King's Mountain (8 page)

I went into the tent, but nobody was there. Just a woven basket of soiled clothes, some bedding, and a tin plate next to a wooden pail of water. The sparseness of the tent was more what I had expected for an army on the move, instead of the rug and trunk and silver and I don't-know-what-all that the commander needed to keep body and soul together in the wildwood.

“You looking for something?”

It was a woman's voice, low and quiet, but colder than snowmelt, and for a heartbeat I felt my body tense to run at the sound of it, but then I shook off that foolish notion, and turned to face her. “You'd be the other maidservant? That Elias Powell said to tell you I am hired on to help you serve the commander.”

She stood staring at me without a word of welcome. It was hard to put an age to her, though of course she must have been about the same as me, for her thick ginger hair was unsilvered, and her face was smooth as a child's. I decided that it was her eyes that belied her youthfulness. They were as green as persimmons, big and dark-lashed, set above sharp cheekbones in a face as pale as moonlight. But those eyes were as cold as her voice, as if she could cut right through you with the harshness of her gaze. For all her beauty, hers was not a face that I cared to look at overlong, and I could feel her still looking at me even after I turned away.

I tried again. “I hope I'll be some help to you, looking after the officer.”

Her smile was mostly a sneer, but she seemed to make up her mind to tolerate me, for she said, “What do I call you?”

“Name's Sal. Elias Powell called me Virginia Sal, on account of I told him I come from there.”

She shrugged. “He had another reason, too. I am called Virginia Paul.”

I wondered if she was saying
Paul
, like the apostle in the Bible, or
Poll
, which is a nickname among some folk for “Mary.” The first was no name for a woman, though, and the second, being the name of the mother of Our Lord, did not suit her at all, so I reckoned “Paul” was her last name. I didn't like to ask, though, for I didn't think she'd take kindly to my notions about her name, so all I said was, “Are you from up in Virginny, too?”

“No.”

I listened to see if I could tell where she came from by the sound of her voice, but she hadn't said enough for me to be able to tell. She didn't sound much like the Englishmen I'd heard talking, nor the fellows from the northern colonies, but she didn't talk like someone from these parts, either. A time or two I thought her words sounded like the commander's way of speaking, with odd, rolling
r's
and sounds that came from the back of his throat and seemed to struggle to come out of his mouth at all. I wondered if she and the commander came from the same place. I made up my mind to ask her about it, if she ever thawed out enough to be civil to me.

After another minute or two of silence, she said, “Well, you came to work, and there's washing to be done. Pick up that basket. I'll show you where the creek is.”

I followed her out of the tent, carrying the basket of soiled linen shirts, and I tried to keep up with her, though the washing was heavy, and I had to watch my step on the uneven ground. Finally, though, I managed to call out to her to slow her pace, and, with a scornful glance in my direction, she did so, leaning up against a tall pine and watching me stumble down the slope to reach her. I managed not to spill any clothes out of the basket, though I had caught my leg on a branch of briars, and the cuts stung as they seeped blood about my ankle.

I spied the creek at the bottom of the hill, a shallow little stream that was as much rocks as water, though that wasn't a bad thing if you were aiming to wash clothes in it, for you needed to beat the garments against the stones to get the dirt out. I set the basket down alongside the creek, and took a shirt out of the pile and held it under the water until my hands tingled.

Virginia Paul came up beside me, and picked through the pile until she found a cloth with red stains on it. I knew it for blood, so I said, “Did he cut himself shaving?”

She gave me another scornful glance. “He doesn't shave himself,” she said, pushing the towel down into the clear stream between the rocks, and rubbing at the stain until the cloth turned loose of the blood. “We do the washing for the regiment's doctor as well. This is his.”

“Have you been with the commander long?' I asked her, thinking that this was as good a time as any to get acquainted.

“A few weeks,” she said, without looking up from her scrubbing.

“So you haven't know him for very long, either.”

She smiled at that. “I've known Patrick Ferguson a deal longer than he thinks I have.”

I wondered what she meant by that, but when I asked, she only shook her head and went right on beating cloth against the creek rock.

I settled into the routine of the regiment soon enough, and I got better acquainted with the others, though the men didn't take much notice of a servant girl, but Virginia Paul kept to herself, as much of a stranger to me as she had been on the first day. But our work was mostly the same, and so we spent time together, and, though I never found out much about her own life, she seemed to know a lot about the commander.

“He's the son of a lord,” she told me once, when I wondered aloud about him. “Back in Scotland. He talks about it sometimes of a night. His father is an earl, the chief of the Fergusons of Pitfour, though he is a lawyer as well.”

“Are you kin to them?” I asked, for she seemed to know so much about the family.

“The Fergusons of Pitfour are my clan, though I am no blood of his.” She nodded in the direction of the commander's tent. “Just as well, since we share a bed now and again.”

Well, I knew that, though I never thought to hear her say it out loud. I couldn't see that there was any love lost between them on either side. It was just something they did to pass the time, perhaps, or to snatch a bit of comfort out of the hardships of army life. Virginia Paul was pretty enough to look at, but it was a cold beauty, like a winter tree silvered in ice.

I thought it best for the time being to keep away from the question of her and the commander, so to get on safer ground, I said, “Fergusons of Pitfour? What's Pitfour? A castle?”

She shook her head. “Just a big old barn of a house. The laird and his family live in the capital city, but they have the country place farther north, and he misses it sometimes, though I think it's because he was a boy there. He left home a long time ago and he will never go back.”

She said that as if it were a known truth, but I didn't see how she could know such a thing, so I said, “Mayhap he will, though. When his father dies, he could go home and take over the family farm.”

Virginia Paul laughed at my ignorance. “Not he! Patrick Ferguson is nothing but a younger son, good for nothing unless the eldest dies. They sent him off to the army while he was still a beardless boy, and he has been there ever since. His mother's brother is an important general, and they had hopes that he would smooth the path for young Patrick in the king's army. And, by the by, that
farm
you speak of is the size of this county.”

“Did he tell you all this?”

She shrugged. “Never mind. I know.”

I thought she must have come from his part of the world, and I wondered if being in the same clan was like being a cousin.

“I am no blood of his,” she said, as if she had heard me thinking, and that made me shiver, for I could be careful of what I said around her, but I didn't see how I could hobble my thoughts.

CHAPTER FOUR

Early September 1780

Isaac Shelby stayed the night at Plum Grove, and after a brief respite to partake of the barbecued steer and exchange pleasantries with the guests, he and I talked until the evening fire burned low. Maj. Patrick Ferguson had invited us into the war, and we aimed to oblige him.

We talked over the logistics of getting a thousand armed men over the mountains and into the territory held by the enemy, with sufficient resources to fight once we got there. A decade or so of living in the backcountry served us well in this respect, for we had both taken part in campaigns against the Indians. That experience had schooled us for the coming fight.

We knew how to move an army through the wilderness, how to make camp without being ambushed, how to keep troops armed and fed, and how to draw up a plan of battle. The expedition to Point Pleasant with Lord Dunmore was the pattern upon which we would base our campaign. The one thing we lacked now that had been supplied for us in Lord Dunmore's War was the money it took to finance a military campaign. The colony of Virginia, backed by the resources of the Crown, could afford to engage in any wars it took a notion to fight, but we were backcountry farmers, and our worth, such as it was, lay in land and livestock. We could defend a fort with a hundred souls under our protection for a week or two, for we were equal to that task in supplies and in the courage of necessity, but now we were proposing to fight the king's army, a long way from home. They did not lack for funds or supplies, or for professional soldiers to lead them.

“Nobody will want to be paid for going with us,” I pointed out to Shelby, seizing on the one favorable aspect of the whole daunting prospect.

“Good,” said Shelby with a wry smile, “because I had not calculated on paying them. That is the least of our worries, though. It will take us ten days or more to get to that part of the country where Ferguson is reported to be, and if among us, we militia commanders can get a thousand men to make up an army, we'll have to supply them with powder and shot. And feed them and their mounts the whole way there and back.”

I could not deny the truth of what he said, but I had no wish to give up the fight for want of a few paltry supplies. “I suppose if the need were great enough, we could get Whig sympathizers along the way to feed us. We are making sacrifices for this cause, and so should all those who side with us. Many of them are rich enough, and it's harvest time, after all. They can spare it. Or else we could take what we need from the farms of the Tories. They're even richer.”

“No,” said Shelby. He yawned and stretched, and began to pace back and forth before the hearth, fighting the weariness that had overtaken him. “I thought about that on the long ride over here. I journeyed past fields full of fat cows, and cornfields that stretched for miles along the river, and I thought, ‘There's enough bounty here to feed an army.' But as soon as I thought it, I put myself in the place of those landowners, and I realized that if any army came like a plague of locusts and stripped my land and took my stock, I would hate them until my dying day, cause or no cause.”

“But such sacrifices have to be made in time of war. Look at what we've gone through here in the Indian wars.”

“Perhaps, but all the same, I think that refusing to demand provisions from the populace would be our great strength. Major Ferguson is doing that, you know.”

“It hardly surprises me. It is usual for armies to live off the land.”

“Yes, but it does not endear them to the citizens in their path. After Ferguson went up to Gilbert Town, he ranged west, trying to frighten people into his fold, and offering them his
protection
if they will remain loyal to the Crown. Those who choose not to side with him are relieved of their goods, and in particular their livestock.” He laughed. “Ferguson was so intent upon rounding up beeves that you'd think the beasts could pay taxes.”

“Well, he has an army to feed, and I'm sure that his master, Lord Cornwallis, would never countenance paying money to mere subjects to supply the needs of the king's troops.”

“No, it never occurred to them to buy the cattle. McDowell and I discussed it after Musgrove Mill, before I set out for home. We thought we might make some political capital out of saving beeves instead of requisitioning them. So we went along to some of the landowners along the Yadkin, those who had the most to lose, and we offered them our protection. If they would pledge to support the Whigs, we said, we would keep their livestock safe from Ferguson by driving their cattle back into the hills for them. And others, who refused to side with us, saw the sense of our tactics, and drove their own herds into the deep mountain coves where the Tories would never find them.”

“That was all to the good, whether the landowners pledged to you or not. At any rate, hiding the cattle in the hills kept the enemy short of provisions.”

“Yes.” Shelby laughed. “I later heard from McDowell that we had help from unexpected quarters in this endeavor. When Ferguson reached the area around Quaker Meadows, he found so few beeves for the taking that he consulted John Carson, whom he took for a Loyalist, and Carson told him where he could find some cattle.”

“Was he telling the truth?”

“That's a question for lawyers, I suppose. Did Ferguson's men come back with cattle? Indeed, they did, proving that in that respect Carson had told the truth.”

I puzzled over this for a moment, and then I had it. I could hardly speak for laughing. “John Carson told them where to find
Tory
cattle, didn't he?”

Shelby nodded. “So he did. You can imagine the wrath of those landowners who were loyal to the king, upon finding that the very army they supported had robbed them of their livestock. After that, I think they'd have favored the devil himself if he happened to oppose the Crown. So, you see, Ferguson's cattle raids are helping our cause, converting more people than a hundred speeches about liberty could ever sway. There are plenty of people sitting on the fence right now, trying to make up their minds whether to support the Whigs or stay loyal to the Crown. All we need to do is to refrain from preying upon these farmers, and they will count us on the side of the angels.”

“It's an expensive virtue, though. We cannot fight the British with starving unarmed men, so we must pay our way. I think I see a way to do that, Shelby.”