The Blacksmith's Daughter: A Mystery of the American Revolution (53 page)

"With that nose of yours, I'll
take your word for it.
 
Listen."
 
Frowning, he
signaled a halt.
 
In the distance, they
heard the report of a musket.
 
"Three miles north, I'd estimate."

"Should we turn around?"

They listened again.
 
After a quarter minute, they heard another
musket shot.
 
Tom stared north,
pondering the source of the shots.
 
"Too sporadic for a volley.
 
It's the battle aftermath."
 
Beyond a curve ahead, a horse snorted, and a harness jingled.
 
Tom jerked his head toward the pine
trees.
 
"Let's get off the
road."

They cleared it by twenty-five
feet, sparse pines and dawn shadow offering concealment.
 
Two-dozen begrimed redcoats on horseback
trotted by with a litter.
 
Betsy
glimpsed a motionless, large man lying amid blood-soaked bandages.
 
The litter hit a rut, jolting its
unconscious occupant, and the commander of the party growled.
 
"Damn your eyes, have a care with the
general, or he shall never survive to reach Camden!"
 
The party progressed southward and vanished
beyond the road's curve.

Betsy followed Tom back out to the
road.
 
The general
.
 
She looked up at Tom.
 
"The man in the litter wasn't
Cornwallis."

"His uniform wasn't from a
Crown unit.
 
Must have been
Continental."
 
His forehead
puckered in thought.
 
"From what I
saw of him, he fits the description I've heard of the Baron de Kalb."

Major-General Johannes de Kalb, fallen.
 
Her gaze followed the road south.
 
"Tom, they weren't rushing as if in
retreat."

He appeared just as amazed as she
felt.
 
"The redcoats must have
triumphed.
 
Otherwise they'd have fled
to Camden, and far more of them than were in that party.
 
The only way they could get close enough to
inflict so many wounds on de Kalb, then remove him from the battlefield, is if
Gates's army collapsed."
 
He
swiveled his gaze north.
 
"If the
redcoats won, we aren't encountering more of them because they're chasing the
Continentals back to North Carolina."

"It
was
what you wished
for the other night."

"So I did."
 
As if reassessing the power of wishes, he
expelled a hard breath before gesturing north.
 
"Let's go."

A quarter-hour later they forded a
two-hundred-foot wide creek.
 
Above the
burble of water on the other side, they heard faint shouts.

The horses trudged up a rise, the
sulfur-stench of black powder and the tang of wood smoke increasing as they
continued north.
 
Sunlight flooded the
area, unhindered by pine trees, and the sandy terrain was free of underbrush
except for weeds.

They came upon British supply
wagons guarded by militia with a few regulars in command.
 
Off to the side, surgeons bandaged up
soldiers while wounded men sat waiting their attention.
 
Women tended fires, boiled water, and
prepared bandages.

The two armies had fought at first
light, with the entire battle lasting an hour.
 
Minutes after the forces engaged, Gates's entire left wing, comprised of
Stevens's Virginians and militia from North Carolina, crumpled.
 
Beset by disciplined redcoats in a bayonet
charge, the dysenteric rebels had flung down their muskets and fled in
terror.
 
Most of Gates's grand army had
followed suit and was being hunted by the likes of Tarleton's Green
Dragoons.
 
General de Kalb, who'd
received numerous wounds in a valiant attempt to sustain Gates's right flank,
was being conveyed back to Camden for medical attention.
 
As for General Gates, he'd vanished from the
battlefield after the first half hour.
 
Some boasted that he'd turned coward and run like Abraham Buford at the
Waxhaws back in May.

Betsy and Tom congratulated the men
at the supply wagons on the sound defeat of Gates, and, receiving permission to
search the battlefield for their missing Loyalist "brother," proceeded
north.
 
The stink of human and animal
sweat and the metallic stench of blood greeted Betsy a hundred or so yards
ahead, where they came upon wagons being loaded with the wounded — some men
quiet, many moaning, a few thrashing about with inhuman agony tearing from
their throats.
 
Horror wrung her
stomach, too recently filled with food.
 
She wanted to gallop Lady May past the face slashed open from a saber
wound, the bleached white of ribs gleaming in the sunlight, the silver sheen of
entrails.
 
She forced herself to search
the wounded militia for Clark's familiar face.

His expression taut, Tom rode back
to her.
 
"Good gods, what
butchers.
 
Clark isn't here.
 
Let's move on."

Just ahead, the road bisected a
clearing about a mile across.
 
Muggy
miasma hugged the earth in fetid layers.
 
Betsy gagged on the stink of black powder and blood, feces, swamp
putrefaction, sweat, scorched pines, and charred flesh.

Several dozen horses wandered
trailing reins, picking their way around incinerated craters where cannonballs
had gouged the earth.
 
More horses
sprawled in the weedy sand, a few of them torn in half by cannonfire, others
twitching, disemboweled and still conscious, or thrashing their forelegs and
unable to rise with broken spines.

While men hustled about with
stretchers or secured the artillery pieces, other men and women drifted among
the soldier and militia bodies in search of comrades or loved ones.
 
And there were hundreds of fallen men out in
the field.
 
Many hundreds, dark and
motionless against the pale sand, like the ravage of smallpox upon a giant
face.
 
A lone woman paused beside a
body, sank to her knees, and wailed, lifting her hands to the sky.
 
The miasma disembodied her keen as well as
the screams, moans, and grunts of injured men and horses.
 
Betsy swallowed, her mouth tasting of death.

Two privates strode past with a
stretcher, headed for the wagons of injured, bearing between them a glassy-eyed
soldier whose right leg below the knee was a shredded tangle of bloody
breeches, magenta muscle, and pink bone.
 
Betsy raised her kerchief to her mouth.
 
Tom, his complexion green, whispered, "I say we try the west
route.
 
I've no great desire to press
further through this carnage and discover how the Continentals fared."

She stuffed her kerchief away with
trembling hands and grasped the reins.
 
In turning Lady May back around, her gaze swept west where a horse stood
still among scraggly pines at the perimeter of the battlefield, its head bowed.
 
She gulped.
 
"Tom, that's Clark's horse out there by the pines."

He peered through layers of dust
and fog.
 
"It's almost half a mile
away.
 
You're certain of it?"

"Yes."
 
She knew he could see, as she saw, a body
lying near the horse.
 
Tears smarted in
her eyes.
 
"I need to know,"
she whispered, blinking to clear her vision.
 
"We both need to know."

"The gods help us,
then."
 
Although he appeared even
closer to puking than she felt, he squared his shoulders.
 
"Follow me."

Chapter Forty-Three

SHE KEPT HER gaze on the tail of
the packhorse ahead but couldn't shut out the stinks of blood-soaked sand,
feces, and vomit.
 
Nor could she block
her ears from human and equine torment: a blend of whinnies, curses,
supplications, and sobs.

Long before they reached the pines,
she recognized the downed man as Clark.
 
From the blood staining his shirt, and the fowler lying within his
reach, his luck at receiving mere flesh wounds had run out.
 
They knelt beside him.
 
Blood seeped from the corner of his
mouth.
 
The wound to his chest was
greater on the front.
 
"Shot from
behind," Tom whispered.

Tears smeared her vision
again.
 
"Ah, Clark," she
murmured, and stroked his face.

His eyelids fluttered, and he
focused on her.
 
"Betsy, go.
 
Get away.
 
Safety," he whispered, and coughed bubbly blood.

A lung shot, beyond the skill of
any physician to repair.
 
Resolution
steadied her gaze on Tom.
 
"We
cannot leave him like this.
 
Find
someone with a stretcher to help us."

Tom glanced over the
battlefield.
 
"I don't want to
leave you out here.
 
Looters have
already started showing up."

She stood.
 
"I've my musket and his fowler."

Tom rose also.
 
"Very well, but I don't like
this."

"No, both of you
go."
 
Clark's speech curtailed with
more coughing and bloody froth.

Betsy stamped her foot.
 
"Be quiet, Clark."

Tom loaded Clark's fowler.
 
Then, his expression dubious, he mounted his
horse and headed back through carnage and chaos, the packhorse in tow.
 
Betsy set the fowler within easy reach
beside her musket.
 
She stripped the
saddle from Clark's horse and, ignoring his groans, propped him up against it.

The clench of pain in his face
eased, and he spoke with less effort.
 
"Go.
 
They think you
betrayed them.
 
They'll kill you."

She knelt before him again.
 
"Did they shoot you when you were
trying to get away and warn me?"

"Yes.
 
They may return."

"Let them come.
 
I'll put a ball between the eyes of two of
them, at least."

"Betsy, I never meant to hurt
you."

A lump gripped her throat.
 
She couldn't afford to break down just then,
but later, later —"I know you didn't."

"Forgive me for leaving
you."

She brushed fingers on his paling
lips and swallowed.
 
"Please, save
your breath."

"I know you didn't betray
me."

The snare of duplicity squeezed her
heart and brought the sting of tears to her eyes.
 
Under no circumstances must Clark know.
 
She folded both her hands over her breast.

"Beware Adam Neville.
 
Ambrose.
 
He thinks you told redcoats about the furniture."
 
He coughed flecks of blood.
 
"And Fairfax knows I'm lying
here."

"Fairfax saw you and didn't
kill you?"

A mirthless smile ghosted his
lips.
 
"Why bother?
 
A fellow Patriot managed the task.
 
I shan't see my child born."

"Oh, Clark."

He coughed, weaker.
 
"Go somewhere safe and have the
baby.
 
Tom will help."
 
He licked his lips.
 
"I noticed in Augusta.
 
The way he looked at you.
 
He loves you.
 
And he's still at your side through all this."
 
A tear spilled over her lid and curved her
cheek.
 
She dashed it away with the back
of her hand.
 
He reached for her hand,
his icy.
 
"Darling, I should never
have doubted your fidelity."

Her eyes widened, and she felt
sickened by his words.
 
Handwriting
wasn't all Fairfax counterfeited.
 
No
wonder she'd been so easily lured to the cellar.
 
If he planned to eliminate the spy ring, he might have left Clark
alive as bait for any surviving members.
 
The vigil with her husband could be a trap.

She sat up, alert, and swept her
gaze over the battlefield.
 
Tom was
nowhere in sight, but she had the feeling of being watched.
 
Clark's voice sounded gravelly, faded.
 
"Behind you."

After seizing her musket, she
sprang up.
 
Grins on their faces, knives
and tomahawks in their hands, the four of them charged from the swampy terrain
concealed by nearby pines: Basilio, Francisco, and two other men she recognized
from the meeting in the cellar.
 
With no
time to think, she cocked her musket, took aim, and fired.