Chase the Dawn (45 page)

“There are more ways than one of skinning a cat,” Ben mused. Bryony abandoned her needlework. Her fingers were trembling too much. She clasped her hands firmly in her lap and waited for Benedict to share his thoughts.

“Ben! Ben! Look what I got!” The excited shriek came first, the small body catapulting through the bushes in its wake. Ned, tripping over the bottom of the shirt that Bryony had managed to cut but had not yet got around to hemming, rushed over to them, his hands clasped to his scrawny chest.

Putting thoughts of battle strategy behind him in the face of this clearly more urgent matter, Benedict said, “What have you got there?”

“Look!” The child extended his cupped hands, a delighted beam on the dirty little face.

“Oh, it’s a lizard.” Ben gave the captive due consideration. “What do you intend doing with it?”

“Eat it,” the child replied matter-of-factly. In his recent experience, the acquisition of animals meant supper.

Bryony choked, her eyes meeting Ben’s amused glance over the boy’s head. “I don’t think it has enough meat on it, Ned,” Ben said seriously. “Lizards are a bit bony.”

“Oh.” Ned’s face fell. “Could put it in the pot.”

“Well …”

“No!” Bryony cried when it looked as if Ben was about to agree to the suggestion, presumably on the grounds that so many things went into the pot, what difference would a little lizard make? “I refuse to eat reptiles.”

“You ate snake the other day,” Charlie pointed out.

“I did not!” She glared with growing suspicion around the circle of laughing faces.

“I’m afraid you did,” Ben said. “And pronounced it very tasty.”

“Sometimes, Benedict Clare, I dislike you intensely.” Bryony stood up, smoothing down her faded dimity print skirt. “Don’t you dare put that lizard in the pot.” She stalked off, hearing their laughter behind her. Her annoyance died fairly rapidly as she strolled around the camp. What did it matter if they made fun of her once in a while? She didn’t really mind and knew that sometimes, like just now, the teasing provided an outlet when tensions or excitement were running high. It was probably the last laugh any of them would have until the grisly business that had brought them so many miles was completed. If any of them were left alive to laugh.

She tried to shake off the thought. They were all sworn to see Ferguson and his men dead or prisoners. There would be little quarter offered those who fell into the hands of these enraged Carolinians. But Ferguson’s army was well trained and had never been accused of lacking in bravery, and they held the superior position, even if they were trapped in it.

“Bryny … Bryny …” Ned’s shrill accents interrupted the unpleasant reverie. Since the boy had found his voice again, his incessant chatter continued every
waking minute. He did not really seem to mind if there was no audience beyond birds and flies, and his imperative shrieks for either Ben or Bryony were constantly heard.

She waited for him to reach her, then asked, smiling, “What did you do with the lizard?”

The little face screwed up with intense concentration. “Ben says we’re not goin’ to eat it, so you can come back. Charlie says he didn’t mean to tease you.”

“What a splendid messenger you are,” Bryony said, taking his hand, and they walked back to their campfire.

“Still cross?” Ben stood up as she reached him, tilting her chin to plant a kiss on her freckled nose.

“You are quite horrid sometimes,” she declared, trying to maintain her severity. “Did I really eat snake?”

“Do you really want to know?” He laughed.

“Probably not.” Bryony sighed. “There is much that I do not think I wish to know, but that I must.”

“For instance?” The laughter had left the black eyes, his gravity matching hers.

“How you intend skinning this particular cat—and when—and what Ned and I are to do while you go about it.”

“You and Ned, sweeting, will stay in the village,” he said. “The people have no love for Ferguson and his bandits, and you will be quite safe.”

“When?”

“We leave before dawn and attack at first light.” As usual, Ben answered her questions with no wasted words and, as usual, he would offer her no false comfort, no promises that he could not be certain of keeping.

It was still dark when the band of nine hundred stamped out their fires, shouldered their rifles, and
slipped through the trees to the base of the mountain that formed a natural fortress for the enemy. The gray October dawn saw them swarming up the mountainside, taking their lessons from Indian strategies that they had learned painfully over the years. Expert marksmen to a man, they hid behind trees, firing with deadly accuracy into the Tory/Loyalist lines as they charged, bayonets poised. The backwoodsmen fell back beneath the charges, only to re-form and press ever closer to the camp, forcing Ferguson’s lines backward, his men dropping like flies beneath the sniping fire.

“By God! We have them on the run,” Charlie exclaimed, dashing the sweat from his eyes as he joined the wave of men breaking from cover to surge across the field, firing as they raced forward, overrunning the Tory lines. For a minute there was chaos as the two forces mingled, trampling over the dead and wounded, trying to sort themselves out; voices yelled orders, screamed pleas, roared in savage fury as bayonets slashed and rifles cracked.

“A surrender flag,” Benedict gasped as two white flags appeared out of the tumult, waving forlornly above the bloody field. “By God, he’s surrendering.”

Then the flags vanished as Patrick Ferguson cut them down with his sword. Bellowing defiance, he charged down the field, riding directly at the American forces standing massed in his way. Fifty men raised fifty rifles, leveling them at the figure. A volley exploded and the major fell from his horse, quite literally shot to pieces.

Benedict Clare thought for a fleeting instant of the time when he had sat at table with the major, had shared a toast. Then a great roar went up as white flags again appeared, this time to remain fluttering in the cold, early-morning
mountain air. The battle had taken one hour, and the field was littered with bodies bearing Tory uniforms and Loyalist insignia.

Francis Cullum drifted in and out of pain. When it came, it was too intense to be endured, and he would sink into oblivion, returning to his senses but to a confused awareness of the hard ground beneath him, the misty blue of the sky above, the sounds that could have come from hell’s inferno—men pleading for water, for surcease; men cursing in broken voices; men weeping. There was a great heaviness on his chest, as if someone had rolled a boulder onto him, and when he breathed, a funny bubbling sound came forth and he did not seem able to draw sufficient air to satisfy his body’s craving. Clearly, he was going to die, he thought with calm detachment. He had been seeking death in this war, after all. But somehow he had not envisaged this reality. Did it have to be in this manner? So slowly and so lonely. Then he heard a voice—a voice from the past, piercing the fog that was coming to claim him again. He opened his mouth and thought he said the name. “Clare.” But then the fog came and he did not know whether he had spoken or not.

Benedict heard his name, or something approximating it. It had come forth as a weak croak from somewhere below him. He looked down. The band he had marched with and fought with showed no interest in the wounded. They would leave them on the field to die or to be cared for by any who chose to come among them. The living were their main concern. Seven hundred of them were to be herded and marched off in captivity, back into the mountains. When he saw Francis Cullum, his first thought was that he was dead, that he had to be
dead with such a wound in his chest. Then he saw the eyelids flicker.

He dropped to his knees beside him, feeling for a pulse. It was there, but fast and feeble. “Charlie?” He beckoned to the younger man, who was standing, surveying the devastation, the look on his face so clearly expressing grim satisfaction—they were revenged for Camden and for all those left dead in Ferguson’s wake. “I want to get this man down the mountain,” Ben said. “I do not know if he will survive being moved, but he will not survive here.”

“Why bother?” Charlie knelt beside him. “Throw him in the pit with the others.”

“You do not combat gratuitous savagery with its like.” It was a cold rebuke from a man who knew its truth, and Charlie felt the blood rush hot to his cheeks.

“Clare?” Francis spoke with sudden clarity, startling them both. “Thought I heard your voice.” His eyes closed again. “How is Bri?”

“Well,” Ben said. “Do not talk. I am going to take you to her.”

“You … you … know him?” Charlie stuttered.

Ben tore off his shirt and began to roll it into a flat oblong. “He is a childhood friend of Bryony’s. Now help me lift him so that I may bind his chest with this. It may serve to keep the wound closed.” Charlie obeyed the rapid instructions without further demur. They fashioned a rough stretcher from material they found within the Tory camp and together bore the now unconscious Francis down the mountain.

Bryony had left the village the minute the firing had started and taken up a position at the base of Kings Mountain. She had left Ned behind with a motherly soul
who had enticed him with the promise of gingerbread. It was impossible to tell what had happened until news of the resounding defeat was brought down the mountain by local lads who had followed the frontier force. Bryony, without further reflection, set off up the slope at a run. There were casualties on the American side, she knew, although her jubilant informant had said nary a one compared with the slaughter of the butcher’s men.

It was a chilly autumnal morning, and the sun had not the power to warm the mountain air, but the sweat was trickling down her rib cage and plastering her hair to her brow when Benedict saw her clambering at great speed up the mountainside toward him, hampered by her skirts and her ill-shod feet. He wondered whether remonstrance would be a worthwhile exercise and decided that it would not. The minute his back was turned, she went where she chose, as she had done since the night she had followed him to the armory and warned them of the redcoats.

“You are safe!” Breathlessly, she came up to them, smiling mistily. “I could not wait below … not when I heard that the battle was won.”

“So I see,” was all he allowed himself to say. He did not allow himself to touch her, either, and saw that she also held back, as if just the moment of reunion was precious enough and sufficient unto itself, after the agonizing uncertainty when the image of his death was as real as the memory of his presence.

Then she dragged her eyes from his, smiled at Charlie, including him in her joy, before their burden intruded on her consciousness. The color left her face. “Francis?”

“He is sore wounded,” Ben said swiftly. “We must take him to the village.”

“Yes. I’ll go ahead and make preparations.” She turned immediately, then stopped with her back to him. “Will he live, Ben?”

“I do not think so,” he said quietly; there were things he would not tell her, but he would never lie to her. Her back was still and straight, her head slightly bowed so that her neck curved, open and vulnerable, and he ached to hold her through the grief. But then she raised her head, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and went ahead of them, running down the mountainside.

The woman in the cottage where Bryony had left Ned raised her eyebrows at the request that she receive under her roof a wounded Tory, but the pain that stood out in the younger woman’s eyes could not be denied, and she gestured to the bedstead that stood against the kitchen wall. “Ye can lay him there.”

Ned crept into the inglenook when Ben and Charlie appeared in the doorway, the stretcher between them. There was fear and dread in the kitchen where before there had been the hot fragrance of gingerbread; rich, embracing laughter when he had said or done something that seemed to amuse; hands that stroked or patted carelessly. Now it was like it had been when the soldiers had come and his mother’s eyes had opened wide in terror and his father had cried out. As he had done then, he hid in the far corner of the fireplace, so close to the fire that it scorched his cheek, and he closed his mouth tight, lest a betraying sound should come forth.

Francis was laid as gently as possible on the bedstead, but all the care in the world could not prevent the groan of anguish as he returned to consciousness. Bryony knelt beside him, her eyes filled with pain at her own helplessness. One look at the wound had told her that
Ben had been correct. There was nothing they could do but attempt to ease his death and make it a little less lonely.

“Bri?” A tiny smile cracked his lips. “Said we’d have another farewell.”

“Yes, you did. I have remembered it all this time,” she replied, laying a damp cloth on his brow, taking his hand, trying not to squeeze too tightly. “But I was sure you could not be with Ferguson’s force.”

Pain scudded across his face. “Such savagery, Bri.” He coughed, and she wiped the bubble of blood from his lips, watching despairingly as the bright fountain welled from his chest to soak the makeshift bandage.

“Do not talk, Francis.”

“I must while I can. If it hastens death, then I am not sorry.” He sounded stronger, as if marshaling those resources that remained hidden until the ultimate need. “I tried to stop it, Bri … but …”

“How could one in a thousand stop it?” she said soothingly. “I have always known you could not have been a part of it.”

His lips twisted in a grimace of disgust. “I was a part of it because I was there.”

“In war, things happen that one cannot prevent or even mitigate.” It was Ben who spoke in quiet compassion for the dilemma he understood so well. It was a dilemma that had nothing to do with the causes and principles for which one fought—it had to do with the simple facts of warfare.

“My thanks for those kind words.” Francis coughed again, and the self-directed cynicism in the green eyes was vanquished by suffering. His eyes closed and there was silence in the small, hot room. Bryony blinked back
her tears. They would not help Francis, and she would not indulge in weeping while he was still here to see and be sorry for it.