North and South Trilogy

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by John Jakes




  The North and South Trilogy

  John Jakes

  CONTENTS

  North and South

  Prologue: Two Fortunes

  Book One: Answer the Drum

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Book Two: Friends and Enemies

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Book Three: “The Cords That Bind Are Breaking One by One”

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Book Four: March Into Darkness

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Afterword

  Love and War

  Prologue: Ashes of April

  Book One: A Vision From Scott

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Book Two: The Downward Road

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Book Three: A Worse Place Than Hell

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Book Four: “Let Us Die to Make Men Free”

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Book Five: The Butcher’s Bill

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Book Six: The Judgments of the Lord

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Afterword

  Heaven and Hell

  Prologue: The Grand Review, 1865

  Book One: Lost Causes

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Book Two: A Winter Count

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Book Three: Banditti

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapt
er 37

  Chapter 38

  Book Four: The Year of the Locust

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Book Five: Washita

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Book Six: The Hanging Road

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Book Seven: Crossing Jordan

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Epilogue: The Plain, 1993

  Afterword

  A Biography of John Jakes

  Copyright

  North and South

  The North and South Trilogy (Book One)

  John Jakes

  In memory of

  Jonathan Daniels

  Islander, Southerner, American, Friend

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Two Fortunes

  Book One: Answer the Drum

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Book Two: Friends and Enemies

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Book Three: “The Cords That Bind Are Breaking One by One”

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Book Four: March Into Darkness

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Afterword

  Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.

  Psalm 88

  Prologue:

  Two Fortunes

  1686: The Charcoal Burner’s Boy

  “THE LAD SHOULD TAKE my name,” Windom said after supper. “It’s long past time.”

  It was a sore point with him, one he usually raised when he’d been drinking. By the small fire, the boy’s mother closed the Bible on her knees.

  Bess Windom had been reading to herself as she did every evening. From watching her lips move, the boy could observe her slow progress. When Windom blurted his remark, Bess had been savoring her favorite verse in the fifth chapter of Matthew: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

  The boy, Joseph Moffat, sat with his back against a corner of the chimney, whittling a little boat. He was twelve, with his mother’s stocky build, broad shoulders, light brown hair, and eyes so pale blue they seemed colorless sometimes.

  Windom gave his stepson a sullen look. A spring rain beat on the thatch roof. Beneath Windom’s eyes, smudges of charcoal dust showed. Nor had he gotten the dust from under his broken nails. He was an oafish failure, forty now. When he wasn’t drunk, he cut wood and smoldered it in twenty-foot-high piles for two weeks, making charcoal for the small furnaces along the river. It was dirty, degrading work; mothers in the neighborhood controlled their errant youngsters with warnings that the charcoal man would get them.

  Joseph said nothing, just stared. Windom didn’t miss the tap-tap of the boy’s index finger on the handle of his knife. The boy had a high temper. Sometimes Windom was terrified of him. Not just now, though. Joseph’s silence, a familiar form of defiance, enraged the stepfather.

  Finally Joseph spoke. “I like my own name.” He returned his gaze to his half-carved coracle.

  “By God, you cheeky whelp,” Windom cried in a raspy voice, overturning his stool as he lunged toward the youngster.

  Bess jumped between them. “Let him be, Thad. No true disciple of our Savior would harm a child.”

  “Who wants to harm who? Look at him!”

  Joseph was on his feet and backed against the chimney. The boy’s chest rose and fell fast. Unblinking, he held the knife at waist level, ready to slash upward.

  Slowly Windom opened his fist, moved away awkwardly, and righted his stool. As always, when fear and resentment of the boy gripped him, it was Bess who suffered. Joseph resumed his seat by the fire, wondering how much longer he could let it go on.

  “I’m sick of hearing about your blessed Lord,” Windom told his wife. “You’re always saying He’s going to exalt the poor man. Your first husband was a fool to die for that kind of shit. When your dear Jesus shows up to dirty His hands helping me with the charc, then I’ll believe in Him, but not before.”

  He reached down for the green bottle of gin.

  Later that night, Joseph lay tense on his pallet by the wall, listening to Windom abuse his mother with words and fists behind the ragged curtain that concealed their bed. Bess sobbed for a while, and the boy dug his nails into his palms. Presently Bess made different sounds, moans and guttural exclamations. The quarrel had been patched up in typical fashion, the boy thought cynically.

  He didn’t blame his poor mother for wanting a little peace and security and love. She’d chosen the wrong man, that was all. Long after the hidden bed stopped squeaking, Joseph lay awake, thinking of killing the charcoal burner.

  He would never take his stepfather’s name. He could be a better man than Windom. His defiance was his way of expressing faith in the possibility of a better life for himself. A life more like that of Andrew Archer, the ironmaster to whom Windom had apprenticed him two years ago.

  Sometimes, though, Joseph was seized by dour moods in which he saw his hopes, his faith, as so much foolish daydreaming. What was he but dirt? Dirty of body, dirty of spirit. His clothes were never free of the charcoal dust Windom brought home. And though he didn’t understand the crime for which his father had suffered and died in Scotland, he knew it was real, and it tainted him.

  “Blessed are they which are persecuted …” No wonder it was her favorite verse.

  Joseph’s father, a long-jawed, unsmiling farmer whom he remembered only dimly, had been an unyielding Covenanter. He had bled to death after many app
lications of the thumbscrew and the boot, in what Bess called the killing time: the first months of the royal governorship of the Duke of York, the same man who had lately been crowned James II. The duke had sworn to root out the Presbyterians and establish episcopacy in the country long troubled by the quarrels of the deeply committed religious and political antagonists.

  Friends had rushed to Robert Moffat’s farm to report the owner’s gory death in custody and to warn his wife to flee. This she did, with her only son, barely an hour before the arrival of the duke’s men, who burned all the buildings on the property. After months of wandering, mother and son reached the hills of south Shropshire. There, as much from weariness as anything else, Bess decided to stop her running.

  The wooded uplands south and west of the meandering Severn River seemed suitably rustic and safe. She rented a cottage with the last of the money she had carried out of Scotland. She took menial jobs and in a couple of years met and married Windom. She even pretended to have adopted the official faith, for although Robert Moffat had infused his wife with religious fervor, he hadn’t infused her with the courage to continue to resist the authorities after his death. Her faith became one of resignation in the face of misery.

  A spineless and worthless faith, the boy soon concluded. He would have none of it. The man he wanted to imitate was strong-minded Archer, who lived in a fine mansion on the hillside above the river and the furnace he owned.

  Hadn’t old Giles told Joseph that he had the wits and the will to achieve that kind of success? Hadn’t he said it often lately?

  Joseph believed Giles much of the time. He believed him until he looked at the charcoal dust under his own nails and listened to the other apprentices mocking him with cries of “Dirty Joe, black as an African.”

  Then he would see his dreams as pretense and laugh at his own stupidity until his pale eyes filled with shameful but unstoppable tears.

  Old Giles Hazard, a bachelor, was one of the three most important men at the Archer ironworks. He was in charge of the finery, the charcoal forge in which cast-iron pigs from the furnace were re-melted to drive off an excess of carbon and other elements which made cast iron too brittle for products such as horseshoes, wheel rims, and plow points. Giles Hazard had a gruff voice and a bent for working his men and apprentices like slaves. He had lived within a ten-minute walk of the furnace all his life and had gone to work there at age nine.

  He was a short, portly fellow, possessed of immense energy despite his weight. Physically, he might have been a much older version of Joseph. Perhaps that was one reason he treated the boy almost like a son.

  Another reason was that Joseph learned quickly. Joseph had come to Giles’s attention last summer, about the time he was beginning his second year at Archer’s. Giles had been discussing the apprentices with the man in charge of the furnace. The man had bragged about how nimbly Joseph worked his way around the sand trough, where bright molten iron flowed out to many smaller, secondary troughs that resembled piglets suckling on the mother sow. The look of the main and secondary troughs had long ago led to the name “pig iron” for the finished castings.

 

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