THEY NOW HAD three functioning scraping tools. Small enough to be hidden in a palm, strong enough to carve cement, they had been constructed from floorboard wood, threads of hammock rope and discarded, sharpened keys. During the game, they had been passed from hand to hand; now, they were all in Horace Cobb’s jacket pocket, his left fist enclosing them. He eyed the militia on the military walk.
‘Shock of their lives,’ he growled to Lane, who followed his eyes and guessed the rest. His hands, too, were thrust deep in pockets, one closed around the cartridges, the other around the pistol.
‘It’ll be quite a sight,’ he said. ‘Yankee men against English boys. And boys that most probably never seen a battle. Barely even fired a rifle.’
‘The most dangerous kind of soldier,’ said Cobb. ‘They won’t have a clue.’
The courtyard was teeming with men. A gentle westerly had allowed the temperature to rise and, when the sun eased through the clouds, a few corners of the yard enjoyed what, in Dartmoor, passed as warmth. From one of these, by the back of Seven, the Rough Allies observed both the British and their own handiwork.
‘I’m tryin’ not to stare at the hole we’re makin’,’ Lane muttered, looking skywards. Cobb inspected the unlit cigarillo between his fingers – his last – and laughed. ‘The whole place’s crumbling. They’re not stonemasons. Why’d they want to inspect a wall?’
‘But can’t they see?’ whispered Lane, incredulous, his eyes dragged again to the smudge on the brickwork that marked their weakening of the radius wall. Beneath it, the ground was scuffed and, despite the clear-up, peppered with crumbled cement. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘We got to get the game up soon, cover our work.’
‘If it was a hole, even the English would spot it,’ said Cobb. ‘But for now it’s just a scallop, a mere scraping. By the time it’s a hole and the bricks are pushed through, it’ll be too late.’
‘And we can do that anytime,’ said Lane.
‘You’re sure it’s that close?’ said Cobb.
‘Could’ve gone through yesterday. But we held back, like you said.’
‘The play’s at three o’clock,’ said Cobb. ‘We give them twenty minutes to settle, give Shortland time to realize what a godawful mess the blackjacks are making of everything, then we go. You go through first – you got the gun. By the time the alarm bell’s ringing, we should all be armed.’
Lane glanced over the radius wall, the central tower of the barracks clearly visible, and swallowed hard. ‘We shoot our way out?’
‘We take hostages. Just like I tried with Madame Shortland. Grab the nearest redcoat we can find and walk out behind him. And with that bloodsucker Crafus busy and all made up like the fancy woman he is, this time, we might make it.’
The shout of orders, a flash of red at the market square gates and Cobb was on his feet.
‘Get some players out!’ he snapped. ‘Go now. Cover what you can – they’re coming in.’ A company of militia, fully eighty or ninety men, were entering the courtyard.
‘What’s happenin’ here, then?’ said Lane, hesitating. The gates swung open, and around twenty soldiers took up positions around the market square entrance, the rest marching straight ahead in the direction of Four.
‘Maybe they found the tunnel?’ Cobb slipped one of the shanks to Lane. ‘I’ll get the men together. You get to the wall.’
Lane called out to the inmates as he ran past and, by the time they reached their ‘scraping’, as Cobb had labelled it, he had at least forty players, with onlookers providing raucous support. Six men threw themselves against the wall, and the scrummaging began. Twenty yards from the gates, they were close – and noisy – enough for the militia to view them warily. A few swung nervous rifles their way, triggering first panic, then anger. Some of the men edged away from the game, towards the troops. Three Allies, arms outstretched, taunted the British.
‘You wanna shoot Yankees? Jus’ for goin’ ’bout their business? S’that why you’re here?’
More of the troops now swung their guns to cover the advancing Americans.
Cobb, running fast and now flanked with Allies, called the men back. ‘Just the game, m’boys! Just the game!’ The vanguard sloped back to the wall, leaving Cobb to watch the soldiers watching him. Three redcoats standing together were the last to lower their rifles. Their faces partially obscured, the only man he recognized was the sergeant; the three stripes on his arm and the striped scar on his forehead gave him away. He stood with his feet firmly planted, like a Devon farmer. ‘Ol’ Fat Bastard,’ muttered Cobb. ‘Of course. It’ll be a pleasure.’ He saluted the man until his fellow soldiers lowered their aim. ‘You got to keep your bullets for Napoleon. You don’t want to be losing two wars in a row, now do you?’
Cobb saw the men bridle, the sergeant’s two colleagues raising their guns again.
‘You need to read the treaty!’ shouted the sergeant, pushing their guns down. ‘Though maybe the words are too long for you. You lost Canada and you lost your White House. Burned pretty easy, they say.’
Cobb bit down on an instant retort, in danger of making the same error he had come to prevent. He shoved his hands in his pockets and gripped the shanks again. Reassured, he studied the three men. Ol’ Fat Bastard was making his stand with two of the youngest, skinniest soldiers he had ever seen in uniform. One gripped his rifle like a shovel, eyes squinting with fierce concentration; the other, his face reddening with excitement, hopped from one foot to the other, ready to let loose. ‘Farmhands,’ he said to himself. ‘Know-nothing farmhands.’
Lane appeared at his shoulder. ‘You got to see the wall.’
‘Is it good?’ asked Cobb, turning away from the soldiers.
‘It’s beautiful.’
They joined a rolling maul, hooking arms with a row of other Allies. Pushed through flailing legs and tumbling bodies, Cobb quickly found himself lying against the retaining wall. As the ‘game’ heaved and sprawled around him, a phalanx of players provided a temporary shield behind which Cobb could run his fingers across the masonry. Over an area of around two square feet, the cement which had bound the irregular lumps of granite together since its construction had been worked loose. Some lay in small clumps on the ground; the rest had been roughly pushed back, filling in the deepest cracks in an attempt to camouflage their work. He pushed gently with both hands and felt one of the smaller stones shift under the pressure. He pulled back, fearing imminent collapse and exposure, but the wall held its shape. Cobb crouched, replaced some more broken cement, then patted it flush with the brick. Forcing his way back through the melee, he rejoined Lane. A crowd of many hundred were throwing insults at the British, the troop hunkering down nervously behind their rifles.
‘Well?’ said Lane.
Cobb brushed cement fragments from his beard, his face flushed. ‘Just as you said. The wall will go when we need it to go.’ He stared at the soldiers massed outside the steps of Four. ‘If they’ve discovered the Negro tunnel, we can forget about everything.’ He wiped dust from his face and beard. ‘But if they’re just checking plans before Shortland gets here, well then …’ He looked back to Lane. ‘With their play, your gun and our Yankee hearts, God willing, we’ll be free men by sundown.’