pay, it might be done. Furthermore, a captaincy was becoming available shortly. The price was seven hundred pounds. He had two hundred saved.
That was why he had written with urgency to his father to enquire what sums might be due to him from his mother’s family.
The mail the packet was bringing would be in his hands by morning.
My dear Son,
You naturally ask whether there is some money due to you from your mother.
It was a matter I had long meant to acquaint you with yet which, I must confess, had escaped my memory these last few years – namely, that when you determined upon gaining a commission before you went to India, it was necessary to purchase the same at a cost of £400.
What neither I nor your mother told you at that time was that such a sum was not readily available; and accordingly it was agreed that it should be borrowed from Sir George Forest, which loan, thanks to the high opinion he had of you, was made at no interest, but upon condition that, upon the decease of either one of us, the loan should be repaid forthwith.
Your mother had from her family a portion of £500. I have accordingly repaid Sir George Forest’s loan of £400, and the remaining £100, my dear boy, is at your service. Pray let me know how and where you wish to receive it.
Yr affectionate father J.S.
They had not told him.
Madame Leroux left two weeks later.
It was three months after that, that several of the troops began to go down with malaria.
1777: OCTOBER 6
It was the eve of battle. Below them on the left flowed the Hudson River; on their right was the battered little group of buildings called Freeman’s Farm. On the opposite high ground, three hundred yards away, lay Gates and the American rebels. Eight miles behind them, Saratoga. The place before them was called Stillwater.
It was the eve of battle, and Captain Adam Shockley felt uneasy.
The essence of the plan, a good and sound plan which, faced with the dithering incompetence of Lord North and his ministers, had been drawn up by George III himself, was that General Howe and his large force should come from the south while General Burgoyne came down from Canada. The two should then meet and trap the American rebels against the east coast. Howe had delayed in Philadelphia.
“Some say he cares more for the rebel cause than our own,” complained one of his fellow officers to Shockley.
Whatever Howe’s reason, the plan was already half ruined and the forces at Stillwater were now waiting, with increasing desperation, for General Clinton to come up through Albany with urgently needed supplies.
But for ill-luck, Captain Adam Shockley would not have been there at all.
By 1769, when the regiment – or rather the handful of officers and seventy-five troops remaining after their sickness in the tropics – had returned to build up its strength again in Ireland, Adam Shockley was suffering from malaria. The voyage home