1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  “Move it, move it, move it!” he bellowed. “March is just starting, you lazy curries!”

  He pointed with the stick to some mountains whose crest could just be seen from the hollow where the captain had ordered a brief rest for the company. “Before this march is done, you gotta be up there in the Bostons! And you will be, by God—or we’ll leave you dead on the road!”

  Sheff took a deep breath, staring up at those mountains. Next to him, McParland did the same.

  Blasphemy in the army, Sheff had already discovered, was pretty contagious. “Sweet Jesus,” McParland muttered.

  “Just think of it as Mount Sinai,” Sheff murmured back.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Maybe. But what I am for sure and certain is a nigger. And that looks like Sinai to me.”

  The march lurched into motion again. For a few minutes, neither of them said anything.

  Then McParland said: “People call me Cal. Can I call you Sheff?”

  As exhausted as he was, Sheff thought that might be the most triumphant moment he’d ever had in his life so far. Not that he’d had many, of course, and this one wasn’t really that big. But he could already see a road of triumphs shaping ahead of him. If he just kept marching forward, no matter how tired he was.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  CHAPTER 8

  County Down, Ireland

  JUNE 3, 1824

  “You owe these people nothing, Robert,” said Eliza Ross. “That man, in particular.”

  She lifted her teacup from the side table next to her divan and used it to point to his shoulder. “Except for half crippling you.”

  The words weren’t spoken angrily, or even in a condemnatory tone. They were stated matter-of-factly, as someone might present another piece of evidence to be weighed when a conclusion is being drawn.

  Her husband was standing at the window of the Ross family seat in Rostrevor that gave him the best view of the Irish countryside. The hand he’d been using to hold back the curtains belonged to the same arm his wife had indicated with the cup. For a moment, half smiling, he studied that arm. Then, took away the hand, letting the curtains swing back into place.

  “Hardly that,” he murmured. “A quarter crippling, at worst. I can still use the arm, after all, and the hand’s fine. I just can’t lift much with it.”

  He didn’t add, as he could have, that the arm ached frequently, especially in bad weather. His wife knew that already, and besides, that wasn’t really what was at issue anyway. Eliza was no more given to nursing old enmities than he was.

  Still at the window, he turned to face her squarely. And, from old habit, clasped his hands behind his back, ignoring the twinge of pain the gesture brought with it.

  “What did you think of the letter itself?” he asked.

  She finished draining the cup, set it on the side table, and looked down at the paper in her lap. Two sheets, it was, both covered with script written in some sort of particularly heavy ink.

  “His handwriting’s getting better,” she said, a corner of her mouth quirking a little. “Mind you, that’s not saying much.”

  Her husband’s mouth matched the quirk with one of its own. “Amazing he does as well as he does, if you ask me. There’s only four misspelled words in the whole letter—and three of them can be debated. I’ve seen worse dispatches from English noblemen, much less an Irish emigrant with no more than a village education. Even in English, much less French.”

  Eliza Ross picked up the sheets and held them closer to her eyes. She was a bit nearsighted. “And there’s that, too, Robert. Why does he write in French instead of English?”

  It was a rhetorical question, of course. So she moved right on to provide the answer herself. “Because Patrick Driscol, born in Ireland, learned most of his letters while serving in Napoleon’s army. Because he’s a man who has been England’s enemy his entire adult life. For years, long before”—this time, she used the sheets to point to Robert Ross’s left shoulder—“he ruined your arm.”

  Again, her tone was level, not accusatory. Just another fact, to be presented.

  “True,” he agreed. “All true.”

  She lowered the sheets back onto her lap. “Robert, I feel I must remind you that your standing within English society has become somewhat frayed, of late. If you accept this invitation…”

  Firmly, her husband shook his head. “Don’t mince words, love. ‘Somewhat frayed’ hardly captures the thing. ‘Tattered as a beggar’s coat’ would do better.”

  Eliza took a slow deep breath and then let it out in a sigh. “Well, yes. Among Tory circles, at least.”

  She did not bother to add, as she could have, that for Anglo-Irish of their class, after the rebellion of 1798, “Tory circles” amounted to the only circles in existence. In Ireland, at least, if not always in England.

  She didn’t add it, partly because it was unnecessary. But mostly for the simple reason that she didn’t care much. A bit, perhaps, where her husband no longer cared at all. But not much.

  Abruptly, Robert Ross released the handclasp and strode—marched, almost—to the wall opposite the window. Hanging there, in a heavy and ornate frame next to the door, was an illustration.

  A very odd one, to be so prominently displayed in such a house. The Ross family was an old and much-respected one among the Anglo-Irish gentry. Robert’s father, Major David Ross, had served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War. A still earlier ancestor, Colonel Charles Ross, had been killed at Fontenoy in 1745, during the War of the Austrian succession.

  Their portraits, along with those of other distinguished ancestors, hung on many of the walls in the family seat. Along with, on another wall in the very room they occupied, all the distinctions accumulated by the current and most renowned member of the line.

  Robert Ross himself, who had retired from the British army with the rank of major general. On that wall—Ross could have pointed to it with his left hand, were he willing to ignore the pain raising the arm would have caused him—were the sort of trophies that precious few officers had ever accumulated in the long history of British arms.

  There was the gold medal he’d received after the Battle of Maida in 1805, the British victory in the Peninsular War that most reports ascribed to the decisive leadership of Colonel Ross, as he then was. Hanging next to it was the sword his fellow officers had presented him four years later, in 1809. Officially, it was another honor for Maida. But really, everyone knew, in appreciation for Ross’s actions and leadership during the terrible retreat to Corunna. His 20th Foot had more often than not been the rear guard in that retreat, holding off Soult and the French pursuers long enough to enable Sir John Moore’s army to reach the port and embarkation to England.

  Next to it hung the gold medal he’d received for the Battle of Vittoria, and the Peninsular Gold Cross. And next to those, the Sword of Honor.

  Other mementos were there, too, some of them personally meaningful if not as officially prestigious. Had he been so inclined, Ross could have covered the wall with his mentions in Wellington’s dispatches from the war. Quite easily. From his return to Iberia in 1812 until Ross was placed in command of the British expedition to North America in 1814, he’d led troops in every major battle in the Peninsular War except Toulouse. From 1813 on, following his promotion to major general, as a brigade commander. He was largely credited with having saved the British army from disaster at Roncesvalles and with having played a key role in the British victory at Sorauren.

  A brilliant career, until the expedition to America and the repulse of the British at the Capitol. But, even there, Ross’s personal gallantry had excited British admiration. And since Pakenham had been in command, not Ross, when the British army was beaten again at the Battle of the Mississippi, no opprobrium attached to him for that defeat.

  It might have, had he been forced to defend Pakenham from public censure upon his return to England, as he’d fully intended to do. But Pakenham’s valiant death at Lille in the
final campaign against Napoleon had put paid to that. Another defeat, true, but Pakenham’s impetuous assault had delayed Napoleon long enough for Wellington and Blucher to trap the French army at Tournai and force the French emperor to surrender.

  There were other honors on other walls, won by his predecessors, and portraits aplenty of the predecessors themselves. All of which made the illustration hanging by the door seem out of place.

  Grossly so, in the opinion of many of the Anglo-Irish gentry who had, in the years since the wars, visited Ross at Rostrevor. Wellington himself had come once, some three years earlier. The moment he spotted the illustration he’d exclaimed, “Oh, dear God, Robert! Why do you have that hanging on the wall?”

  Wellington had recognized it immediately, of course. Detested though it might be by most of England’s leading figures, the illustration was probably better known to the British populace by now than the portraits of any but kings and queens. First introduced to public attention in 1789 by Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, the founders of the British antislavery movement, it was a diagram of the slave-trading ship Brookes.

  It was a horrid thing, really. Which was, of course, its whole purpose: neatly and meticulously displaying, in the form of a top-down diagram, exactly how slaves were carried across the Atlantic. Lying side by side, like so many spoons nestled in a silverware drawer—or so much meat in one of the new tin-lined cans.

  Of all the methods used by the antislavery movement to advance its cause, this single diagram had always been the most effective. Against it, the claims of slave traders that their business was a reasonably humane one were simply froth against a cliff. Its copy, though not often so finely drawn, hung in taverns and workingmens’ homes and lawyers’ offices all over Britain. Not to mention, by now, perhaps a third of its churches. Well over half of them, if one counted only the Dissenting churches.

  After staring at the diagram for perhaps a minute, Robert said softly: “I owe Patrick Driscol nothing, Eliza. True enough. But I shall never forget what I saw in America. One memory, in particular, haunts me to this day. A man—black as he might be—with a collar around his neck. Like a watchdog’s collar, except the spikes faced inward, pricking the skin. The contraption is a common form of punishment for slaves, at least in Louisiana. The man cannot sleep without injuring himself—possibly even dying.”

  “Yes, I know, Robert. You’ve described it to me.”

  Ross smiled, a bit crookedly. “An obsession, perhaps. But I find as I age—I’m nearing sixty, you know, now much closer to my death than my birth—I find myself obsessing over the afterlife. And I wonder, almost every day now, what God will have to say about my life when my judgment comes.”

  He was back to that soldierly handclasping. His head swiveled, to bring the wall of honors and trophies under scrutiny. “Will he really be impressed by all that? You can find the same sort of wall, I can assure you, in the houses and mansions of many generals in many nations. For many centuries now. Each of us claiming, as we meet gallantly on the field, that the Lord favors our cause.”

  He looked away, back to the diagram. “Or will He present this to me? And ask me what I did in battle against this monstrosity? How much will the defeat of Napoleon weigh, against this?”

  He heard his wife’s little laugh. “That damned Irishman! He’s corrupted your thinking, Robert.”

  The retired general’s smile grew more crooked still. “Perhaps. But what do you think, dearest?”

  She said nothing for a time. Then, in the same level and matter-of-fact tone: “I think that I am your wife. The same wife who rode a mule across more of Spain than I wish to remember, after you were wounded at Orthes.”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “I remember. The weather was frightful.”

  “Not as frightful as the sunny day you set sail for America. I was sure I’d never see you again, Robert. And I almost didn’t.”

  He left off his examination of the diagram to look at Eliza. Her face was tight, perhaps, but quite composed.

  “I am your wife, Robert. And you shall not leave me behind this time. If you are bound and determined to return to America, in response to”—she clutched the sheets in her right hand and held them up—“the damned Irishman’s request, I shall not stand in your way. But you will not leave me behind. Not again.”

  “Surely you don’t fear—”

  For the first time, some anger came into her face. Not fury, simply exasperation. “Oh, stop it, Robert! You know perfectly well why Driscol is asking you to visit him. After—what has it been, now? Nine years? Nine years of the most peculiar correspondence in the world, but none of it was accompanied by any suggestion that you might actually come to America yourself instead of simply giving him some advice from a distance.”

  She brought her left hand to the sheets. Looking, for a moment, as if she might crumple them altogether. But, after a slight pause, she used the hand instead to flatten the sheets back out.

  Then, smiling very crookedly herself: “And spare me the pious pose. I don’t doubt you mean it well enough. But I know you better than anyone. You’re like an old racehorse, looking at what might be your last starting gate.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “Ridiculous? Patrick Driscol is expecting a war, Robert. That’s why he’s asking you to come. No other reason. And…so are you.”

  He unclasped his hands and waved the left. “I say again, ridiculous. It’s far too soon to predict any such thing, Eliza.”

  “Predict? Of course not. But generals are not in the business of predicting outcomes. You’ve said that to me a hundred times if you’ve said it once. Generals are in the business of gauging outcomes. And you are gauging, Robert. Don’t deny it. Not to me.”

  He didn’t. For the simple reason that he couldn’t. Major General Robert Ross was indeed gauging what might be the last war of his life. And the one that might—just might—be the one that saved his soul.

  After so many decades, he was tired of duty to king and country. He’d paid that duty, paid it in full—and had the wounds as well as the honors to prove it. Wounds that ached everywhere he went, whereas the wall of honor was there only on the occasions he entered this room.

  “Besides, there’s Ireland,” he murmured.

  “What was that?”

  “Ah…never mind.”

  Eliza was considerably more broad-minded than most people of her class, but she still retained most of its basic outlook. Whereas at the age of fifty-seven there was very little left at all, in Robert Ross, of the young man from Anglo-Irish gentry who’d enlisted in the 25th Foot right after graduating from Trinity College in Dublin. Except courage and determination, he liked to think. The years and the wars had burned most of it away, especially that horrible war in America. And what had remained had been slowly scoured off by his years working with Clarkson and Sharp. He was no Quaker, like so many of the supporters of the antislavery movement, and never would be. But their piety was contagious, in its own way.

  The general who’d been active in the British army had never wondered much about such things. No need to, really, when it was obvious that God was an Englishman. But his years since Napoleon’s defeat rubbing shoulders with the men in the antislavery movement had undermined that certainty.

  What was left was Ireland itself. Bleeding, tortured Ireland. Ross had never seen anything he could do, in his life, that would have benefited Ireland. But perhaps he and another Irishman, on another continent, could prevent another such endlessly suppurating wound.

  It seemed worth a try, at least. There was some evidence in the New Testament, if you looked at it properly, that Jesus would favor the Irish. Quite a bit, actually. Perhaps more to the point, Ross had read the Bible front to back three times over since his return from America. Noticing, each time, that nowhere was God’s color recorded.

  He might even be black. Worse yet, He might have no color at all. How, then, to explain one’s inaction, knowing of the Brookes? For Eliza, as for mo
st Englishmen and Englishwomen—most members of the antislavery movement, for that matter—the blacks depicted as so many spoons in a drawer were miserable and suffering souls. Faceless, for all that.

  But, at the age of fifty-seven, Robert Ross could now see his own wife and children on that ship. Something which, he could now understand, Patrick Driscol had been able to see since he was a boy.

  “Dear God, I miss the man!” he said, as surprised as he’d ever been in his life.

  Over dinner, when he told the children their plans, his oldest son raised an objection.

  “I’d like to go, too.”

  Mrs. Ross shook her head. “David, your education—”

  “Oh, Mother! I’m sick of boarding schools. Fine enough for the younger ones, but I need a change. Trinity can wait a year or two.” Pouting, a bit: “Besides, it’d be good for me. Broadening of the horizons, all that. Boys my age do it all the time on the continent. The Germans even have a name for it.”

  “Wanderjahr,” his father supplied. “Yes, I know.”

  He and Eliza looked at each other. After a moment, she shrugged. “As stubborn as he is, I suppose we may as well. He’d just waste a year at Trinity with sulking.”

  Robert nodded. “Very well, then.”

  Naturally, that immediately stirred up the other four children. But there, Robert held the line. Leaving aside the fact that they were too young to be interrupting their educations and forgoing the salutary discipline of boarding schools, there was the factor of disease to be considered. At nineteen, David was old enough that he’d be taking no more risk than an adult.

  “No,” he said. Then, swiveling his gaze as he’d once had cannons swiveled: “No. No. No.”

  Three days later, he set off for London. The ship he and Eliza and David would be taking to America wouldn’t leave for weeks yet, and he had some final business to attend to.

  Clarkson approved. No surprise there. Thomas Clarkson was the brawler of the movement. The man who, though no more a Quaker than Ross, had decided at the age of twenty-five, in June of 1785, that slavery was an abomination. And had devoted the rest of his life to ending it—throwing into that cause his fine education at Cambridge, his unflagging energy, and his extraordinary skills as a political organizer.