King's Mountain

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “My brother Valentine has said that the battle was a rout, but he gave me little of the particulars.”

  Shelby waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, they were outnumbered, sick from trying to eat green corn, and footsore from the long march. It is not the battle that I wished to speak of. It is the aftermath. They say that Gates left the battlefield at a gallop. Major Davie was on his way to the battle with a small group of reinforcements, when—ten miles from Camden—he encountered a rider in full flight, heading north. Davie says that Gates ordered him to turn back, to which the major replied that his men were ready to fight against Tarleton, despite his reputation as a butcher. General Gates looked back as if he expected to see all the devils of hell in pursuit of him, and then he spurred his horse and sped on northward.”

  “Gates abandoned the army?”

  Shelby shrugged. “What was left of it. We had nearly four thousand men on the field at Camden, and General Cornwallis claimed that his men had killed a quarter of that number and wounded another quarter. Meanwhile, as these men lay maimed or dying at Camden, their illustrious commander rode more than a hundred and eighty miles in just three days, and fetched up in Hillsborough.”

  There were so many thoughts crowding my brain that I seized upon one at random and said it aloud. “General Gates … He is not a young man, is he?”

  “He is past fifty. You may consider that ride an admirable feat for a man of his age, but as behavior for a general it is monstrous.”

  “And is he still in Hillsborough?”

  “The last word that I had said he was there with the few hundred survivors of his folly at Camden, trying to reassemble an army. If you are thinking of appealing to Gates for help—”

  “Not after what you’ve said,” I assured him. “It sounds as if we are on our own. But we cannot do it alone, you know, Shelby. Not just with your militia and mine. We haven’t enough men.”

  “No, but people look up to you, Colonel Sevier. If I can tell people that you are with us, then the rest will come. You can raise at least a hundred men or so, can’t you?”

  “Yes, but you know it will take more than numbers. If you propose to march a few hundred men down to Ninety Six, or wherever the fight will be, then you’ll need powder and shot, rations, supplies … It takes a deal of money to grease the wheels of a war wagon.”

  “Yes, it does indeed, but no one will give us the money until we have the army. We’ll cross that bridge farther along. What I need to know right now is—will you come?”

  I considered it. “So Ferguson threatens to bring the war to us.”

  “Yes. That’s the nub of it. I do not think any of us has a choice of whether or not to fight. You can only decide whether you want to do it in the low country or”—he pointed to the sunlit lawn beyond the window—“there.”

  “Where are the armies now? Do you know?”

  “Lord Cornwallis and Banastre Tarleton are thought to be in Charlotte, but Major Ferguson was headed for Gilbert Town, and we deem it likely that he is still there in the foothills burning and thieving his way to converting the people to his side. I don’t want him here.”

  “No. It was good of him to warn us, though. I wonder why he did.”

  “It’s peculiar, isn’t it? I can only assume that he meant to frighten us into submission.”

  We looked at each other and laughed. “He doesn’t know us very well, does he?”

  VIRGINIA SAL

  I joined up with him that summer, a week or so after Ramsour’s Mill. Some of the folk hereabouts would take umbrage at my doing that, for they were saying that the British were only trying to keep us from being free, but I never had any time for wrangling about politics. I reckon I will still have to chop wood and boil water no matter who is in charge of the country. I listened to all the arguing, though—you could hardly help it unless you was to sit off by yourself the livelong day, which I had neither the means nor the leisure to do. I kept my opinions to myself, but hearing both sides of the wrangle day in and day out, I saw the most sense in those that held with keeping our ties with England. Maybe it’s all right for those folk in the big cities by the ocean to harp on being independent, but here we are in the hill country, a few far-flung farms and patchwork fields hewed out of a tangle of forest that goes on forever. Who is to save us if the Indians make another war? Or if the Spanish should decide to come north? If that was to happen, I reckon most folk around here would go down on their knees and beg the British to stay.

  Anyhow, I did like the look of that fellow I saw commanding the Loyalist troops in these parts.

  I caught a glimpse of him from afar as his regiment went marching down the road one day. Some of the men had on the scarlet coats of the regular army, and they made a fine show on their horses, with their swords and their brass fittings glinting in the sunshine. Most of the soldiers, though, were just South Carolina farm boys, not real soldiers at all, and they just looked dusty and hot, and ordinary, trudging down the road in the wake of the gentry. The commander caught my eye at once. I took him for a general, with his fine white horse and his faraway look, as if he was so important and noble that it was beneath him to notice anything so common as a muddy trace cutting through the hills of Carolina, and a bunch of gawking rustics, peering at him from over their fences.

  Folk who had seen him up close were full of tales about the commander’s fancy way of talking, and the prissy way he had of insisting on proper meals and clean clothes, even when he was soldiering and camped out in the back of beyond. He was quality. You could tell. But when I went along to the army camp that summer morning, I hadn’t any notion of meeting up with him at all. He was just a sight to behold, riding by on a white horse, and I had no more thought of getting closer to him that you’d have about keeping company with a waterfall or a snow white deer—he was just a marvel to say you had seen one time, that’s all.

  His manservant, Powell, found me in the camp, a few days after that set-to they had at Cowpens. Their side had won that battle, and so I came along out of curiosity, but mainly to see if there were pickings to be had, for I have to make my own way in the world. There are some I know who would have run away from an army, and if I had been a man, I reckon I might have done that, but, on my own like I was and sick to death of being the hired girl on an upland farm, I thought I would go and see what the war was like, afore things around here went back to being dull again. I was young and pretty enough to be sure of my welcome among soldiers. And I reckoned I was safer with an army than I would have been as a lone, lorn woman on some farmstead when they came through, a-foraging. You fare better if they can count you as one of their own, and if you are not afraid of them, for one on one they are mostly just farm boys, same as all the ones you’ve seen a-plowing and hoeing corn. Besides, from what I had seen these past months of Loyalists and Rebels raiding farms, stealing livestock provisions, and hanging them that disagreed with them, I judged that it might well be safer to be with an army than staying at home and trying to ignore one.

  So I set out that morning before sunup, looking for the war.

  It didn’t take much to find them, neither. The Indians may slip in and out of the woods without ever you knowing they were there until too late, but the king’s army rampages around like so many rutting bulls, making all the noise and commotion they please and proud of the display of it. So I had to ask the way a time or two, along with a dipper full of water, for it was a day of breathless heat, but finally I found them along about mid-morning, and I strolled into the camp, smiling and nodding how-do as if I had been sent an invitation.

  I attracted attention enough. Some of the Loyalists were older men, and mindful of families left back at home, and bone weary besides from all the marching, but there were enough young bucks in the ranks to create quite a stir at the sight of me. I smiled broader and edged away from a grasping few, looking for somebody worth my time.

  A likely-looking bunch of the younger soldiers had gathered around me, and they were making free
with their flasks and their rations, when a fussy little terrier of a man—name of Elias Powell, I was to find out—spied me talking amongst them, and he swooped in like a duck after a june bug, cut me out of the pack, and hustled me away, with his hand gripped tight around my elbow so’s I couldn’t run.

  “What did you want to do that for?” I asked, trying to shake him off. “I wasn’t doing nothing, but only just passing the time of day with those boys back there.”

  He tightened his grip on my arm and shook it a little to show he meant it. “How do we know you aren’t a spy for the Whigs then?”

  I blinked at that, for it wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. This Elias Powell wasn’t much older than me, maybe twenty-five, I judged, though not at all as handsome as them he had dragged me away from. He looked like a chinless rabbit, and he sounded like a local farmer, but even so I thought that he had taken me away from the militia men either because he disapproved of stray women in camp, or else because he had designs upon me his own self, though now I could see that his thoughts lay elsewhere entirely.

  “A spy?” I couldn’t help it: I laughed in his face. “Where’s the money in that? I came here hoping to earn my keep.”

  His eyes narrowed, and he nearly let go of my arm. “As a camp follower?” He’ll wash his hands in the nearest creek when he leaves off shouting at me, I thought. “More fool you, girl!”

  “Why? They might be a fearsome sight as an army, all coming at you at once with guns a-blazing, but take them one at a time and they ain’t nothing but Carolina country boys. Though they do give themselves airs about fighting for the king, as if he’d know anything about it or care if he did know. Much good may it do them.”

  “You have the sound of a Whig to me, making sport of the king. I do believe you are a spy. We hang spies when we catch them, same as the other side does.”

  I shrugged. “Why would I bother to spy upon you? Nothing will change for the likes of me, ever who wins, so why should I help either side in this? I came here for my keep, that’s all.”

  He kept peering at me as if he expected some words of truth to break out in letters upon my forehead, but I returned his gaze stare for stare, never showing a flicker of fear, and presently he stopped looking so fierce and said, “What is your name?”

  I give as good as I get, and for all his high and mighty ways, this little man did not frighten me. He was in a military encampment, right enough, but he hadn’t the look of a soldier, and I had seen enough of them to know. “Come to that, what’s yours?”

  He drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t much. “Powell. Elias Powell, Esquire, and ‘sir’ to you. Now, then, I asked you your name, girl.”

  When I hesitated, he tightened his grip on my arm again, and I knew that by midday I would have his finger marks in purple on the skin of my forearm. Finally I muttered, “I am called Sal.” I didn’t want to tell him much about who I was, for I had no wish to be sent back to the place I’d left, where they would never miss me anyhow. This Elias Powell didn’t look like the sort of nosy parker who could be bothered to do such a thing, but I trust nobody, especially in these times, when neighbors are at one another’s throats over some fal-lal of ideas about liberty and such, as if such notions would buy you a pot of beer or a crust of bread. I couldn’t see the sense of it.

  “And you live around here?”

  “I come from Virgininy,” I told him. Well, one time I had come from there, and I saw no reason to tell him more. It was true enough.

  He grunted, as though he begrudged the fact that my answer had pleased him. “Well, then I shall call you Virginia Sal. You’ve come a long way, but I am not yet twenty miles from home, myself. But, like you, I wanted a taste of army life. I’ll wager there’s little else of common ground between us, though. Why are you hanging about this camp like a stray dog?”

  “Because I am one, I reckon.” I picked a dry leaf out of the tangles of my hair, and that set me to wishing that I had given myself a wash in the creek this morning afore I come into camp, cold as the creek water was. There was no use being sorry about my dirt-streaked, ragged dress, though, for I had no other. “I got no family, so I thought I’d come find the soldiers, and mayhap hire on as a cook or a laundress. Whatever the army needs. Armies always have money.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe they do, but earning it a penny at a time from the likes of yonder hounds would be hard labor indeed.” He held me at arm’s length and looked me over. He muttered to himself, thinking aloud, and heedless of whether I heard him or not. “A right ragamuffin, I’ll be bound. And it wants to be a laundress, if you please. The first thing in need of a wash are those hands and face. Young and fit, though. No sign of the pox. Good teeth. Curly red hair. He’s partial to gingers, though the Lord knows why. I don’t fancy ’em myself.”

  I stiffened when I heard him say this. “He? Who are you speaking of that is partial to red hair?”

  “The commander. He’s a bit of a ginger himself, so perhaps that accounts for it. He’s a proper Englishman. Well, Scotch, then. He is particular about that, as if one place there over the water is any different from another. At any rate, the commander is a gentleman, son of a lord or some such title, and they have a fine country estate somewhere that he talks about when the mood takes him. So it stands to reason that he won’t stand for the ordinary privations of soldiering, even out here in the wildwood.”

  I resolved then and there to get a closer look at this high and mighty fellow. “And what are the needs of a gentleman general?”

  “He is not a general, but only a major, though I’ll warrant that is a high enough perch in the king’s regular army. They buy their way into the officers’ ranks, the British do, so you’ll hardly find any commoners among them.”

  “If they are as rich as that, you’d think they would have better things to do than come out here to the wilderness to fight.”

  “They are younger sons, mostly, so the money settled to buy them an army commission is their inheritance and their one chance to make good—unless of course the eldest brother dies, and then perhaps they’d go home and get on with the business of managing the family estate.” Elias Powell scowled. “As to the commander’s personal requirements, that need not concern the likes of you, unless he accepts you into his service, and then I reckon you’ll be apprised of them soon enough, and roundly punished if you should forget them.”

  “What service would his lordship be needing then?”

  Powell took a breath, as if he were about to trot out a lecture on how to address my betters, but he must have thought better of it, for he only shrugged and said, “He takes special food, and he’s particular about the cooking of it, so there’s a cook in camp just to look after him, apart from them that does for the rest of the men. He has a washerwoman already—leastways we call her that—and I am his body servant, seeing to his clothes, and cleaning his boots, unpacking his cases, and the like.”

  I stared at him, trying in my mind’s eye to picture this runty fellow nipping about the commander’s tent, setting up a silver teapot upon an officer’s trunk and spooning cane sugar into a china cup. I almost laughed. “You do for him? You? I thought he’d have a black slave, same as most of the quality folks from around here.”

  Elias Powell shook his head. “We’re all blackamoors to him, girl.”

  * * *

  I always got the feeling that he talked to me the same way another person might talk to their favorite hound, more to hear the sound of their own voice than to be understood or answered back by the listener. Maybe it was on account of my mare’s nest of red hair, which folk have said gave me the look of the Irish over the water. ’Course the commander, he was a Scotchman, but I don’t suppose there’s much to choose between them, for judging by the ones I have seen, they both have voices like music and pale skin that reddens and burns in the sun.

  Elias Powell sat me down on a rock that first day, while he went to see if it was convenient for the commander to look me o
ver. It wasn’t above a quarter of an hour before he came back and motioned for me to follow him to a tent pitched in a clearing a little away from the rest of the camp. I had smoothed down my hair as much as I could, and brushed the mud from my skirts. Now I resolved to stand up straight and meet his gaze to show I wasn’t to be bullied or cowed by a man, no matter what his station.

  As I stooped to go through the tent flap, Elias Powell gripped my elbow again, and in a harsh whisper he said, “You mind your manners here, girl! He’ll have you flogged if you sass him, but, worse than that, you will make him think ill of my judgment, so have a care.”

  I nodded to show I understood, and then I wrenched free of his grasp and followed him in.

  The officer didn’t take any notice of us at first, so we stood there at the entrance waiting to be spoken to. He was sitting on a little stool scratching away with a quill and ink on a bit of paper set atop a polished wooden box. I could not decide if he was trying to put me in awe of him by taking no notice of me standing there, or if he was so lost in thought in his letter-writing that he had not seen us come in. I didn’t mind, though, for it gave me a chance to look him over, same as he’d be expecting to do to me. He wasn’t young by my lights—he’d see forty afore I ever saw twenty-five, but he held his years better than poor men do, and he was still a fine figure of a man—clean and carefully dressed, as if he were a-settin’ in a fine parlor instead of in a tent on a piney ridge. He was light-haired and angular, and I wondered from the strained look on his bony countenance if he had been ill or wounded. As soon as I had that thought, the officer shifted a bit on his stool, and I saw that his right arm was bent up close to his chest and that even when he moved, it did not. That surprised me, for I could not see how a man with only one good arm could command an army. I would have expected him to be sent home to his rich family, or perhaps to some sort of job back home that could be done with papers at a desk, for surely he could not ride and fight, maimed as he was. I didn’t feel sorry for him—he looked so grand and stern that pity would be an impertinence. Besides, wounds are the wages of war.