Camp Follower: A Mystery of the American Revolution (27 page)

Hannah's
shoulders relaxed, indicating her relief that she wouldn't have to testify in
court soon and be discredited and demeaned by attorneys and judges.
 
"Yes, madam."

She returned to
the dishes.
 
Helen's gaze flicked over
to Jonathan, who helped Roger fold up tent canvas.
 
On occasion, Charles had confided in Jonathan, but had Jonathan
possessed more than speculations, she was certain he'd have said something to
her, especially after he'd witnessed her economic collapse, especially after
all the recent hubbub over "perjury" and Widow Hanley.

Still, it
never hurt to approach him from another angle.
 
The thought that Badley and Prescott might have defrauded not only her
but also the Landon family nagged her.
 
She resolved to query Jonathan with her theories during the midday
break.

Chapter Twenty-Five

THAT MORNING,
HELEN battled the urge to head for New Berne and request audience with Widow
Hanley.
 
Common sense kept her in the
saddle guiding her mare north.
 
Travel
to and from the Santee entailed tremendous peril, even with the protection of
an armed escort, and the Legionnaires were under orders to return to their
unit.
 
Besides, if Badley and Prescott
had plundered Silas's estate, the court would take years to recover what it
could trace.
 
She and Hannah might never
recognize most of it.

Could Badley so
desire her death that he'd fake an entire assignment?
 
What would motivate him to finance putting her in harm's
way?
 
Fairfax had said there was no
Samuel Kerr on the
London
Chronicle
.
 
Was Fairfax reliable on that point?
 
Had Badley bought
him
off, paid him to discourage and
frighten her?

What if the new
magazine didn't exist?
 
Was the Legion
assignment pointless?

The party
encountered the first demolished farm just up the road, and there were plenty
more after it.
 
Although some brick
chimneys remained intact, most houses were leveled to their foundations.
 
Burned wagons, plows, and carts stood
sentinel over eviscerated gardens and crop fields.
 
Plump buzzards poked with minimal interest among bones.
 
The stench of scorched wood and slaughtered
livestock clung to the road and seasoned every breath she took.
 
She had to coax Calliope across the bridge
to Jack's Creek.
 
Birdsong sounded
tentative, reluctant.

She imagined
glassy-eyed women crouched around campfires, embracing babes and children who
shivered, while behind them, the wrecks of homes and barns smoldered dull
orange beneath the majesty of the Milky Way.
 
How many lives along the Santee Road had been uprooted?
 
Where had the infirm and elderly, women,
children, and farm hands gone with their homes destroyed?
 
She thought of war victims in Wilmington,
orphans and widows who received the Church's charity.
 
No one ever showed the victims of war as heroes for what they'd
endured, yet along the Santee Road, the face of devastation looked the same
whether one were Whig, neutral, or Loyal.

She
straightened, jolted to the core by the bizarre juxtaposition, and yet
compelled to revisit it in her head.
 
Were her thoughts not sedition?
 
Still, her brain persisted in toying with them.

To distract
herself off the disturbing tangent, she asked another question of the dragoons
while they rode through the devastation: "With what attributes do you
describe Colonel Tarleton?"

Compliments
poured from them.
 
Valiant, courageous,
heroic, brave, just, fearless.
 
She
suspected Marion's men would say the same of him.
 
How could the dragoons praise their commander amidst the
destruction he'd wrought, destruction they could see, smell, and taste?
 
But then they weren't women: mothers, wives,
daughters, sisters.
 
Men seemed to
disconnect with more ease from the wound of war.

She asked them,
"Is Colonel Tarleton compassionate?"

The dragoons
guffawed for a full minute, and Helen felt her face glow with humiliation.
 
"This is war, Mrs. Chiswell.
 
Why does Colonel Tarleton need
compassion?" said Davison.

Connor
brandished a sour smile.
 
"I've
seen him compassionate — when the lady's pretty."
 
The men hooted some more.

Campbell nudged
his horse up to pace Helen's, his expression sober.
 
"September, at Fishing Creek, the Colonel came down with
malaria.
 
He got delirious and couldn't
be moved while he recovered.
 
All around
us in the swamps were the rebel dregs who'd butchered Captain Huck in
July."
 
The set of his jaw declared
resolve.
 
"Not a man in the Legion
quit his post."

Helen
acknowledged him with a nod.
 
"That's
courage and loyalty, not compassion."

"True.
 
One night, a starving brat sneaked past the
sentries into camp, said he wanted to join the Legion.
 
Markson took him in, gave him some biscuit
and bacon.
 
Remember Markson,
lads?"

A somber murmur
of assent stirred the men.

"At dawn,
Markson was dead, his own knife buried in his throat.
 
The little turd vanished, along with Markson's purse."
 
Campbell spat off to the side of the road.
 
"What use have we for compassion?
 
Bloody lucky we are that he didn't report to
the rebels.
 
How they'd love to have
caught Colonel Tarleton when he was vulnerable."

"Just as
we'd love to find Sumter."
 
Davison
beamed.

Campbell moved
off, and Fairfax occupied the space beside her.
 
She kept her gaze on the road ahead.
 
Unmistakable, the superciliousness in his voice.
 
"Our conversation early this morning
inspired me to ponder your situation further.
 
I shall share my conjectures with you tonight."

"Generous
of you, but unnecessary."

He clucked his
tongue.
 
"You always have hated it
when I'm the correct one, dear sister."

He rode on
ahead.
 
Helen inhaled a deep breath of
horse sweat and incinerated homestead and coughed.

Noon, the party
paused to redistribute weight of baggage in the wagon.
 
Helen snagged Jonathan's elbow and towed him
far enough away for privacy.
 
"I
suspect that Badley and Prescott committed perjury, misappropriated assets from
Silas's will, and swindled Charles and me out of a considerable portion of the
estate."

Jonathan
studied her, his expression cool, before his gaze flicked over her shoulder to
their party at the road.
 
"Interesting.
 
That makes
sense of the more puzzling elements of this situation.
 
The scruples of both men are ambiguous
enough to render it plausible.
 
Did this
angle occur to you unassisted?"
 
He
pinned his gaze to hers.

Frost in his
eyes startled her.
 
"You dismiss
the idea as not credible?"

"I ask
that you evaluate the motivations of your source of inspiration.
 
You didn't arrive at your conclusion about
my affections unassisted, either.
 
Notice how comfortable you and I are with each other as a
result."

Helen felt her
expression stiffen and braced her fists on her hips.
 
"I suspect there was another will.
 
Maybe that's what Widow Hanley tried to communicate.
 
Hannah said Charles told his family that
Silas intended to provide for them.
 
Really, Jonathan, you're more than envious.
 
You're
jealous
, and I find that unappealing."

"I shall
be delighted to discuss your theory at length when we have time and
privacy.
 
But do consider the
source."
 
With a curt bow, he
headed for the horses.
 
She trailed
after in annoyance.

The party met
no one on the road.
 
The weight of loss
mounted upon Helen, and her soul grew more and more restless.
 
Late afternoon, they arrived at what was,
until a month earlier, Richardson's plantation.
 
The manor had been fine for those parts, with solid, brick
chimneys.
 
She fingered shards of a
blue-and-white porcelain tea service, dashed to pieces, probably while Widow
Richardson was forced to watch.
 
Remnants of a loom, ladder-back chairs, quilts slashed to pieces, and an
oil painting tangled in a mound that had burned in the front lawn and been
soaked to mush in a rain shower.
 
Helen
strolled in the family cemetery, paused at the grave of General Richardson —
who, from the inscription on his stone had been dead but a few months — and
wondered if he rested in peace.

She insisted on
sketching.
 
Without argument, Fairfax
moved her portmanteau and unloaded her campstool and desk.
 
They left her alone for half an hour and
waited out on the road.

Two hours
farther north in the dark, the bitter stink of destruction behind them, they
pitched camp just past the confluence of the Wateree and Congaree Rivers.
 
Exhausted from emotional tumult and lack of
sleep, Helen struggled to complete the entry before she forgot nuances of the
encounter with Francis Marion, the ambush, and the torched homes.
 
Multiple times, she intercepted intrusion of
her own bias.
 
Crossed-out words and
sentence fragments blotched pages.
 
Clambering over her mind to distract her was all that she
couldn't
write about: Silas's will, Jonathan, Fairfax, and David.

Roger had
refined his movement at musket drills.
 
When Davison showed him a few swings with his saber and placed it in his
hand, the locksmith looked so natural with it that Helen pictured him saddled,
wearing the green uniform and helmet of brown bear fur.
 
She glanced at Hannah.
 
What did the younger woman think about her
husband's dream come to life?
 
But
Hannah, who observed Davison and Roger, had her back to Helen.

The nightly
chess game proceeded with ill grace.
 
Five minutes into it, she heard the board pushed aside, and when she
peered back, Fairfax stood, his glare bored into Jonathan.
 
"I shall have you checkmated in three
moves.
 
You are again allowing me to
win.
 
I do not enjoy this
pandering.
 
Resume the previous position
with your piece, and play chess like a man.
 
Otherwise, I shan't engage you in the game again."

Without
hesitation, Jonathan slid the chessboard back into place and returned his castle
several squares to one side.
 
His
expression stony, Fairfax resumed his seat.

Helen continued
her journal entry.
 
War waged on the
chessboard for almost two hours.
 
During
the last half-hour, "Check" traded sides at least three times.
 
Eyes achy with fatigue, she'd sanded the
final page of the entry and was in the midst of a stretch and yawn when she
heard Jonathan's serene, "Checkmate."

In her
peripheral vision, Fairfax rose and bowed to Jonathan, who put up the chess set
and strolled off, his shoulders thrown back.
 
She gathered pen and ink and would have risen had Fairfax not sat beside
her on the bench facing the fire, elbows supported on his knees.
 
She deposited pragmatism in her tone.
 
"You
did
ask him not to restrain
himself this time."

"Hmm."
 
Fairfax stared into the fire, his voice soft
to prevent any dragoons from overhearing.
 
"I'm curious who Badley and Prescott hired to assist them in
swindling you."

Annoyance swept
over her, and she covered a yawn.
 
"
If
they swindled me," she whispered, "why does it
matter to you?
 
I'm fairly certain Silas
didn't will money to you."

He straightened
and swiveled on the bench to regard her.
 
"No upstart frontier merchant or country pettifogger should be
allowed to defraud a peer of the realm."

She felt color drain
from her face.
 
The class issue
again.
 
"This is America, not
Britain."

Incredulity
loaded his eyes.
 
"Did you dump
your peerage overboard during the crossing?
 
Sometimes I wonder."

She trod
treacherous ground.
 
"Now who has
the overly busy mind?
 
If they swindled
my husband's money, it's long gone.
 
However satisfying it might be to see them rot in jail, that wouldn't
bring back the money."