The thick coating of mud indicated that it had rained recently but the surface had frozen hard in the interim and the slush trapped between the ridges and in the deeper wagon ruts and around the roots of the trees and in the lee of the buildings where the sun had failed to reach suggested that a fair amount of snow had fallen, too.

Above them the sky was bleached of colour and denser clouds were moving determinedly across from the north. Winter had sent out feelers and a warning that heavier snow could only be a day or two away. When it arrived, hell would surely follow.

Dropping his gaze, Hawkwood looked beyond the lead wagon. They were coming up to the river.

The Saranac did not flow directly into the main body of Lake Champlain but into a small bay on the lake’s northern rim. The road traced the bay’s western edge. At the point where it turned inland, away from the river mouth, the view opened up, revealing an uninterrupted panorama all the way around the bay to where a protective, low lying, forested promontory formed its eastern shore.

Hawkwood felt his elbow nudged.

“Looks like young Renner’s suspicions were correct,” Lawrence murmured.

Taking in the scene on the far side of the river mouth and along the adjacent bay shore, Hawkwood was thinking exactly the same thing.

Batteaux – a veritable fleet of them, too many to count at first glance – were drawn up along the shoreline. The smallest were perhaps thirty feet in length while others were almost twice that and much wider in the beam. A number of the larger ones had been layered with planking and lashed together to form pontoon jetties, to which the smaller ones had been secured. Stores had been piled upon them, ready to be loaded.

Some vessels had been hauled on to the beach and over-turned, exposing their flat underbellies, sharp ends and shallow draught. It was a shape that had changed little over the years. It hadn’t needed to. Constructed chiefly from pine – though sometimes oak was used for the bottoms and uprights – batteaux had been carrying men and cargo in the Canadas and the northern states for the past two centuries.

Men – soldiers, Hawkwood assumed – were at work on the up-turned hulls. The air resonated with the sound of saws and mallets and with the heady scent of pine. The latter emanated both from the boats’ timbers and the sap in the oakum that was used to caulk the seams. The scene was one of intense activity.

His thoughts were interrupted by a strong and sudden shove between his shoulder blades.

“Move!”

Hawkwood kept his temper in check. There was no point in retaliating. Disarming the trooper would have been easy, even manacled as he was. Trouble was, there were four troopers guarding them, all armed with muskets. No one could out-run a musket ball. Besides, where would they run to?