Still she needed rest, for as minutes accumulated into an hour, two hours, her fingers cramped, and her shoulders ached. When her right hand fatigued, she attacked the left knot. When both hands fatigued, she slumped forward, trying to ignore her growling stomach, dry throat, and pressured bladder.
Once, about eight-thirty or nine, the faint voice of Tom calling her name roused her from drowse. "Tom!" Her voice emerged a croak. She coughed to clear her throat. "Tom! In the cellar! Tom! Tom!" She listened but heard no response. He'd moved out of range. Despair sullied her determination. With a snarl, she shoved desolation away, returning to the knots.
Exhausted an hour later, she realized the right knot was beginning to open. Muscle spasms coursed through her arm and up the side of her neck. Her wrist and palm were rubbed raw. She had to rest. She dozed, lost track of the time.
When she awakened, she returned to the right knot, probing its structure. What time was it, midnight? Over and over, she traced her fingers along the knot's mysteries, not understanding what fed one strand until she happened to move her left hand, and the whole mess on the right side moved with it. Just as with Emma, Fairfax had left a rope connection between her hands. That meant she'd have to untie both hands before getting either free.
Wearied again, she allowed herself to doze before returning to work, this time with the fingers of her left hand probing the other knot. Her left wrist and palm gained intimate knowledge of the spiky fibers imbedded in the rope. Shoulder cramps and the needling pain intensified and slowed her. She dozed and wakened, dozed and wakened. Whenever she could, she kept after the knot, long into the nightmarish night, long after the passage of time had ceased to flow in units she recognized.
The left knot loosened. Then, with both knots open, lacking just the unraveling of the rope between them, she heard the door to the cellar scrape open. Blinking into lantern light, she caught her breath, fear soaring into her throat. Oh, gods, no, it couldn't be so! With only five minutes longer, she'd have freed herself.
"Betsy? Are you down here?"
She gasped. "Tom!" She coughed. "Tom, yes, over here!"
He clambered down the stairs, a lantern held above him, and drew up, dumbfounded, at the sight of her bound to the chair. "Oh, my god. Oh, Betsy!" Knife drawn, he rushed forward and set down the lantern so he could cut her bonds. He dragged her up out of the chair and crushed her to him. From the confines of the chair, every joint in her body ached, and every muscle trembled with fatigue.
He bore her weight while she stretched limbs, restored circulation, found her footing. Then, after sheathing his knife, he took her face in his hands and kissed her eyelids, cheeks, mouth, and chin. "I thought I'd lost you, oh, my sweet Betsy. Who on earth did this to you?" He felt the tremor shoot through her and set her back at arms' length, stepping on the rose in the process. A snarl curdled his handsome face. He snatched up the rose and flung it. "I swear to god, I'll kill the maggot."
"Please, let's just leave here. I don't know when he'll be back."
He grabbed the lantern and caught her about the waist to help her ascent. Outside, frogs and crickets lauded night. She sucked in lungfuls of air that didn't smell of wine or conquest. By the light of a moon one night past full, she visited the vault and relieved her aching bladder.
A single candle burned in the dining room, where Hattie embraced her and set food before her. "Child, yo' man tried to get some help searching fo' you, but them soldiers was all too busy."
Tom read the blankness on Betsy's face. "The redcoats marched north last night to engage the Continentals."
"Last night? What time is it now?" Betsy crammed buttered cornbread in her mouth.
"Just on four in the morning."
"I've been down in the cellar almost twelve hours."
"Tied up all that time? You poor thing. An' poor Mistuh Tom, wishing he'd a thought to check the cellar earlier." Hattie's gaze took in Betsy's reddened wrists, and she scowled. "Who would do such a thing to a woman with child?"
Tom slammed his fist on the table. "A dung-eating pig."
Betsy covered his fist with hers, seeing the opportunity to explain their departure. "Hattie, a crazed British lieutenant is trying to kill me. Tom and I had intended to sneak out of Camden late yesterday, but I was captured and imprisoned in the cellar. He must have marched out with Cornwallis. Perhaps that's why my life was spared long enough for Tom to find me. We must leave before dawn. Will you wrap up some food for both of us?"
"Yes, but where are you goin'?"
She firmed her jaw. "To a safe place to have my baby."
With a curt nod of her head, the slave turned away to the beef roast on the counter and sliced pieces of it. "This here ain't no place to be havin' a baby, that's fo' sure. Hattie'll get a couple meals ready fo' you."
"Thank you. Where's my cousin?"
"Here." Wraithlike, Emma drifted from the darkened common room, her fingers plucking at the bodice of her bedgown. She flicked a haughty glance from Tom to Betsy. "I heard what you said." She paused. "At least remain until my husband returns."
Betsy held Emma's gaze. "He won't be returning. He kept the wrong company."
Emma's lips trembled. "Then stay and help me. You wanted to manage the ledger. It's yours. I'll help you and Tom find a home in Camden, a lovely house. But please don't leave me."
Betsy wondered how many men Emma had smitten with that pathetic, helpless look. Not that she herself was beyond being moved by her cousin's plight, but running the tavern wasn't her problem anymore. She said in a quiet voice, "My first duty is to my unborn, making sure the baby is birthed in peace and quiet. There will be neither in Camden for awhile. I must move on."
Emma choked out a sob of despair. Then she swept past them, seized her bottle of laudanum from the windowsill, and ran upstairs. After her passage, Hattie averted her gaze to the meat she'd been carving. "Well, what you waitin' fo? You folks got to go. Finish up yo' meal. Get yo'selves packed."
Chapter Forty-Two
BY THE TIME they'd transferred everything downstairs and begun loading the horses, the eastern sky was paling on a muggy, warm day. Betsy handed one of the last bundles to Tom. "In the cellar, Fairfax and I witnessed a meeting of the Ambrose spy ring. Adam Neville is Ambrose. He's a double agent. He figured out that I led Fairfax to the spy ring. He's ordered his men to kill me — and kill Clark, should he try to warn me."
Even in the darkness she saw worry on Tom's face deepen. "Good god." He strapped the bundle on the packhorse.
"One of the Ambrose ring could be stationed at the ferry across the Wateree."
"Agreed. Shall we make for Charles Town, then?"
She considered. "If I remember the map correctly, the rebels are camped off the Waxhaws Road, almost due north. The first route we'd selected, the one that parallels the Wateree — doesn't it branch to the northwest well south of the rebel camp?"
"Yes, it does, south of Log Town, in fact."
"Let us ride northwest, then. With luck, we shall slip past all of them to the west."
"All right. I'm willing to give it a try."
They led the packhorse from the stable. Her gaze shifted north. She blinked. "Did you see that just now? It looked like lightning, except that it — oh, look, there it is again."
Tom studied the northern sky. Intermittent flashes painted the horizon scarlet. Beneath their feet the earth vibrated. He walked several steps away for a view unblocked by trees. Disbelief etched his face at the light display. "It isn't lightning. It's cannon fire."
She grimaced. Cornwallis and Gates had found each other.
Tom strode back to the stable, snagging her elbow on the way. "Regardless of who wins that battle, we'll be mired in heavy traffic on the road this morning if we don't ride ahead of it now."
When they finished balancing the loads on the horses ten minutes later, the eastern sky smoldered with sunrise. The northern horizon had quieted. Tom helped her mount Lady May and handed up her loaded musket. Then he climbed in
to his horse's saddle and adjusted his musket and reins.
They headed north. She wished she could have felt enthusiastic about riding away from the month in hell, but her womb had begun to ache. Violence rippled the air ahead, expanding in all directions, dragging down her mood. Somewhere to the north, hundreds of men and horses surely lay dead or dying upon a battlefield, their spirits whispering for her to beware. She and Tom weren't safe yet. Before the morning was spent, disaster had plenty of time to seek them out.
***
The soldier at the blockade apologized. "We've troops patrolling all up and down the Wateree with orders to allow none but His Majesty's forces access to the road."
Betsy gazed with longing at the northwest road, her head fuzzy with exhaustion, and heard her frustration echoed in Tom's voice. "Trying to prevent rebels access to their men in Fort Cary, eh?" He indicated the Waxhaws road. "May we travel north?"
Another redcoat blocking the road spread his hands. "I advise against it. We saw cannon fire that way not half an hour ago. Been a great battle six or seven miles north. We've no word yet on the outcome, but you might be taking yourselves into peril."
"That's right," said the third soldier. "Even if you miss having your head torn off by a cannonball or a bayonet stabbed through your guts, scavengers come in after battle, help themselves to whatever they find. Rebel scavengers would be animals. I hear they haven't eaten in a week."
"They're so hungry they'd eat your flesh."
"While you're still breathing and conscious."
Betsy almost smiled at the young men. Gruesome their suggestions might be, but they were doing their job, trying to dissuade civilians from taking a questionable route.
Tom's lips pinched. "I don't suppose we want to be caught in a retreat back to Log Town, either."
"Retreat?" The first soldier drew up in indignation. "Lord Cornwallis wouldn't retreat."
"No, sir, he didn't march out of here last night to retreat. He marched out to shove war down the throats of seven thousand scummy rebels."
Tom's jaw hung slack. "Seven thousand?"
"Outnumbered three to one, and still he marched north. He's a lion." Pride glowed in the soldier's smile.
The three soldiers appeared to reconsider Cornwallis's odds. Then the first man inclined his head toward Tom. "You're right, sir, getting caught in a retreat wouldn't be jolly fun."
Tom exhaled. "We need to reach Charlotte Town."
"Wait a few days. Let all this settle down."
"Or take our chances on the Waxhaws Road today." Tom motioned Betsy closer. "This road connects with the road west."
She glanced from the soldiers to Tom, aware that the redcoats were attentive to their conversation, knowing that she and Tom had to make it sound convincing. "How much delay will we encounter on that route?"
"Perhaps an hour or two."
"Is that all?"
Tom shifted in his saddle. "Under ideal circumstances. As this fine soldier informed us, ideal circumstances probably don't lie ahead."
"If the rebels hold the ferry south of town, we cannot get past that way. Cousin Mary will be worried if we don't show." She rubbed her pregnant belly for emphasis.
"Let's head north, then. If it looks bad, we'll return to Camden and wait it out."
Or try to sneak west from one road to the other, perhaps, and skirt the action. Betsy flashed Tom a smile. "Very well, dear, let us try that course."
The soldiers stepped aside, their expressions doubtful. "Luck to you folks."
Tom tipped his cocked hat at the fellow in charge. "Thank you, gentlemen." He and Betsy clicked their tongues and headed the horses north at an easy trot. When they'd ridden a quarter mile, past several bends in the sandy road, he signaled for her to ride alongside him, his posture in the saddle conveying their need for wariness.
The eastern sky brightened over thinning pine barrens, and Betsy noticed the absence of birdsong and morning scamper from squirrels. About six o'clock, she sniffed the air. "Black powder and wood smoke."
"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."
The Blacksmith's Daughter: A Mystery of the American Revolution Page 30
