Marcus sprang to his feet, along with the front line of men packed along the fence.
A British boy—someone Marcus’s age, who looked so like him they might have been cousins—looked directly at him, mouth round with astonishment. Marcus aimed.
“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” Stark shouted.
The British lad’s eyes widened.
Marcus pulled the trigger.
A dark hole appeared in the soldier’s eye socket. Blood trickled out, increasing to a flood.
Marcus froze, unable to move.
“Get down!” Cole pulled him to the ground.
Marcus dropped his gun as he fell, his stomach heaving. He was dazed, his ears ringing and his eyes burning.
The British fixed their bayonets with a loud snick. The soldiers roared as they ran toward the wall, a hail of bullets accompanying them, hurtling toward the colonials from behind the British line.
Stark waved the red-and-green flag. Cole stood along with the second line of men.
Lying faceup on the ground, Marcus followed a single bullet as it passed overhead. He watched, dumbstruck, as it hit Cole in the chest just as the man was aiming his long rifle. Cole grunted and fell—but not before discharging his weapon.
The British line shouted in surprise. They had not been expecting a second round of fire so soon. Shouts turned to screams as colonial bullets found their marks.
Marcus crawled over to Cole.
“Is he dead?” Jimmy asked, eyes wide. “Oh, God, is he dead?”
Cole’s eyes stared at the heavens, unseeing. Marcus knelt, hoping to feel the breath coming from Cole’s lungs.
Nothing.
He closed Cole’s eyes.
Stark tossed his flag in the air, deliberately drawing British fire.
Jimmy and the remaining colonials stood, took aim, and shot.
The screams and shouting continued on the other side of the wall.
“Fall back! Fall back!” The British officer’s command carried on the wind.
“I’ll be damned.” Stark propped himself up against the stone wall while the farmers, woodsmen, and hunters of New England—now soldiers in this new “Continental Army”—turned to one another in disbelief.
“Well, lads,” Stark continued, mopping his brow with his sleeve, “that was a good afternoon’s work. Seems you turned aside the great British army.”
Cheers rose from the ranks, but Marcus couldn’t bring himself to join in. Cole’s gun lay in a pool of his blood. Marcus took it and wiped the grip on his sleeve. It was even finer than the one Pomeroy had loaned him. And he might need another gun before the day was through.
God knew the New Hampshire man didn’t. Not anymore.
* * *
—
THE REST OF THE BATTLE passed in a blur of blood, buckshot, and chaos. There was no water, no food, and little respite from the fighting.
Stark and his men turned the British aside again.
When the British attacked a third time, the exhausted colonists had no ammunition to fight back.
The heartiest and the oldest men volunteered to stand at the wall while the rest retreated.
They were almost across the neck and safely back in Cambridge when Jimmy Hutchinson suddenly fell, a piece of shot embedded in his neck. Blood spatters mixed with the freckles on the boy’s face.
“Am I gonna die like Mr. Cole?” Jimmy’s voice was faint.
Marcus ripped the bloodstained sleeve from his own shirt and tried to stanch the flow.
“Not today.” If it gave Jimmy a shred of hope to cling to—though Marcus knew the boy would curse fate before his ordeal was over—how could it hurt?
Marcus took a coat from a dead British soldier. He and Aaron Lyon made a makeshift stretcher out of it. Together, they carried Jimmy toward the camp hospital that had been set up in Harvard Yard.
The area smelled like a charnel house, the scent of blood and singed flesh filling the air. It sounded even worse. Groans and pleas for water were punctuated by screams of soldiers in agony.
“Bless me, is that Jimmy Hutchinson?” A stout woman, fiery headed with a pipe clenched between her teeth, appeared out of the smoky twilight, barring their way.
“Mistress Bishop?” Jimmy said weakly, blinking up at her. “Is that you, ma’am?”
“Who else?” Mistress Bishop replied tartly. “What fool let you come up here and get yourself shot? You’re not even fifteen.”
“Ma doesn’t know,” Jimmy explained, his eyes rolling shut.
“I should think not. You should have stayed in Salem, where you belong.” Mistress Bishop gestured to Marcus. “Don’t just stand there. Bring him here.”
Here was not the direction that most of the wounded were being carried. Here was a small fire, with a group of makeshift beds arranged around it. Here all was quiet, as opposed to there, where shouts and cries and utter bedlam proclaimed the location of the surgeons.
Marcus eyed the woman with suspicion.
“You can take him to Dr. Warren if you want to, but Jimmy’s chances of surviving are better with me.” Mistress Bishop shifted her pipe from the left side of her mouth to the right.
“We left Dr. Warren on Breed’s Hill,” Marcus said, pleased to show up the woman as a liar.
“Not that Dr. Warren, you dolt. The other one.” Mistress Bishop was equally delighted to let Marcus know he was a conceited fool. “I reckon I’m more familiar with the medical men of Boston than you are.”
“I want to stay with Mistress Bishop,” Jimmy mumbled. “She’s a healer.”
“That’s a polite term for it, Jimmy,” Mistress Bishop said. “Now, are you two louts going to carry my patient to the fire, or do I have to do it?”
“He’s got a piece of shot in his neck,” Marcus hurriedly explained as they lugged Jimmy the last few yards. “I think it cut through the veins. It could be lodged in the artery, though. Some of the flesh around it is black, but that could be a burn. I tied my sleeve around his neck as tight as I dared.”
“So I see.” Mistress Bishop picked up a pair of nips, a rushlight pinched between them. She peered into the wound. “What’s your name?”
“Marcus MacNeil. Here.” Marcus fished around in his pocket and pulled out a bit of candlewood he’d brought from home. The resinous pine splinter would cast a brighter glow than the flickering rushlight. He thrust the end of it in the flame. The wood caught immediately.
“I thank you.” Mistress Bishop swapped her nips for the candlewood. “You know your way around a body. Are you one of those Harvard boys?” Her look of derision was reason enough to deny it. Mistress Bishop clearly had no use for the college educated.
“No ma’am. Hadley,” Marcus replied, his eyes pinned to Jimmy’s pallid face and blue-tinged lips. “I don’t think he’s getting enough air.”
“None of us are. Not with all this smoke.” Mistress Bishop contributed to it by drawing on her pipe. She sighed, a fug of tobacco surrounding her, and looked down at Jimmy. “He’ll sleep a bit now.”
Marcus knew better than to ask whether Jimmy would wake up.
“It took me eighteen hours to bring that boy into the world, and no time at all for some idiot with a gun to steal him away.” Mistress Bishop pulled a small bottle out of her pocket. “War is such a waste of women’s time.”
Mistress Bishop used her teeth to pull the cork from the bottle and spat it into the fire. It popped and sizzled for a moment before igniting in the flames. She took a substantial swig and offered it to Marcus.
“Thank you, no.” Marcus still felt as though his stomach could rise up at any moment. Memories of the battle struggled to the surface of his mind.
He had killed a man. Somewhere in England, a mother was waking up without a son—and it was his fault.
“Think about that weeping mother before you pull the trigger next time,” Mistress Bishop said, returning the flask to her own lips.
Somehow, the woman had divined the contents of Marcus’s guilty conscience. Alarmed and overwhelmed, Marcus clapped a hand over his mouth as his guts heaved. Mistress Bishop looked at him sharply, her hazel eyes snapping.
“Don’t you dare go all missish on me. I haven’t got time for your nonsense. One of the Proctor boys broke his leg running away from the guns. Fell in a hole. First sensible story of battle I’ve heard today.” Mistress Bishop took another swig from her bottle, then lumbered to her feet. She beckoned for Marcus to follow.