by Jane Feather
All around him was carnage as men fell before the enemy bayonets. Benedict saw de Kalb go down under a cavalry charge that at last broke the American ranks. A groan of despairing fury escaped Benedict’s lips as he finally accepted the overwhelming odds. “An organized retreat is all that is left to us,” he said to Charlie, who had been at his side throughout. “Although God knows how many of us are left to retreat.” He looked grimly around at the decimation. There could not be more than sixty men of Gates’s army left standing on the field.
But those sixty would leave in good order. The bugler sounded the retreat, and the Americans fell back, still fighting, but were not pursued beyond the field. All around them was a scene of devastation and confusion, bodies and weapons marking the path of the rout. Benedict, numbed by the sights he had already witnessed, thought only of Bryony now. She would have been much safer in Camden than in the path of the fleeing troops who might have swept her along to God knows where, if she had not been trampled underfoot.
He reached the camp and looked around in despair. A few women remained, their faces blank with shock, eyes stunned. Wagons were overturned, their contents spilled higgledy-piggledy; sacks of flour were split, pouring over sides of meat in a pathetic heap; mules were tugging at their tethers in search of uncropped ground.
Bryony came slowly down from her hillock, the baby in the crook of her arm, brushing hair away from her face in that characteristic gesture that twisted his heart. She looked ten years older, eyes haggard and deeply shadowed, shoulders sagging as she surveyed the wreckage. Then she saw him standing beside his horse and came running, tripping heedlessly over guy ropes and debris, yet maintaining her hold on the babe even as she threw herself into his arms.
As her cheek touched his, she felt the wetness of his tears and drew back slightly, looking into the haunted face. “Such carnage, sweeting,” he said softly as she stroked the tears from his cheeks with a caressing fingertip. “A slaughterhouse. We did not know we fought alone.”
“Even had you known, you still would have fought,” she said gently, running her salt-tipped finger over his lips. “Gates left hours ago on his racehorse.”
His face darkened and the tear-brightness of his eyes dried. “He has surrendered South Carolina to Cornwallis. There will be no organized resistance, so the fight must go underground again.”
“You will not follow the army?”
“What army?” he said with a sharp crack of disdainful laughter, looking around. “No, it is time to return to the backwoods.” He looked over her shoulder, saying with difficulty the words he knew he must say. “Will you go under flag of truce to Cornwallis? You will be safe, and he will restore you to your father.”
Bryony managed to produce a watery smile. “You said you would be rid of me if I broke rank again without permission. But I am still here, am I not? Your wife, when all is said and done.”
“My life.” He cupped her face with his battle-grimed, callused hands and she turned her lips into his palm.
A thin wail came from the burden in her arms and Benedict looked down. “Whose is this?”
Bryony shook her head in a gesture of defeat. “Her mother died of the fever a while ago. Her father could be anywhere—dead on the field, or in flight. I do not know what to do with her, except to take her with us.”
“An unweaned babe-in-arms! Lass, have some sense,” Benedict exclaimed, shaken out of bleak despondency by such an impossible suggestion. “We must hide by day and move by night. Wage war by stealth. It is no business for a woman, let alone for a child.”
“But what are we to do with her, then?” Bryony looked at him helplessly.
“Give her to me.” Charlie Carter stepped forward, and they both realized that he had been standing to one side, patiently waiting for the intensity of their reunion to abate. “I have a little money, and one of the women will be glad to take the child, I am certain, in exchange for coin.”
Bryony looked doubtful. “Are you certain that one can buy fair treatment for her, Charlie? It is a life’s burden you lay upon someone.”
“They would take her without pay,” Charlie replied quietly. “They take care of their own. But it would ease matters for many if there was payment for her keep.”
“I have some jewelry,” Bryony said swiftly.
“Keep your jewelry.” Ben stilled her hand, which had begun to grope beneath her petticoats. “Here, Charlie.” He handed him two gold sovereigns. “That should be enough.”
“Aye.” Charlie nodded and took the coins and then the baby. “You will wait for me?”
“Do you take this fight into the underbelly, then?” Ben asked, his eyes serious, holding the younger man’s gaze. “It is not clean fighting, Charlie. No heroics, no glory.”
“After what I have seen today!” Charlie spat on the ground. “I have no truck with heroics or glory. I will fight as it is necessary.”
“Very well, then. We will gather together supplies.”
“Where is John?” asked Bryony, reminded with a powerful stab of the laughing, redheaded forager.
“Cut down with de Kalb,” Ben said, the curt tone masking his grief. “He cannot have suffered. He was dead when I reached him.”
“Yes,” Bryony said. There was nothing else to say. Those who were left would continue the battle in whatever way was open to them, and they would fight, informed with the spirits of those who had died, so that their friends would not have died in vain.
Murdering bastards!” Benedict Clare surveyed the smoking ruins of the tiny hamlet in sick disgust. Picking up a large stone, he hurled it at a rooting hog, and Bryony turned her head away, retching. The hog had been feasting on human flesh. Unburied bodies lay in the gardens, along the cart track running through the center of the hamlet, stretched across doorways where they had fallen, blood blackened, the limbs twisted in rigid death, and flies rose in clouds in the warm September air.
“Ferguson’s lot again!” A bearded rifleman in leather jerkin and baggy britches spat disgustedly. “They’ve left nothing that could be carried away.”
Bryony wondered if her breakfast of goat’s milk and blackberries was going to remain in her belly. Somehow, she could not become inured to these sights, although she had seen plenty similar in the weeks since their band of frontiersmen, hunters, and riflemen had tracked the course of Major Patrick Ferguson’s Tories and Loyalist militia in his plundering sweep across western South Carolina.
Ben looked around, then said with resolution, “Well, let’s stick one or two pigs. There’s worse dinners than fresh pork.”
“You cannot!” Bryony stared in horror, her hand over her mouth. “They have been feeding on human flesh. We can’t eat them.”
Benedict spoke with his customary realism. “Lass, when one is hungry, one cannot afford to be too nice in one’s notions. If you choose not to eat it, no one will force you.” He took his knife from his belt, running his finger over the blade to test its keenness. “I used to chase pigs across the fields when I was a lad. It’s to be hoped I haven’t lost the skill. They’re the very devil to catch.”
An enormous bear of a man, his skin tanned to a deep mahogany, tough as leather after a lifetime in the Carolina hills, chuckled richly. “Let’s be at ’em, then!” The two men crept stealthily into the garden where the pig still snuffled and grunted. Bryony shuddered and turned away.
“Poor girl,” Charlie said with soft sympathy. “I don’t think he means to be unkind.”
“No, of course he doesn’t,” Bryony said swiftly. “And you have to admit, if it were up to me, we would all starve.” A reluctant smile glimmered in her eyes.
Charlie laughed. “Ben is so damnably competent,” he said. “How does he know how to stick pigs?”
Bryony shrugged. “I do not know, Charlie. For an Irish aristocrat, he possesses the oddest assortment of skills.” But then, Irish aristocrats were not usually sentenced to bondage, and they did not, in general, bear the marks of the whip upon their backs. The t
hought came and went as it often did. A shrill, piercing squeal came from the garden, and Bryony paled beneath the sun’s bronzing. “That’s the pig! They are hurting it.”
“Well, I don’t imagine it’s possible to avoid doing so,” Charlie said thoughtfully.
“Oh, I am being a fool! We are surrounded by dead people and I am concerning myself with a pig!” Angry tears clogged her voice and threatened to spill from her eyes. Bryony turned away abruptly. “I am going for a walk.”
The stench of corruption hung heavy over the hamlet, and soon the air was rent with more squeals as other members of the band followed Ben’s example and set about a slaughter that would provide much needed replenishment of their peripatetic larders. There had been many times in the last weeks when she had ached for home, for the time long gone when she had not known these horrors existed, had not believed what man was capable of doing to his fellows. But now she had seen gibbets by the paths, entire villages put to the torch, men and women staring sightless into the unfeeling blue sky. She had wept with exhaustion even as she put one foot in front of the other, wept with anger, wept with misery. More than once, she had turned on Benedict in her rage and wretchedness, blaming him for the horrors because he was a part of this dirty fight that seemed without honor on either side. Not once had he retaliated but had reacted with limitless patience, holding her until the storm had expended itself and she was cleansed and renewed.
Because he had borne her anger and her accusations with love and tenderness, had looked at her only with the eyes of love, and had touched her only with the touch of passion, she had put away from her those moments when the hatred that he bore someone … something … became focused on her. The business of living from minute to minute was raw enough without resurrecting old sores.
She walked down the mud-ridged cart track, keeping her eyes on the verge, where, incongruous in the midst of this charnel house, wildflowers massed in a profusion of blues and pinks, yellows and whites. A sudden movement behind a clump of bushes flickered across her vision. What could possibly be left alive among this carrion? Then she heard the sound. It was a human sound, part sob, part cry. Bryony pushed through the bushes and then stopped, staring.
A child—a ragged, tattered scrap of human flotsam—cowered in the grass. Brown eyes, huge in a pinched, dirty face, gazed at her in terror. His scrawny body and sticklike limbs poking through the torn shirt and britches were evidence of deprivation, as were the open sores and scabs where flies clustered. Bryony had been campaigning long enough to know what happened when flies found open wounds—the child would be crawling with maggots.
She dropped to the grass beside him. “Don’t be afraid. I am not going to hurt you.” There was no response. The terror-struck gaze remained unmoving. “Where do you live?” she asked gently. Again no response. “In the village?” she guessed, gesturing over the hedge. This time there was a barely perceptible nod. No one was alive in the village. The child must either have been left behind when his family fled, or somehow he escaped the slaughter. “What is your name?” She risked reaching out a hand to touch his arm, but the tiny figure recoiled as if he had been burned. What had he seen? she thought with a shudder of revulsion; it required little imagination to guess.
Nonplussed, she sat beside him, then almost instinctively picked a handful of daisies, piling them in her lap before beginning to thread them into a chain, not watching the child, who at least made no attempt to run from her. Perhaps he could not. “Are you hurt?” she asked in a casual tone, still not looking directly at him, although her eyes slid sideways. His head shook a negative. “Hungry?” Again her tone was casual, as if the question were of no real importance. There was an affirmative nod.
Bryony held up her daisy chain. “This is pretty, is it not?” She turned to smile at him. “But then, little boys don’t make daisy chains, do they?” There was no response, but she could sense the slight relaxation, a flicker of life in his eyes. “My name is Bryony.” She strung the chain around her neck. “It’s the name of a wildflower. Will you tell me your name?”
It was barely a whisper. “Ned.”
“Well, Ned, I think we had better find you something to eat.” Bryony stood up and reached down for the child’s hand. He shrank away, but this time she took the clawlike hand in a firm grasp. “You would like some bread and milk, would you not?” Their scrawny goat could be induced to produce another cupful, she thought. And there was half a loaf of barley bread that they had been saving for their supper.
The child came up as she pulled on his hand, but he hung back when she pushed through the bushes and took a step toward the village. “It’s all right,” she reassured. “No one will hurt you now.”
Benedict, wiping his bloody hands on the grass, looked along the cart track and saw a sight that made his heart sink. Bryony, some disreputable creature in tow, was striding along with the determined vigor that always spelled trouble. The baby at Camden had been the beginning. Ever since, she had been constantly collecting the living debris of this war. There had been starveling kittens and three-legged dogs, pregnant women who must be given food and coin, wandering children who must be found homes, which also required the outlay of coin. Ben’s financial resources were much depleted as a result of this philanthropy, but he could not find it in his heart to refuse her when her distress at what she saw and experienced was so vital a force.
“His name is Ned,” Bryony declared without preamble as she reached Ben. “He is half-starved and utterly petrified. I think he must have been in the village when this—” she gestured around her, searching for words, but none adequate came to mind “—when this happened. Can you imagine the effect on such a baby? He does not seem able to speak.”
Ben scratched his head, surveying the pathetic mite. “He needs cleaning up. Those sores will be infested.”
“I know. But I thought I would feed him first. It might help to ease his fear.”
“What are you going to give him?” He could not help a slight smile, even in the face of this further war-torn misery. Bryony was so very intense.
“The goat will yield a little more milk today, and we can spare the barley bread,” she said with determination.
“Then you will have to eat pork or go hungry, lass,” Ben pointed out with a quizzical lift of an eyebrow.
She shrugged. “I daresay I shall not regard it when the time comes. There are worse things.”
“Undoubtedly,” he agreed solemnly. “Well, see to your protégé. The pig has to be butchered, and we must bury these bodies before we go.”
It was two hours later before the band was ready to move on, their booty packed in haversacks, the dead buried in a deep communal pit that would deter the scavengers for a while. Ned still had not spoken a word, but he had consumed the bread and milk with a single-minded concentration, and had endured Bryony’s ministrations as she stripped off his rags and cleansed the worst of the dirt from him with water drawn from the village well. She had used a paste of wormwood on the open sores, which would kill the maggots and keep away further flies, then regarded her handiwork, frowning.
“Stay here, Ned. I will be but a minute.” Leaving the child by the well, she had gone in search of Ben, who was busy with the grisly business of burying the dead. “I don’t know what to put on him, Ben. His clothes are torn beyond repair.”
Ben had sighed. “Since we won’t be taking him farther than the next hamlet, Bryony, surely they will do?”
“If the next hamlet looks like this one, we’ll be taking him a lot farther.”
So little Ned, wrapped in a shirt of Ben’s, as if in swaddling clothes, was clutched tightly in Bryony’s arms when they left the hamlet and continued on their way in pursuit of Major Patrick Ferguson.
“You had better let me have him,” Ben said, after they had been walking for an hour and Bryony’s step was beginning to flag. He made to take the child, but Ned wailed in sudden terror and clung to Bryony, burying his face in her neck.
“It’s all right. I can manage.” Bryony smoothed the dirty thatch of hair in soothing fashion.
“I beg to differ,” Benedict said dryly. “Come along, Ned. Either you let me carry you, or you walk.” He pried the scrawny arms from Bryony’s neck and hitched the trembling boy onto his hip. “The sooner we find a home for this stray, the better.”
“We have seen nothing but wasteland,” Bryony said. “I do not understand it, Ben. Francis is with Ferguson. He would not be a party to such inhumane savagery. You know he would not. I broke bread with the major. My father called him friend. I cannot make my mind go around it….” She sighed. “I don’t know how to explain.”
“I understand,” he said, brushing a speck of dirt from her nose. “But in war, people behave in inconceivable ways.”
“Francis would not have been a party to this,” she repeated sturdily. “What are you doing to my nose?”
“I thought it was dirt.” He chuckled, attempting to deflect her train of thought. “But it’s only a freckle, it seems. You are so thoroughly bespeckled that there is barely a free centimeter.”
But Bryony was not to be deflected. “I suppose he may be dead.”
“Yes, he may well be.” Ben was never one to ease matters with prevarication.
Bryony said nothing further, just tramped at his side until the falling of dusk signaled the moment to make camp. These backwoodsmen and frontiersmen were expert at creating a degree of comfort out of the most unyielding surroundings. Fires sprang to life in a circle that allowed for privacy even as it offered companionship. Groups had formed long ago, and foraging, hunting, and cooking took place within them. But no one team would refuse to share with another less fortunate.
The minuscule addition to the Clares’ cluster of themselves, Charlie, and two burly, monosyllabic Carolinians remained mute, although his mouth opened to roast pig before he tumbled, still swaddled in the voluminous shirt, onto a pile of leaves and instantly fell asleep.
