The Fort by Bernard Cornwell

studded by guns, because he knew that the southwest wind would bring more than the smell of salt and shellfish. It would bring rebels, a swarm of them, and the air would stink of powder-smoke, of turds and of blood.
    “Phoebe Perkins’s child contracted a fever last night,” Calef said brutally.
    “I trust she will live?” McLean said.
    “God’s will be done,” Calef said in a tone which suggested God might not care very much. “They’ve named her Temperance.”
    “Temperance! Oh dear, poor girl, poor girl. I shall pray for her,” McLean said, and pray for ourselves too, he thought, but did not say.
    Because the rebels were coming.
    *    *    *
    Peleg Wadsworth felt awkward as he led Lieutenant-Colonel Revere into the shadowed vastness of one of the armory’s stores where sparrows bickered in the high beams above boxes of muskets and bales of cloth and stacks of iron-hooped barrels. It was true that Wadsworth outranked Revere, but he was almost fifteen years younger than the colonel and he felt a vague inadequacy in the presence of a man of such obvious competence. Revere had a reputation as an engraver, as a silversmith, and as a metal-worker, and it showed in his hands, which were strong and fire-scarred, the hands of a man who could make and mend, the hands of a practical man. Peleg Wadsworth had been a teacher, and a good one, but he had known the scorn of his pupils’ parents who reckoned their children’s futures lay not with grammar or in fractions, but in the command of tools and the working of metal, wood, or stone. Wadsworth could construe Latin and Greek, he was intimate with the works of Shakespeare and Montaigne, but faced with a broken chair he felt helpless. Revere, he knew, was the opposite. Give Revere a broken chair and he would mend it competently so that, like the man himself, it was strong, sturdy, and dependable.
    Or was he dependable? That was the question that had brought Wadsworth to this armory, and he wished that the errand had never been given him. He felt tongue-tied when Revere stopped and turned to him at the storeroom’s center, but then a scuffling sound from behind a pile of broken muskets gave Wadsworth a welcome distraction. “We’re not alone?” he asked.
    “Those are rats, General,” Revere said with amusement, “rats. They do like the grease on cartridges, they do.”
    “I thought cartridges were stored in the Public Magazine?”
    “They keep enough here for proofing, General, and the rats do like them. We call them redcoats on account they’re the enemy.”
    “Cats will surely defeat them?”
    “We have cats, General, but it’s a hard-fought contest. Good American cats and patriot terriers against dirty British rats,” Revere said. “I assume you want reassurance on the artillery train, General?”
    “I’m sure all is in order.”
    “Oh, it is, you can rely on that. As of now, General, we have two eighteen-pounders, three nine-pounders, one howitzer, and four little ones.”
    “Small howitzers?”
    “Four-pounder cannons, General, and I wouldn’t use them to shoot rats. You need something heavier-built like the French four-pounders. And if you have influence, General, which I’m sure you do, ask the Board of War to release more eighteen-pounders.”
    Wadsworth nodded. “I’ll make a note of that,” he promised.
    “You have your guns, General, I assure you,” Revere said, “with all their sidearms, powder, and shot. I’ve hardly seen Castle Island these last few days on account of readying the train.”
    “Yes, indeed, Castle Island,” Wadsworth said. He towered a head over Revere, which gave him an excuse not to meet the colonel’s eyes, though he was aware that Revere was staring at him intently as if daring Wadsworth to give him bad news. “You command at Castle Island?” Wadsworth asked, not because he needed confirmation, but out of desperation to say anything.
    “You didn’t need to come here to find that out,” Revere said