“Ha! That’s the spirit! All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, eh? Besides, we’re at war. Who’s to say we shouldn’t enjoy what could be our last day on earth before we head to the front?”

“I thought everyone was going to be snowed in for winter,” Hawkwood said. “There won’t be a front until March.”

“Ah, but the ladies don’t know that, do they?”

God save us, Hawkwood thought.

As an ear-splitting shriek shattered the surrounding calm.

Hawkwood pivoted. Heart in mouth, he paused as a broad grin of delight opened up across the major’s face.

“Ha!” Quade exclaimed gleefully. “Had the same effect on me, the first time I heard it. Thought it was the cry of the banshee come to carry me off! They do say it’s caused seizures in at least half a dozen of the city’s older female folk. Not seen her before? Quite a sight, ain’t she?”

The major pointed with his cane.

As his pulse slowed to its normal rate, Hawkwood, embarrassingly aware that other passers-by had not reacted as he had, looked off to where Quade was indicating. They had come to a halt adjacent to the river. Only the width of the street and a patch of open ground separated them from the quayside and the vessels moored alongside it.

The Hudson was Albany’s umbilical. It was from the busy wharves and slipways crowding the mile-long shoreline that goods from the city’s granaries, breweries and timber yards were transported downriver to the markets of New York, one hundred and fifty miles to the south.

Scores of cargo sloops and passenger schooners competed for mooring space with smaller barges and hoys. It could have been a scene lifted from the Thames or the Seine, had it not been for the tree-clad hillsides rising from the water on the opposite shore and the extraordinary-looking vessel that was churning into view beyond the intermediary forest of masts and rigging. The throbbing sounds that enveloped the craft as it manoeuvred towards the jetty were as curious as its appearance and like nothing Hawkwood had heard before.

There was no grace in either its movement or its contours. Compared to the other craft on the river, it occurred to Hawkwood that the clanking behemoth, with its wedged bow and wall-sided hull had all the elegance of an elongated canal boat, while the thin, black, smoke-belching stove-pipe poking up from the boat’s mid-section wouldn’t have looked out of place on the roof of a Cheapside tenement.

The threshing sound was explained by what appeared to be two large mill wheels, their top halves set behind wooden housings on either side of the hull, forward of the smoke-stack. They were, Hawkwood saw, revolving paddles; it was their rotation that gave the vessel its momentum through the water.