King's Mountain (9 page)

“Do you? How?”

“Oh, we'll borrow it from the king.”

VIRGINIA SAL

I never did mention any of the things she told me to Major Ferguson himself, for I wouldn't like him to know that we were whispering about him behind his back, being servants of his, like we were, but as I got used to being around him, I listened carefully whenever he talked, to see if I could piece together some of what he told me with what Virginia Paul had said. He didn't seem to take much notice of me at first. I had mending to do, and Elias Powell secured permission for me to sit in the commander's tent of an evening, so that I could work in the lamplight. I suppose that being from a noble family like he was back in Scotland, he was accustomed to having servants underfoot, and he paid them no more mind than I would the kitchen cat. So I kept quiet and listened while I sewed.

Often of an evening the commander would have Capt. Andrew DePeyster come and pass the time with him, and sometimes the camp doctor, name of Uzal Johnson, would stop in, for he was an educated man and fitting company for the son of a lord. They weren't neither of them thirty yet, and both of them came from the northern colonies. Dr. Johnson had a fine education, and he had left a medical practice in New Jersey to be an army doctor for the Loyalists, and Captain DePeyster was a fine-featured gentleman from New York, who had been soldiering since the start of the rebellion. I reckon he and the doctor were good friends because they were much the same age, and they came from the same part of the world.

Even though they were well-spoken and educated gentlemen, the both of them generally had a pleasant word for me. Virginia Paul told me once that true aristocrats are mostly civil to everybody; it's only them that have just climbed up out of the muck themselves that are rude to their underlings. It made sense to me that the major would choose to spend his evenings in the company of these learned and kindly fellows. Perhaps they reminded him of the evenings with the gentry in Edinburgh—at least, if he closed his eyes to the shabby surroundings of his army tent and ignored the boiled and burnt food that sometimes passed for his dinner.

Once he got to know me, Dr. Johnson even asked if I would mind helping him with the sick and the wounded soldiers if he ever had need of any help, and I said I would. I reckon he could have just made Major Ferguson order me to assist him, but instead he asked me politely himself in that clipped and formal way of his, and I set a store by him for that bit of kindness.

Many nights I got to sit in a corner of the tent and listen to the gentlemen's conversation. And sometimes, after the fires burned low, Major Ferguson spent the rest of the night with me, but we never did talk much then. I didn't take it too personally. It was just that he had been alone so much of his life, and being in the middle of a war, he could never count on having much of a future in which to remedy that. So little by little, we got acquainted, there being nothing else to do after sundown between set-to's with the enemy.

*   *   *

Sometimes, when the mood took him of an evening, especially if it was raining and cool and he had no other company, the major would sit in the opening of his tent, staring out into the darkness, and he'd talk a bit about his home and the times he had growing up in Scotland. I never asked him any questions when he talked of home, even when I didn't understand what he meant with a strange word or a peculiar turn of phrase, for to interrupt the flow of his words would have broken the spell. He would have thought me impertinent, besides, to speak without being spoken to, for whatever else we were to one another, every now and again, he was above all my master and the commander here. Even when I shared his bed, I never called him by his given name, which was Patrick, or Pattie, as his family called him when he was a lad, but he would never stand for being addressed as such by anyone on this side of the ocean. I never heard Virginia Paul call him that to his face, either, though she said it often enough behind his back. A word from him and they'd flog you until the skin of your back was in ribbons. Anyhow, at such times it was plain that, though he spoke aloud, he was not talking to me, but only airing his thoughts for his own comfort. He could have been talking to a hunting dog for all the answering he expected.

Odd that he never talked about military matters. He seldom spoke of his postings in the islands or up in New York, except in passing. He had lived through a fair few battles and such, but they were not uppermost in his mind on the evenings when he went to woolgathering. No, mostly he harked back to his boyhood, and his home in Scotland, though he hadn't been much more than a boy when he left there, Still, I suppose we all see our youth as an Eden of perfect days, and we think that if only we could go back there we would be content. But it was more than that with him. At first I thought it was because his father was a lord, and that he missed the mansion and all the trappings of being an aristocrat, but though he made it clear that we have nothing here to compare to the fine estates in Britain, he did have his nobility here, for being a commander in the king's army gave him position and servants, and the best of what there was to be had. Anyhow, leaving home at fifteen like he had, I reckon he had long got out of the habit of rich food and the finery of the gentry. I came to think that he dwelt so longingly on thoughts of his home and family because he sensed that he would never see them again.

What I learned of his history in the army I found out piecemeal, some from Dr. Johnson, but mostly from the lips of Virginia Paul, while we were doing our chores. Sometimes in the late afternoons, if all was peaceful thereabouts, she and I would get out of earshot of the camp, and, since there wasn't much else to talk about, leastways nothing that seemed to interest her, I'd get her to talking about the commander. I wondered if he had told her all she knew about him when he took her to his bed, but he never spoke of his military past with me in similar circumstances, so I did wonder. Virginia Paul never did seem to mind him being with me, and he never let on to me that they were close, so I couldn't make sense of it. She knew about him, though. Sometimes she talked like she had been there her own self, she knew so many of the particulars.

I knew how he had begun his military life as a young cornet on the continent, and now he was here in the Carolina backcountry, commanding Loyalist troops, but I wondered what had come in between.

On another long afternoon in the wagon, journeying from one backcountry nowhere to another, I reminded her of where she had left off before. “… So after young Ferguson recovered from the sickness he caught in the Prussian war, he went back to the regiment, but they had forgotten all about that foolhardy stunt of his with the dropped pistols?”

She nodded. “That war on the continent was over, and everything having to do with it was old news. All he could do was start over, and hope to get noticed again. He spent a few months in England, assigned to put down local riots of colliers—them that mines coal, ye ken—and then he was garrisoned here and there about the country, though of course he longed to do real soldiering again. He tried to get posted to the command of his mother's brother in Canada, but that came to naught, for his father fell ill, and he felt he must stay close by the family. By then he was twenty and not much further along than he had been when he began.”

I sighed. “It must be hard to do everything you can to make your way in the world and still have all the luck run against you.”

“Like a salmon swimming upstream, fighting the current,” she said, with one of her rare smiles, but I did not know of such things, for here in the Carolina hill country we have trout and bream, and mostly they drift along in the streams living peaceful lives in the backwater. For the hundredth time I wondered where she was from. You couldn't really tell by how folks talked, because some of them whose parents were foreign, or them that had come over the water as children, still had the cast of a foreign tongue in their speech. But Virginia Paul knew more about what went on over there than anybody not born and bred over there ought to know. I asked her more than once, but not a word would she say about it. I kept her talking, though, in hopes that she would let something slip one day, and I could put the pieces together.

I opened my mouth to say,
“Did you come from where his family lives?”
but I knew it was no use asking her for the twentieth time, for she never would answer, so instead I said, “Well, at least he had recovered his health—”

“Not entirely. He tired easily, and limped a bit, and he was given to fevers. But worse than that for him was that time was passing. All the young officers who had begun when he did now outranked him, and he knew that he had to do something to begin moving forward again.”

“He needed another war, did he not?”

“Well, he needed more of one than he was likely to find with the Greys, chasing smugglers on the coast of Sussex. So he did what many an ambitious officer had done before him—he sold his commission in the Scots Greys, and purchased a new one in a regiment being sent abroad.”

“Back to the continent?”

“No. Not to that continent or this. He transferred to the 70th, to serve under a cousin of his, Lieutenant Colonel Johnstone. It was his best chance for advancement, and his new commission was a captaincy, but when he told the news, he got more condolences than congratulations.”

“Why?”

“Because the 70th was posted to the West Indies, where most of the battles are fought against pestilence. Why, a man could die just trying to get there.”

I waited a moment, and then asked lightly, looking anywhere but at her. “The Indies? Have you been there?”

She was silent so long that I turned to look at her, but her gaze was as empty as a stone. “Those islands be a long way from the solitary firs of Pitfour, in every way at all,” she said at last. “Hot and strange, those islands, with fauna and flowers that seem to come from another world. You'd think he would have hated it there, wouldn't you? So wild and strange to a Scots lad that it would take a sea of rum just to keep him afloat for duty. But he gloried in the place.”

Well, he might have told her that, I supposed. “What's it like then, those islands? Do you know? And what captivated him?”

“Well, he was but twenty-four then. Perhaps new places and things are more enchanting before people get set in their ways. He called it an everlasting summer. It was rich in game—wild hogs and doves and pheasants—and the waters around the island teemed with fish, which were anybody's for the taking. Not like Scotland, where the very streams belong to one laird or another, and you must pay for the right of fishing them. And the fertile soil of those tropical islands must have seemed a miracle to one accustomed to the cold, thin earth of the Highlands, where little grew of its own accord save thistles and heather.” She laughed and shook her head. “On Tobago, he actually made his soldiers plant gardens, so that they might grow their own vegetables. Would you credit it? And proud as a peacock he was for having thought of it.”

I blinked, trying to imagine the proud and stern commander turned farmer. “Do they promote officers for such as that?”

“You know they don't. But 'twas a way to pass the time until real duties called.”

“If the islands were such a paradise as that, what would they be needing soldiers there for?”

“Well, it wasn't a paradise for everyone. There were slave revolts. 'Twas a hard life for them that toiled in the cane fields. They died young. Disease and hard labor in the hot sun carried them off. But Captain Pattie, as he was then, dealt with it all, and stopped the revolts. He'd have got his precious promotion out of that, I don't doubt.”

“Did he not then?”

She smiled. “He did not. For just as he was beginning to glimmer like a hero again, he took sick. Malaria—easy enough to get in the tropics, especially for one who was in delicate health to begin with. They shipped him home to Scotland yet again, and he spent months in his mother's care, fighting to regain his health. When he was well again, the islands were forgotten, for the war had begun here. So here he came, hoping that the third time would be the charm.”

I shivered. “Do you think it will be?”

“No.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Early September 1780

The next morning Shelby and I mounted our horses and took the trace along the river to the home of the Irishman, John Adair. The day was fine with a blazing blue sky, and the road, which lay between the green wall of mountains and the winding Nolichucky River, made for a pleasant morning's ride, or it would have if we had been able to leave our troubles at home, but we scarcely noticed the late summer glories of woods and fields, for our thoughts were already fixed on the coming battle.

John Adair knew both of us well, for he had been elected to office last year when the North Carolina Assembly passed an act to create a new county here on the frontier, calving the lands around the Holston settlement away from Washington County. Thus, Sullivan County was formed, and, along with a sheriff, a clerk, and other functionaries, Isaac Shelby was appointed colonel of the new county's militia. John Adair was the entry taker, the man who kept the county treasury, mostly from land sales, which were to be sent back to the state's government in New Bern. We were counting on Shelby's rank as militia commander to carry the day.

We found John Adair at home on that bright September morning. Someone in his household had spotted us from afar over the fields, and had no doubt run to tell Adair that two gentlemen on horseback were headed to his door. By the time we reached his yard he was waiting for us, and trying to smile a welcome, though his eyes showed his unease. He knew that this was no social call, and during the moments while he waited for us to dismount he must have run through all the dire possibilities that could have prompted our visit. On the frontier, unexpected callers often heralded bad tidings: an Indian attack in the offing, a smallpox outbreak, or perhaps the death of a neighbor.