Letters! This second of Brooke’s received, unhappy Cochrane replies (to Cockburn) that the plan is folly: the navy can do nothing; McHenry will not fall; New Orleans is a richer city anyroad; retreat. It is Tuesday evening, rain coming down hard now. Cockburn scoffs at this letter — Washington all over again! — and urges Brooke to ignore it: Attack, attack. Brooke’s junior officers are of the same mind; retreats do not earn promotions. But command is heavy: if the army takes the city but the navy cannot take the fort to load prizes, there will be nothing but an expensive bonfire to show for possibly very high losses. If the army fails and the navy succeeds (as seems unlikely), the fall of Fort McHenry will mean nothing. The officers — not including disgusted Cockburn — argue till midnight, when Brooke wearily pens his last to Cochrane: We are following your advice; as the navy cannot take the fort, we shall retreat to North Point and reembark.
But on that same midnight (you can see and say, Muse, what they cannot) — suspecting that Cockburn might persuade Brooke to ignore these letters and attack — Cochrane dispatches after all, reluctantly, the diversionary force Brooke has requested but no longer wants. And here, Henry, our ancestor comes back into the tale. You have seen him, all this while, fretting through the bombardment with Key & Co. back at the main fleet anchorage. He is truly saddened, as you saw, by the news of Ross’s death: the man was overcautious, perhaps, but brave and not bloodthirsty, an officer and gentleman. You have seen Andrew fear for the fate of Baltimore if — as seems likely from Prevost’s letter and Cochrane’s first to Colonel Brooke — Cockburn has his way with the city. Rumors abound like Chesapeake mosquitoes; every dispatch boat leaves its message like a wake behind. Old Dr. Beanes complains he can’t see a thing; Andrew borrows a spyglass from the British lieutenant in charge of them and confirms through the day that Armistead has not yet struck his colors at McHenry. There is a bad moment towards late afternoon, just after the one heavy exchange of fire from the fort, when they lose sight of it, the big 30-by-42-foot Stars and Stripes, in the smoke and rain, and wonder whether after all the fort has died. But John Skinner recollects that there is a second flag there, a smaller “storm flag” for squally weather; he optimistically proposes that the renewed silence means only that the bomb ships have retired back out of range, and that Major Armistead may be using the lull to hoist a banner more appropriate to the wretched weather. Key is unconvinced. Dr. Beanes fears the worst.
Andrew volunteers to find out. He has seen how fretful is their young warden to be upriver with the action. Without much difficulty Andrew has insinuated that his own status is different from that of “the Americans,” some sort of special agency. When the message sails through that Brooke plans a night assault and wants diversionary action west of Fort McHenry, in the “Ferry Branch” of the Patapsco, he declares to the lieutenant that he knows those waters like the back of his hand (he has in fact crossed once on the ferry, in 1803, en route to Joshua Barney’s hotel and Jérôme Bonaparte’s wedding) and pleads to be fetched to Cochrane as a guide. Whether or not the lieutenant believes him, he sees a chance here to move his own career upstream, and so delegates his wardenly duties to a midshipman and fetches Andrew in a gig to the Surprize.
The Americans are indignant; Key in particular feels himself imposed upon, though he has never quite taken our forefather at face value, and though Andrew has done his hasty best to intimate that this present defection is another ruse. When Andrew presses on him a hurriedly penned note “in case we see each other no more,” Key at first will have none of it. But there is a winking look in the fellow’s eye… At last he stuffs the letter into his waistcoat and turns his back; Skinner and Beanes shake their fists at the departing gig.
