Long Knife (9 page)

He lowered the pistol. “What is it, Nell?”

She worked her lips for a moment and finally was able to say, “I wondered, do you need anything, sir? I heard you come in …”

“No, thank you, Nell, but that’s a fine lass. Wait …” He disappeared behind the door, then reappeared. “Here, with thanks for your kindness.” He extended a silver coin to her with his bare arm.

She shook her head. “No. I don’t want that.”

“Of course, you do, girl.” He pressed it into her hand.

“Are you going away?” she whispered, suddenly feeling as if she would fall apart inside.

“Early tomorrow.” He paused and looked at her tremulous expression. He remembered what Herring, the courier, had said about her. George had been too preoccupied with his plans to pay much attention to her during his stay. Now, it was obvious that she wished to be asked in. He reached out and placed his hand against her cheek and neck; his thumb touched her small, warm ear. He had a sudden impulse to draw her into the room; she seemed pliant and soft; she seemed to be wilting against his palm. No, he told himself. He needed to think and be alone with these documents and comprehend everything. He leaned out of the doorway and kissed her forehead, then withdrew and pushed the door shut. It was a minute before he heard her blow her nose softly and then shuffle down the stairs.

He turned away from the door then. He knelt and placed some fresh hardwood on the embers of the fire, shook his head ruefully at the thought of the many long, lonely and comfortless nights that surely must lie ahead, then stood up, went to the table, picked up his letters of instruction from Governor Henry, slapped them lightly several times against his palm while gazing toward the western window, then returned them to the table. There was no sound but the popping and rustling of the fire and the moan of wind around the corners of the house. For a moment he thought of going down to Nell’s room under the stairs and simply letting himself succumb to the affection and coziness which she seemed so eager to offer.

Instead he dashed his naked torso with icy water from the pitcher, rubbed down, and began pacing the room, thinking of what lay ahead. He had planned every step of it over the last few months, planned and refined his plans, and knew exactly what must be done, and how. But now that it was authorized and had become more than a daring dream, the details and difficulties of it were staggering to contemplate.

With an advance of twelve hundred pounds in depreciated Continental currency, he was to raise an army, in a commonwealth where manpower was nearly exhausted, and lead it to a place seven hundred miles deep into the hostile wilderness, and there discipline it into a swift and obedient fighting force. From there he was to lead it down still more trackless miles of rivers and wilderness, to attack a fort near the Mississippi, secure that fort and lesser ones nearby, win over or neutralize several tribes of hostile Indians, and then—then, perhaps—move north and
east to storm the British base of western operations at Detroit. That last notion he had not even revealed to Wythe and Jefferson and Mason, for fear of being thought mad. And he had only hinted at it to Patrick Henry.

Now running the whole sequence through his mind for the first time as a clear and imminent duty instead of a grandiose reverie, he saw that somehow he had assigned himself a task that would consume every ounce of his energy and every moment of his attention for months to come.

He was accustomed to being the man in charge of impossible tasks; he had been that through all the years of his adulthood, and having been that, he could not imagine himself as anything less. He had never had a home since leaving his father’s Virginia roof at nineteen years of age to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains; now he could anticipate more homeless years as a campaigner without any sort of domestic solace.

Thank God for one blessing, he thought. There being no prospect for ease or apparent glory in this task, I shan’t be importuned to take along anyone’s political favorites, but can choose the sort of officers I know to be right for it.

There were stealthy footsteps on the stairs outside his door again, then a soft knocking. By Jove, he thought, this time I just might take ’er in … His loneliness had deepened. “Nell?” he said softly at the doorjamb, his hand on the bolt. A pleasant excitement was building in him.

“Nay, sor,” said a raspy male voice. Surprised, George stepped back to his table and picked up the pistol.

“Who, then?”

“I’m Davey Pagan, sor,” said the voice. “I’d like a word wi’ you.”

“I don’t know the name. Can it wait till morning?”

“I’m ’ere now, yer ludship. I come t’ talk about yer offer.”

“What offer?”

“T’ sign up an’ be yer first volunteer, sor, an’ get me a plot o’ ground.”

What the devil? George thought, cocking the pistol and sliding back the doorbolt.

He was astonished at the ugly, battered face that looked in, its one eye staring with equal astonishment at the barrel of the pistol. It was one of the footpads he had confronted on the street a few minutes ago. For a moment George was at a loss for words. “Are you sure you know what y’re about?” he said at last. “How did you find me?”

“Just followed you, guv’nor. May I step in, by yer leave?”

Reason told George to keep the scoundrel away, but there was something so engagingly direct about the man, and something so remarkable about his unlikely arrival at this hour, that he signaled him in at gunpoint, glancing into the corridor as he did so. “Where’s your partner?”

“Oh, ’e weren’t for joinin’ nothin’, guv’nor. So ’e went ’is way.”

“And you’re sincere? You’d better be, man, or, by Heaven … Davey what? Pagan, you say?”

“Aye, Pagan. And I’m sincere if y’r offer is half decent. I need a berth that goes somewheres. I’ve ’ad enough o’ goin’ nowhere a year at a time an’ sufferin’ all the way. Tell me if you please about this fight we’re goin’ to.” The rascal looked warily at George’s imposing physique and the ready pistol, but could talk cockily enough withal.

George was amused and intrigued. He went behind his desk, laying the pistol at his right hand. “I’m going over the mountains to fight Indians,” he said. “Have you the guts for that?”

“Hm. Indians? Never done that. Me pet enemy is Englishmen …”

“With luck, we’ll get at some of them.”

“Why, guv’nor, I’d go through a herd o’ Indians t’ get me an Englishman.”

“You feel strongly. Why so?”

“Why, sor, because I was snatched off the street in Boston by a British press gang back in ’68 and throwed aboard a British frigate, an’ every day since then I been flogged, kicked, maimed, abused, and fed swill, or nothin’ at all, under one whoreson tyrant of a British skipper after another.”

“What can you do?”

“Why, I’m a good boatwright, sor, and a right fine carpenter, and nobody better with rope and marlinspike.”

“Can you shoot?”

“I fed me brothers and sisters on game afore I went t’ sea.”

“Sounds fair to me. One more thing. You look a bit bandylegged t’ me. Are your legs good enough for something in the nature of, say, forty miles a day?”

For a moment that one gray eye widened. Then Pagan said, “I never been called on to do that. But by my eyes, guv’nor, if it ain’t worse’n twelve hours aloft reefin’ frozen mainsheets in the teeth of a gale ’round the Horn—that’s where I froze these
two digits off, y’ see here?—if she ain’t too much worse’n that, I can do ’er.”

George sat back and scrutinized the fetid, nervous little sailor for a moment, and came to the conclusion that he was a better man than he looked. And that he had come out of the night in such a startling manner seemed like some sort of an omen. “So be it, then, Davey Pagan,” he said, pouring rum in a cup and sliding it across the table to him. “You’re my first volunteer. My name is George Rogers Clark of the Virginia militia. Here’s the king’s shilling, so to speak, and our first seven hundred miles or so’s by riverboat, so might be you’re just my man. Drink up and be off, now. Here’s travel money to Redstone, where I’ll be recruiting, and if I don’t see you there you’ll carry my curse to your grave.”

“’Ere’s to that, Mister Clark,” said Pagan, tossing down the rum with a grotesque grimace of appreciation. “Ah … About that land for me old age …”

“Aye. Three hundred acres for every man if we succeed. Though I don’t know what that means to a seafaring man.”

“If I don’t see another drop o’ sea brine till my dyin’ day, it’ll be soon enough for me, sor. Well, I’m off now. Good night, an’ …”

“Pagan.”

“Aye, sor?”

“Obtain a rifle if you have none. It’s what you’ll live by.”

“I’ve just th’ one, sor, a fine Deckard, at me home place. I’ll get it on m’ way to Redstone. Addyoo, guv’nor!” He saluted, and slipped out the door, leaving a chuckle and a whiff of body stench where he had stood. George shook his head and grinned. Likely he’d never see the man again. He felt, though, that he would.

With rum before him and the fireplace beginning to take the chill out of his room, George now drew a chair up to his table and in the pool of light from a candle began writing the recruitment orders. He wrote carefully on the new sheets of costly linen paper. He wrote to Major William Bailey Smith, a veteran of the Boonesboro defense, instructing him to raise two hundred recruits on the Holston River and march them over the Wilderness Road and down the Kentucky River Valley, to a spring rendezvous on the Ohio River. George folded a hundred and fifty pounds of the paper money into the letter, sealed it, and set it at one end of the table. Then he drew another sheet of the paper into the candlelight, dipped the quill into ink, and wrote to one
of his favorite comrades, the garrulous and affable but iron-hard ruffian Leonard Helm. He and George had fought side by side in Dunmore’s War. Helm was fearless; men would follow him anywhere just to be worthy of his esteem. George instructed Helm to raise a company in Fauquier County and bring it to meet him at the Redstone settlement on the Monongahela. He put that letter and more money aside, then penned a third letter to Captain Jospeh Bowman. He told Bowman that he should raise a company of men in Frederick County, and that he should gather those men as swiftly as possible and march them overland to the Redstone settlement by the first of February. There they would meet George, and Helm’s new detachment, go down the Monongahela to Pittsburgh to obtain their boats and arms and provisions from General Hand, and then start down the Ohio by earliest spring.

He sealed the last letter, capped the inkwell, leaned forward on the table, and raised his glass. He looked at the candle flame through the liquor, watched its distorted arrow of light, and thought.

A tall order indeed. The settlers will be reluctant to spare men for the defense of Kentucky. They’ve scarcely enough to defend their own lands and they’ll soon be needing to get out next spring’s crops. But Bowman and Helm and Smith have a way about them. If anyone can help me raise a force, they can. The brutal truth is, there are always some white men with a need to get some Indian-killing, some bloody revenge, out of their systems before they go back to clearing their fields.

He tossed the liquor to his throat, stood up, and paced about the room. At this hour, there was nothing more he could do, but he was agitated still by an excess of energy. He lifted his sword down from its peg on the wall and pulled it out of its scabbard. It rang slightly as it came out. He flexed his wrist, turning the blade to reflect the light of the candle and fireplace.

A carriage rattled by under his window and from it came a snatch of woman’s laughter. Someone returning from a ball. He thought of fiddle music, of reels, of bare arms and milky bosoms and adoring eyes, of glittering crystal, of such wisps of laughter as that he had just heard in the night. There surely will be none of those delights for a long time to come, he thought. Again the warm and vulnerable Nell came to his mind, down there one flight of stairs below, perhaps still awake and waiting and thinking. The carriage wheels diminished into silence outside.

Then George lowered the sword to rest at his side, and leaned upon it as if on a cane. Suddenly he was lonely, unbearably lonely, frightfully lonely. The weight of his responsibility and the dank gloom of the primeval forest nights awaiting him came into the room and tried to crush his soul.

With a groan, he jabbed the point of the sword into the floor. Then he dropped to his knees, clasped his hands over the hilt, lowered his forehead to rest on his hands. He knelt as he had been taught to do in his family, but for a time his mind resisted trying to assemble the notion of his family’s God and he thought instead only of the dark forest, its breath of eternal decay, the scents of its eternal renewal.

Then he thought of what the great solid George Mason had said to him. And, having made himself humble enough to do so, he closed his eyes and prayed for strength, wisdom, and luck.

A
T HER BROTHER’S REQUEST
, T
ERESA DE
L
EYBA UNWRAPPED HER
guitarra
and began picking out one of the simple
passacaglias
of her repertoire, sitting grave and demure under the sun-awning in the stern of the broad river galley. Her spirit was not in the playing. She had grown depressed by nearly two months’ travel up this enormous brown Mississippi River. She was intimidated by the dark, inscrutable, and uninhabited shorelines, bored by the eternal slow rhythm of the rowing, and dispirited by the prospect of an indeterminate stay in some tiny village a thousand miles up the river from New Orleans. It seemed that her life, begun so bright and promising twenty-two years earlier in Spain and woven into a delicate tapestry of education and daydreams during her schooling in the convent at Malaga, now was being unraveled to a hopeless nothingness as the career of her brother and guardian, Don Fernando de Leyba, led her farther
and farther from civilization and into the crude and insignificant outposts of the Louisiana Territory. As the family fortunes in Spain had dwindled following their father’s death, Fernando had come to the New World seeking colonial posts. After a sojourn in the oppressive but exciting New Orleans, he was now to rule as the Spanish Lieutenant Governor of Upper Louisiana and commandant of the garrison at St. Louis. Teresa knew the appointment seemed to him the beginning of life, but to her, it seemed, it must be the end. The notes of the
guitarra
, which would quiver and resonate so beautifully within the walls of a courtyard or sitting room, were merely absorbed by the space out here, plinking and plunking pitifully, accenting the imperfections of her playing and the puniness of the silly instrument with its delicate ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays. Furthermore, the soundboard was beginning to crack and warp from the months of humidity in New Orleans and on this river journey, and that too was ruining the tone of the piece.