Jack Absolute (25 page)

‘Oh tush!’ she said, striking his shoulder lightly with the crop.

‘So it seems you obtained Burgoyne’s permission.’

‘Indeed! It was not hard. The General always yields to reasoned argument.’

Jack looked at her and wondered if the General had been persuaded by more than words. He had been away a while; and Louisa
was damnably attractive.

To cover the flush these thoughts brought to his face, he reached for the bag at her side. ‘Since you are under my command,
madam, I must see what it is you consider so important that you will burden our horses with such baggage.’

Indeed, her bag was not huge. And she did not release it to him.

‘You would not seek to look within a lady’s purse, sir? It is not very gallant.’

Jack said nothing, just kept pulling on the haversack. Reluctant to the last, she let it go.

‘I have, or will find food for us both, madam, so you will not need this.’ He removed the bag of bread, though the warmth
and scent of it made him hungry. Handing it to the
grateful farrier who stood by, he delved deeper. There was only a few spare clothes, a canteen of water – again unnecessary
but he let it pass – and …

‘What’s this?’ He pulled out a book with a soft, green linen cover. ‘We’ll have no time to read by day and no light to do
so at night.’

Louisa regarded the book, biting her lip. ‘It is not for reading, sir, but for writing in. My diary. I have pen and ink too.’

She did. He heard them clink when he shook the bag. ‘The same goes for writing as reading. You must send this back to your
maid.’

‘Please, Jack. It is a small luxury, surely. I cannot go a day without writing. I would rather give up some clothes. Here
…’

She reached towards the bag then, made to reach inside. Perhaps it was because the appeal was made so genuinely that Jack
relented.

He released the bag to her, handed her the diary. ‘Keep it, Louisa,’ he said. ‘Let the man tie this to your horse and we’ll
be gone.’

The farrier attached the bag. They mounted, Louisa swiftly arranging her skirts around the side-saddle, her knee crooked around
the horn, her feet in the single stirrup. Doughty jerked his head up and down in impatience while she did this. Jack brought
the reins up tight, exerting his will.

‘Away!’ he said, and the two horses cantered into the still-thick fog. They headed down a path to the right, to the west.
They would have to swoop wide to by-pass the American position on Bemis Heights and the out-flung Rebel patrols.

At last
, thought Jack, thrilled with the off, with the shrouding fog, with Doughty, so vastly different from the sorry roan Benedict
Arnold had lent him. The thought of that American oddity suddenly made Jack chuckle; somewhere, not very far away, Arnold
was no doubt raging to all who could bear to
listen about the ungrateful oath-breaker, ‘Lord John Absolute’. The chuckle became a laugh as he thought to the road ahead.
A dangerous one, to be sure, but the woods were his world, especially when he was this well armed and prepared. He had a mission
of import, this magnificent animal under him, and, despite some misgivings at her presence, a beautiful companion beside him.
It was a joy to be alive.

That joy lasted three hundred yards, till Louisa suddenly reined in. Jack did the same, circled back.

‘Your girth, madam?’ he said, the impatience ill-concealed.

‘Shh!’ was her only reply. She was squinting into the swirls to her left. ‘I’m sure this was the tree. Nancy! Nancy!’ she
hissed.

There was a sudden stirring there that had Jack reaching for a pistol, though he knew they were still well within the British
lines. Then Louisa’s maid appeared. In her hands was a sack.

‘What’s this?’ Jack demanded. ‘Really, Louisa, there will be no more baggage.’

She ignored him, dismounted, then looked up. ‘Pray, hold my horse for a moment, will you?’

Jack took the proffered reins and Louisa immediately became busy with straps and cinches. In a few moments her side-saddle
was on the ground and she was reaching into the sack Nancy held.

‘Now,’ said Louisa and, with a flourish worthy of a stage conjuror, produced another saddle. A gentleman’s.

‘What the …’ Jack was stunned, could only watch as the woman before him attached the new saddle as expertly as she’d removed
the old. But this surprise was as nothing to his next shock. For Louisa now grabbed at her waist and swiftly undid the strings
that held her dress there. Stepping out of the folds of purple cloth, she stood before him – in breeches!

He was wordless, as she took back the reins and straddled
her horse, wordless still, as Nancy wrapped the side-saddle in the purple skirt and tied the whole to the last three dangling
straps.

‘Now, sir,’ Louisa said, ‘why do you dally? Shall we ride?’

He watched her spur ahead of him into the mist. Wordlessly, he followed.

They rode hard most of the day, their horses seemingly tireless, though Jack took good care to walk them frequently and rest
them when necessary. They followed an insubstantial trail that soon widened to parallel a small river, the Schoharie. Dusk
found them on the edge of the forest just above the settlement of the same name, a dozen log cabins set among well-tended
fields of ripe corn. Lamps were just being placed in windows, farmers returning from their work, beckoned by their light.

‘It looks cosy,’ Louisa said from beside him. ‘Shall we seek hospitality?’

‘I think not,’ replied Jack. ‘They may be Cowboys or Skinners or neither, but strangers rarely receive welcome this close
to a war.’

He turned back beneath the trees, leading his horse. He’d noticed the tiniest of paths down a little stream. A five-minute
walk and they came to an uprooted beech. A fire could be lit in its lee and never be seen.

While Louisa hobbled and nose-bagged their mounts, Jack cut the smaller, springier boughs from the felled beech and soon had
them lashed together with withies into a frame. The birch-bark rolls he’d bargained for with the Indians were threaded through
them and then this half-moon shelter was pegged down.

‘Even cosier than a cabin, I’d say.’ Louisa watched, as Jack slashed some sprays from a pine. ‘Where are you going to sleep?’

Jack snorted and threw the pine on to the floor of the shelter, then gestured to the forest. ‘Can you gather some firewood?’

She was back soon, with a good mix of tinder and smaller logs. From one, he pulled off a small strip of bark, rolled it into
a cone, then stuffed it with dry leaves. From his pocket he produced something he’d spotted when they’d walked their horses
earlier.

‘A mushroom?’ Louisa was watching him closely. ‘Is it supper?’

‘The Amada’s not for eating.’ He pulled out the inner layer of the mushroom, shoved it into the cone. ‘Hold this.’

While she did, he pulled out his strike-light. A few hits of a rifle flint against its metal and sparks fell into the centre
of the cone. The mushroom skin began to smoulder.

‘Now, blow,’ he said. ‘No, gently, gently, that’s the way. Now a little harder.’

She looked up at him, her lips forming a half-smile. Then she pushed them out towards the glowing cone and blew with more
force. Suddenly, the leaves ignited and he took the cone from her, shoving it into the tinder of the fire. Kneeling, he piled
more dry leaves around, and as the flames grew, he pushed in first smaller sticks, then larger. Soon the fire was crackling
nicely.

‘If you will be so kind as to fill our canteens from the stream, Miss Reardon, then tend the fire, I will set about catching
us our supper.’

He found the ideal place two hundred paces from their camp. The stream widened a little, while its bed flattened, a little
pool that, once he’d stripped off his breeches and stockings, only reached to just above his knee, a few inches below his
shirt-tails. The water was deliciously cool, refreshing on a mid-September day that had turned hot again once they’d escaped
the fog. If he had been alone in the forest he
would certainly have stripped off completely and dived in. But he was there, anyway, for another purpose. Forearms resting
lightly on his lower thighs, he let his fingers sink into the water.

He had positioned himself so that his shadow fell behind him. The ripples of his entry, the slight stirring of silt, all had
settled again. The pool was almost as it was. His breathing slackened. Only his eyes moved, following the brown shapes that
flitted from pebble to tumbled branch across the stream bed. A trout banged against his ankle. Too small. It moved away; one
of its larger brothers came near. Nearer. He struck. Tossing the fish on to the bank, Jack grinned and crouched again.

Later, he heard her coming but he did not move to the sound. He had been stalking the biggest of the fish, or rather willing
it close. He had gone for it once and the beast, belying its size, had squirted agilely away from his questing fingers. Enough
time had passed, its fish brain had forgotten him, it was coming closer, ever closer …

‘Well, now. That is quite the sight.’

Jack shot his hands in, a tail fin brushed his hand with silk and was gone.

‘Zounds! You made me miss it, woman!’

He straightened, stretched, easing his now-cramped back. Louisa laughed. ‘Have you not caught enough?’

She pointed to the six trout that lay on a moss-covered rock, all longer than Jack’s hand. They had fat backs, brown and speckled,
creamy bellies.

‘Aye,’ replied Jack, ‘but what are you going to eat?’

She laughed again, a sound as good to his ears as any in that twilit forest. He waded to her, climbed out. ‘You are a fine
fisherman, sir.’

‘You are kind. Yet I am but a novice. Would you care to see the master?’

On her nod, he beckoned silence, took her hand and led her a few feet forward, parting the leaves of an overhanging willow.
They peered through. ‘Now there’s a fisherman,’ he said softly.

The heron was perhaps fifty yards further down the stream, stiller than Jack could ever have been, more perfectly hidden,
blue and grey feathers blending it into its world. As they watched the pencil neck straightened, craning out over the water.

‘Does it know we are here?’ Louisa whispered.

‘It knows. That circle vision takes in everything. But we’ve been fishing side by side for an hour now. It doesn’t mind me.’

Suddenly, the bird’s head shot down. Scalpel beak sliced the surface, a glitter was impaled, there was a flickering of sunlight
on silver, a bulge in the thin neck. Then all was still again.

‘Perfect.’ Jack let the leaves fall back. ‘Mind you, they are ungainly flyers. And their call is a harsh croak.’

‘And they have spindly legs. Unlike yours.’

She glanced at them, wet to the thighs, damp shirt-tails hanging halfway down. He smiled and she smiled back and for a moment
all was still in the forest. Then he turned away to his clothes, and said, ‘Come, Louisa. Let’s have our supper.’

Full night was upon them when they finally lay back in their birch-bark shelter, sated.

‘Well,’ Louisa sighed, ‘among all your obvious talents, I never would have guessed you a master of cuisine.’

Jack leaned forward to shove another log on to the fire – and to conceal his pleasure at her words.

‘Camp fare only. Simple stuff.’

‘The best I’ve eaten in many a week. The campaign’s been hard on the commissary.’ She reached to grab a last few
crumbs from the wooden cooking plank. ‘What did you call these?’

‘Johnny cakes. Just cornmeal, maple sugar … and I was lucky to find those sweet chestnuts.’

‘Chestnuts. Yes! So,’ she sat up and looked at him with that peculiarly secretive smile, ‘Jack Absolute. Soldier. Mohawk.
Duellist. Dramatist. Chef! One feels quite outshone. What other talents have you yet to reveal?’ Her tone was teasing.

Jack cleared his throat. ‘A talent for trouble, perhaps. Recently I reflected on the number of people who have tried to kill
me lately, the variety of their methods.’ He poked at the fire with a stick, watched little blazing empires collapse, others
arise.

‘Maybe that is because you are too free with your opinions. Many are provoked by beliefs firmly expressed.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Jack threw himself back on an elbow. ‘I was coerced into this war, as you well know. I only
sought to get on with my business. I am the mildest of men. I seek to provoke no one.’

Louisa hooted so loudly at this that Jack, after glowering for a moment, was forced to join in.

‘You? I remember that conversation our last night aboard the
Ariadne.
You were passionate in your defence of the Rebel colonists.’

‘Was I? I do not remember being passionate about anything but your eyes.’

‘Fie, Jack. I am serious. Curious.’ She had sat forward, intent now. ‘Curious as to why an officer so close to, so fond of
General Burgoyne, would hold such dangerous sentiments?’

‘I am an officer, it is true, albeit a somewhat reluctant one. And indeed I care for the General, personally and professionally.
But …’ He hesitated then went on. ‘I am also the son of a rebel.’

‘Your father?’

‘Sir James?’ He chuckled. ‘I think … not. No, my mother. She was Irish and fierce, especially in her avocation of that country’s
freedom. So there’s a curse of blood, if you will.’

‘Intriguing,’ Louisa had risen to her knees, the better to look at him. ‘A war within a war. So the rebel in you would see
the Colonists free of their allegiance to the Crown?’

Jack thought for a moment. ‘In the end, I would not. Like many so-called Rebels, I would see them gain their liberty yet stay
loyal to the Crown. They are English too, after all.’

‘And Irish, Scots, German, Dutch – these have no loyalty to England, surely?’

‘It is England that has opened this land to them; England that has near ruined itself in war after war to protect them from
French tyranny. Do they not owe a debt for that? I say let them have their representation, along with every Englishman’s birthright
of liberty … then tax them accordingly!’