“Well, it was a lot of rum we drank.” Fergus glanced wistfully at the Half-Moon, but he also had priorities and turned back to Roger.

“Anyway, they had stopped to catch fish; there were schools of … tunny fish, I believe he said. The owner of the sloop drank rum with him, too, and told him that the French were sending a fleet in support of the Americans; he had seen the fleet and heard about them in a bar on Barbados—” He waved his hook, seeing Roger’s expression. “Don’t ask me how word came to be there; you know how gossip works.

“And,” he went on, “that their plan was to go to New York but that they were aware of the British’s machinations, to sever Philadelphia and Boston and New York from their food, so to speak.” He gestured with his hook from the nearby warehouses to a stretch of ripening fields across the river.

“So if it should happen that the British were already coming south, D’Estaing—he’s the French admiral,” he explained, “D’Estaing will sail at once to the south. And if what he told me is correct, the French ships will come here.”

Roger swallowed and wished he’d listened to his baser urges and had that drink first. “Actually,” he said, “they’re going to Savannah. The Americans are going to attack Savannah. Quite soon.”

Both of Fergus’s dark brows quirked up at that. Roger coughed.

“So that’s where the French are going,” Roger said. “To support General Lincoln’s troops at—”

“But General Lincoln is here!”

Roger waved a hand, still coughing.

“For the moment,” he agreed. “And he’ll leave a garrison here, of course. But he’s taking a lot of men to Savannah. They won’t succeed, though,” he finished, feeling apologetic. “But then they’ll come back here. And then General Cornwallis—I think it’s Cornwallis—will be coming down from New York. Clinton and Cornwallis will besiege the city and take it. And … erm … I’m thinking that perhaps you and Marsali might think of not being here when that happens?”

Fergus’s eyes were as close to round as they could possibly get.

“I mean,” Roger said. “It’s not like you can easily hide.”

That made Fergus smile, just a little.

“I have not forgotten how to become invisible,” he assured Roger. “But it’s much more difficult to make a wife and five children disappear. And I cannot leave Marsali to run the newspaper alone, not with two infants to feed and the town alive with soldiers.” He wiped a sleeve across his sweat-shiny face, blew out his cheeks, and sat down on a stack of white-dusted crates crudely labeled Guano with a slapdash brush.

“So.” He gave Roger a sidelong glance. “You are telling me that the British will possess both Savannah and Charles Town?”