“Agenda? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t play the innocent. It’s common knowledge the war’s created divisions along our northern borders. Divisions the British are only too eager to exploit. Who’s to say our Captain Hooper – if Hooper is even his real name – wasn’t sent here to liaise with Federalist cadres in order to plot further dissent, perhaps to try and persuade the New England states to abandon the Republic and align themselves with the Canadas?”

Lawrence gaped. “Good God! You are out of your bloody mind!”

Ignoring Lawrence’s outburst, Quade swung back to Hawkwood. “You may think you played me for a fool, sir, but I will see you subjected to military justice and hanged, by Christ! You’ll not find it so funny when they slip the noose around your neck!”

“You’re probably right about that,” Hawkwood said. “Though I should warn you that’s the second time in a day I’ve been threatened with the gallows, and the last person who made the threat didn’t fare too well. I’m not here to spy. I never was. All I’m trying to do is get home.”

“Slaughtering anyone who stands in your way.”

“No one slaughtered anyone, Major,” Hawkwood said wearily. “It was self-defence.”

Even as he uttered the words, Hawkwood knew how pathetic they sounded. Had he been in either Quade’s or Winan’s shoes, he’d have been looking down at himself with the same withering expression on his face.

He wondered how, of all the boats he could have taken, Quade had ended up on this one.

His medical furlough at an end, the major would have reported to Greenbush for his orders. He’d been due to proceed to Plattsburg to join Dearborn’s Northern army, Hawkwood remembered, which should have put him on the Fort Edward road. But as Hawkwood and Lawrence had found out, that was impassable due to storm damage.

That would have left a stage ride either to Whitehall and the schooner’s erratic schedule or a longer overland journey to Burlington from where, thanks to military requisitioning, the steamboat followed a more regular timetable. Of the two, the Burlington route would have been the more sensible option.

Thus, presumably, while Hawkwood and Lawrence had been voyaging their way down the lake aboard the Snake, a seething Major Quade had been rattling his way north. Arriving at Burlington, he’d secured passage on the most convenient military transport to Plattsburg which, as bad luck would have it, had been the recently commandeered Vermont.

It had probably been that simple, Hawkwood reasoned; nothing more than an ill-fated twist of circumstance. A bloody coincidence, in other words, which, ironically, was how he and Major Quade had crossed paths in the first place.

Bugger it.