“Run in and load,” Michael commanded, and the ten-foot length of his French twenty-six-pounder rumbled back on its iron garrison wheels.

  A mile and a half offshore the first British vessel, a squat, ungainly brig with its masts set too far to the rear, dropped two anchors and swung bow on to the fort. Suddenly the ship’s bow sank deeper, and a hollow, thumping crash drifted toward the shore. Some crews in the fort looked up, but Michael’s men kept working. The iron shot was rammed down to seat against the cartridge.

  “Run out!” Michael yelled, and his men took up the carriage ropes, and pulled.

  Something dropped with a thump in the soft sand in the center of the fort. A moment later an explosion rained sand over everyone.

  A fresh wind out of the southwest brought HMS Bristol and HMS Experiment in line, with frigates ahead and astern. Another line of small frigates brought up the rear. The right bastion began firing as soon as the British came in front of their slewed-around guns, but the line came calmly on.

  Michael thrust the priming iron down through the vent to pierce the cartridge, then filled the vent with fine powder from a horn. He picked up a slow match and breathed on the glowing end.

  The first ship-of-the-line let go its anchor not more than four hundred yards off the beach. Almost immediately a broadside lashed out at the log fort. The front wall seemed to quiver under the impact. One ball struck hard by Michael’s embrasure, and he flinched in spite of himself. Then he realized there’d been no whine of flying splinters. He leaned out to take a closer look. The shot had hit squarely, but the soft palmetto wood had been crushed by it. There was no fracture, no splintering. As the second ship, Bristol, dropped anchor and let go her broadside, Michael laughed. The whole fort leaped and shook. The walls still stood. The damned thing might stand up yet.

  “Commence slow fire!” came the order.

  Michael crouched behind the gun, motioning the men to pull on the training tackle. He laid it squarely on the Bristol’s quarterdeck. The slow match went to the vent, and the cannon hurtled rearward with a roar. On the British ship a section of rail rose and toppled into the sea. It could have been their ball, or any one of the others erupting from the fort at the same time.

  The gun crew ran to reload, but the heat of their first battle was on them. He had to stop one from ramming a cartridge down the barrel, perhaps onto a spark and blowing his hands off. The man grinned nervously as the wet sheepskin sponged out the bore, but from then on the nerves were gone. The close call seemed to calm them. They worked as smoothly as any Royal Navy crew.

  The fleet’s guns fired in crushing broadsides, the sultry wind carrying the smoke of their firing down on the shore, so that even the crash of their guns seemed to smash at the fort. Inside, the men had grown used to the deafening thunder, but there was no getting used to the thick, acrid smoke. It blackened faces, burned eyes, and seared throats, turning the blazing morn into a foggy twilight. Only the blue flag on the left bastion—the Second Regiment’s crest, a silver crescent, in the upper corner, and the word LIBERTY across the bottom—stuck up above the maelstrom.

  How long had it been? An hour? Two? Michael blinked smoke-reddened eyes and checked his sighting again, then stepped back and touched it off. Before the gun had finished snapping back against the retaining cable he was peering through the haze, searching. Ships moving! Three frigates from the second British line were swinging wide into the harbor. Too few to be headed for the city—Holy Mother of God, pray for them all. They were sailing around the island to enfilade the fort.

  Gabrielle huddled at the attic window and kept the brass spyglass pressed hard to her eye. There was so little to see, and no details at all. The dull ache in the small of her back made her shift, but she refused to take her eye away.

  Out in the harbor ships kept up a fire at the fort, and the fort was firing back. She could barely see through the haze of battle. The fort was shrouded with it. Something that seemed to wave through gaps in the smoke must be the flag. The fort still held. Michael still lived. He must. But what were those three ships moving out of the smoke?

  A sudden, sharp pain made her fumble the spyglass. Astonished, she looked down at her swollen stomach. That wasn’t the babe kicking her. It wasn’t time, yet, not by more than two weeks, but the baby was coming.

  Calmly she collapsed the spyglass and walked to the stair. Another pain sent her reeling to the bannister. The spyglass bounced its way down step by step. “Martha! The baby! It’s time!”

  Martha and a swarm of housemaids appeared before her shout was finished. The pain was ebbing. She could stand, if they would let her. Another pang brought a moan to her lips before they reached her chamber.

  As the women began undressing her, fear hit her. Oh, God, so much could go wrong. How many stories had she heard of women dying, of babies dying? She gritted her teeth. Nothing was going to happen, either to her or the babe. Michael would come home and find her with his child in her arms. “Martha, fetch the midwife. Right away.”

  The maid’s cheeks wobbled as she shook her head. “Way them pains is coming, Miss Gabrielle, ain’t no time. That young man’s on his way now.”

  Gabrielle smiled as they slipped a clean white shift over her head, and helped her lie back on the bed. “So you think it’s a boy, too?”

  “Oh, yes ma’am. Cleo, Lilah, you runs to get that hot water right this minute. Yes, Miss Gabrielle. Ain’t he acting just like a man? No sense of time, coming early.”

  Gabrielle tried to laugh, but halfway through it turned to a groan. “Oh, that hurt, Martha. Oh, Lord, that hurt.”

  Martha hurriedly tied a length of cord to one of the head-posts, and put knots in it. She guided Gabrielle’s hands to it, and they gripped as if at a lifeline. “You gots to trust me now, Miss Gabrielle. I know what I’s doing. I birthed babies in the quarters lots of times.” She put the knife she’d kept ready under the bed to cut the pain.

  “I trust you,” Gabrielle panted. “I trust you.”

  “Then when you feels the pain coming, you pull on that cord just as hard as you can. Everything going to be all right.” She patted the sweat on her mistress’s face with a cloth. “Cleo! Where is you with that water?”

  Sweat covered her from head to toe. The black women gently wiped it away, but it always came back. She wanted to pant, to breathe in short, sharp bursts, and Martha told her not to fight it. Rest easy, she said. Let it come. Rest easy? Oh, God, how?

  Every muscle flexed, knotted, loosened, and began again. Her feet dug at the bed, cramping. Her jaws clamped shut till her cheeks hurt, and she could taste blood from a bitten lip. It came in waves that periodically washed through her, carrying her before them. She pulled at knots till she was sure the cord or the bedpost must one break. The greatest wave receded, and she dimly heard a cry that wasn’t her own. “The baby,” she gasped. “Let me see the baby.”

  “He a fine, healthy boy, Miss Gabrielle,” Martha said. She motioned for the others to hurry. “Here he is. Just let me get this blanket round him.”

  And Martha laid the babe in her arms. She smiled down at him through her weariness. Such a red, hairless little thing to be so beautiful. She brushed the blanket aside, and he grabbed weakly at her finger. As if to see what he had hold of, his hazel eyes opened wide. Unless she missed her guess that little nose would turn out to be his father’s.

  He bleated a small cry, and she began to rock him soothingly. “Sssh, little one. You and I must both be pretty for your papa. Don’t cry, my sweet.” He fell silent, staring at her in fascination. She had to laugh. He looked so serious. “James Christopher Fallon. James, after Michael’s father, and Christopher after his good friend. Micheal will like that, won’t he, Martha?”

  “I expects he will.” A broad grin split her face. “I expects he’ll approve of most anything. Right now, though, you got to get you some rest, and I got to get a wetnurse. Young Master James coming early done bollixed up my plans. The woman I had planned, she ain’t—”

  “I’ll nurse him myself,” Gabrielle said quietly.

  Martha bridled. “You ain’t going to ruin your fine bosom nursing no baby. You ain’t no up-country woman. You a lady.”

  “Martha, I will nurse the baby.”

  Martha began to swell like a frog. Gabrielle sighed. It would be a long battle.

  At three o’clock Michael paused to wipe his face. That he was still alive he credited to Providence. As the frigates moved serenely through fountaining geysers, every man in the fort had known he was within minutes of death.

  Then, as if Providence had put a hand to its wheel, the lead ship shuddered to a halt, spars and tophamper falling, wedged on the Middle Ground. The other two put their helms over hard. Too hard. Inexorably, they ran together, and drifted, tangled, to join the other on the shoal.

  He’d little time to think about that now. Three men were gone from the gun crew. One was expected to live. He bent again to the gun. As he dropped the iron bar and checked the lay of the piece, his eye caught again the twenty-six-pounder that had been next to his, lying upside down on the sand inside the fort. An arm stuck out from beneath it, a hapless corporal who’d been running past at the wrong instant. No one had time to shift two and a half tons of metal just to retrieve a body. There wasn’t even time, or means, to put the gun back in action.

  It was only one of those dismounted. The cavaliers to either side of the fort had had to be abandoned. The dead lay in a line along the low rear wall, faces covered by their coats. A steady stream of wounded limped, or was carried, to the camp behind the fort, where a handful of surgeons under Dr. Peter Fayssoux labored and sweated like field hands.

  But the fleet had suffered, too. Two of the three frigates on the Middle Ground had been kedged off to limp away, but the third was stuck fast, hammered by the guns of the right curtain.

  To the front, the bombship had withdrawn, though never a shot had gone near it. Shots had reached Experiment and Bristol, though. Half their spars were down, and their rigging hung in tatters. Gaping holes had appeared in their bulwarks, and Bristol, Admiral Sir Peter Parker’s flagship, had taken on a list. A flow of boats moved between the transports and the warships on line, carrying fresh men one way, dead and wounded the other.

  Michael touched the slow match to the vent, and the gun crashed back to the limit of the retaining cable. As if in answer all four ships of the first line let loose broadsides. The fort jumped and shook. A powder monkey running toward Michael suddenly took two steps without a head and toppled from the gun platform. Between two guns men writhed in agony and spreading pools of their own blood, cut down by splinters of a ball that’d struck one of the guns square on the muzzle. And with a crack that could be heard above the screams and the shouting, the flagstaff parted in the middle, and the blue flag fell to the beach outside the fort.

  Instantly a uniformed man tore over the wall, dropping to the sand and running to the flag. Some guns boomed raggedly from the fleet, and grapeshot kicked up spurts of sand all around him. Grabbing up the flag, he raced back to the fort. In seconds he appeared again, on top of the bastion, the flag tied to a rammer. Defiantly he waved it over his head, yelling at the ships. Then he stuck the rammer upright in the sand of the wall, shook his fist one last time at the British, and dropped inside the fort.

  Michael realized he’d been holding his breath. “And who in God’s name was that?”

  “Jasper,” one of his gun crew answered. “William Jasper. Grenadier sergeant. That man’d pull the devil by the tail for sport and bet on the outcome.”

  “Ware the commodore!” someone shouted. “The flagship! The flagship!”

  Slowly, majestically, HMS Bristol was swinging away. One of her anchor cables had been cut by cannon fire, and now the tide swung her around the other, turning her guns away from the fort, turning her stern to it.

  Immediately Michael thrust the priming iron through the vent, primed the gun, touched it off. Every other gun in the fort did the same, every gun that could still fire. The stern timbers weren’t as thick and heavy as the sides. Every ball that hit ripped through, and every ball that ripped through smashed the length of the gundeck, shattering into iron splinters against cannon, turning the deck into a hell where the few men left erect walked ankle deep in blood.

  “Slow your firing. One gun every ten minutes by the glass.” Moultrie himself strode down the gun platform, fury in his face. “Reduce the rate of firing. One gun every ten minutes.”

  Michael reached out and grabbed him by the arm as he passed.

  “Colonel, another ten minutes and we’ll have the flagship on the bottom! Another hour, and we’ll sink the other, too. We must increase, not hold, our fire. They’re already putting out boats to kedge the Bristol back into line.”

  “I can’t. Don’t argue, Fallon. Just hold your fire until it’s your turn.” Moultrie started to leave, then stopped. Visibly, he calmed himself. “We’re running out of powder, Fallon. We’re running out. Lee won’t send more. We must make do with what we have, then it’s spike the guns and retreat.” He squared his shoulders and moved down the platform. “Slow your fire. One gun every ten minutes.”

  Michael turned back to his gun. Bristol was less than halfway to the British line again. He could put four more rounds into the stern, perhaps five. Bitterly he slumped beside the gun. Its still-hot metal made cracking sounds.

  Once the powder was gone, they were done. With the fleet’s guns to support them, British Marines would land against the fort. It’d be a fine fight, and a short one.

  In the overpowering quiet he could hear sporadic musket fire from the Breach Inlet end of the island, and now and again the heavy boom of one of their cannon. Retreat would leave Thomson and his men trapped. And staying meant sooner or later one position would give out, and they’d all be overrun. No powder? Charles Lee was an ass. A murdering ass.

  In the long spaces between firing, men stared toward Breach Inlet. They could see nothing but scrub myrtle, and there’d been no change in the sound of Thomson’s guns, but rumors spread of a landing. Thomson was being pushed back. He was making a stand at the quarterguard. No, the British had landed between Thomson and the quarterguard. He was being pushed into the sea. The British were marching on the fort. Watch close and keep the bayonets handy. They’re coming.

  The slow stream of powder from the magazine sank to a trickle. At four o’clock Moultrie lengthened the time between firing again. Some began to look to the floating bridge, but none took to it. Every musket had its bayonet, and every man—laborer, doctor, powder monkey—carried one. Michael was sure the rumors were false. Hell, if one redcoat had set foot on the island, Thomson’d have a messenger to them as fast as the man could ride. Still—He sent a man to the tents for his pistols, and stuck a bayonet down his boot. It’d do for a dirk if the worst came.

  He was crouched beside the embrasure, wishing they could fire massed cannon just one time in answer to the pounding they were taking. Suddenly he gave a start. Moultrie was ascending to the platform, with a tall man in the uniform of a major-general. Charles Lee had come to see for himself. Michael noted with a start that the general’s bearlike Pomeranian, Pip, followed behind. Well, they said he took the dog everywhere.

  The general bent behind one of the guns, directing the crew in shifting it. It wasn’t the next due to fire, or even time for the next shot, but he curtly directed the slow match to be applied. Moultrie nodded, and the cannon roared. Lee started on down the platform without waiting to see the fall of his shot. Moultrie followed, speaking as quietly as the onslaught from the British ships would allow.

  Two guns farther on, Lee did the same thing, and Moultrie once more motioned for the cannon to be fired. And the general, again indifferent to his shot, resumed his casual stroll, Colonel Moultrie following, talking hard.

  Was it just that the man liked to hear the guns fire? Michael wondered. They were going to stop at his next, it seemed. He got to his feet.

  Up close it could be seen that Lee’s coat had wine stains and snuff down the front. He bent with a grunt, spraddle-legged, motioning for one man or another to haul on the tackle. He sniffed and rose, pointing a bony finger at Michael. “You, there. Touch it off, and be quick about it. Step lively, damn you.” His voice was high and pinched.

  Michael’s scalp tightened; behind the general, Moultrie signaled him to fire the gun and keep silent. He brought the slow match down.

  A splash rose at least six feet behind Bristol, and others came as the ball skipped uselessly over the water to sink somewhere beyond the second line. Michael resisted an urge to spit, but some of his gun crew weren’t so constrained.

  “Damn crews don’t lay their guns very well,” Lee said. He flipped open a snuffbox, sniffed a small pile off his little fingernail, and put the box away without offering any. A large and dirty handkerchief muffled his sneeze. “Well, Moultrie, it seems you’re doing quite well without me. I’d better be off, back to the mainland.”

  Moultrie strode worriedly in the general’s wake. “General Lee, the powder!”

  Michael could only shake his head. “Well, what are you standing around for? Load! Whatever happens, we’ll get a few more off. Maybe we’ll put one up Sir Peter’s spout.”

  Less than an hour later a boat grated ashore on the mainland side of the island. Men began carting kegs up to the magazine. Powder kegs. Michael watched silently. More than one man cheered like a bedlamite, but the kegs were small, and there weren’t that many of them.

  Making his way down the platform came a man Michael knew from Rutledge’s staff. “Hello, Mitchell,” Michael said.

  Mitchell stared at him coldly; then recognition dawned. “Fallon? Michael Fallon? Is that you? God, man, your face is black as a field hand’s.”

  “Powder smoke does that,” Michael said dryly. “Look you, how much powder did Lee decide to send us?”

  “I brought five hundred pounds.” He jumped as massed broadsides struck the fort, setting it quivering. To cover he clapped his spyglass to his eye and peered out at the fleet. “They’re damaged worse than I expected, I’ll tell you that. Worse than anyone in the city thinks. What’s that pouring out of the scupper on that big one? Good God! That’s blood! I can see the color. It’s blood, I tell you. Why aren’t you firing more? That one must be ready to sink.”