The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles Page 38

  I doubt the cause is solely the uprising, Judson thought somberly. I expect it’s also a certain event that happened afterward—

  For a moment he entertained the notion of stopping at McLean’s on his way out of Caroline County. But he rejected the idea. Nothing he could do now would ever make amends for the despicable act committed in the summerhouse.

  His thoughts lingered a moment on an image of Peggy’s face. Not without effort, he blanked the image from his mind as part of the past he had to shut out forever.

  “Well—” He couldn’t bear to protract the parting much longer. “—if you do have the opportunity, tell her where I’ve gone, and why.”

  “Be assured I’ll do so. I know it will be months if not a year or more before we hear from you—”

  “I promise I’ll write when I can.”

  “Yes, but with the tribes rising, I doubt the post operates on any sort of regular schedule between here and Kentucky!”

  And not at all from the British-controlled territory beyond, Judson added silently.

  “I don’t want to sermonize, Judson, but I do believe you’ve made the proper choice. I’m thankful that despite all the turmoil in the west, there’s open land to which a man can go if need be—”

  Tears glistened in the corners of his eyes. He wiped them away quickly. “God keep you, brother.”

  “And you,” Judson answered, starting up the road.

  “Oh, wait—damme! I’m forgetting everything—!”

  Judson wheeled around, startled to see his brother pull a small black-bound book from his coat pocket.

  “I saw Father while you were putting your things together. This is a present—”

  Judson’s jaw dropped. “Not for me—?”

  “Don’t be too overwhelmed until you examine it. It’s what you’d expect of him, I think.”

  “I didn’t expect anything.”

  “No, I mean the nature of the gift.” Donald’s thumb bent around to the gold stamping on the binding. Judson smiled that old, brilliant smile that could light his face:

  “A New Testament. I see what you meant.”

  “Go on, open the flyleaf.”

  Judson took the book. Something caught in his throat when he saw the familiar handwriting, a little shakier with age than he remembered, but still recognizably his father’s. The inscription read:

  To my son Judson. Angus Fletcher March 29, 1778

  Judson’s smile faded. His face grew almost stark as he stared at the words. Donald chuckled with false heartiness:

  “Of course Father thinks you’re even madder than I do. Yet all the while he’s inveighing against your waywardness, I get the feeling that in some queer, perverse way he approves of what you’ve chosen to do.”

  Judson’s eyes widened in fury. “I told you I chose it for myself, not to please him.”

  “Somehow I believe he appreciates that. I think it’s the very reason he does approve. Maybe he recognizes that you’ve become a man.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was anything else.”

  “Oh yes,” Donald said quietly. “Until a few months ago, you didn’t deserve the name. Ah—!” A hand was quickly raised. “None of your temper, now. It’s the truth. Most of us come to it in our own time and in our own way, and some never come to it at all. But you have. And while you didn’t exactly turn out as Father wished—” A shrug. “Well, life is endless compromise. You wanted Peggy and couldn’t have her. I loved my wife and lost her. Father wanted a dutiful pair of boys, appropriately Tory in sentiment—he still abominates the rebellion, you realize—and instead, he got one gouty old lump who barely manages to help him run the place and is on the wrong side politically to boot. He also got an atheistic rogue who has decided, God save us, to be one of those rude frontiersmen—”

  Donald smiled. “Every father desires a lot from a son, I suppose. If he can’t have everything, he settles for what good things do come about.”

  “I don’t think Father really cares about m—”

  “Dammit, now, no more! He does! He told me he is convinced you’ll probably die of the ague after your first week of sleeping in the woods. But I swear he sounded just a mite proud when he remarked on it.”

  Judson started to speak, found he couldn’t. He tightened his hand around the testament, tucked it carefully down into the haversack. Something in him fought to bring forth words; the hardest words, perhaps, that he’d ever uttered—

  Something else resisted. For a moment his fine features showed the tormenting struggle.

  Then, almost blurting it:

  “Tell him I thank him very much for the gift.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And—”

  My God, there were tears in his eyes!

  “—and tell him I said—”

  The tide burst through—older than all the terrible resentments built between them, timeless in its force and power:

  “Tell him I said I love him.”

  “That, he will welcome most of all.”

  Judson grinned. “But he won’t believe it, the old bastard.”

  They laughed together, clasped hands, and Judson turned west in the morning sunshine.

  v

  Late in the afternoon of the day he met the woman plowing in the field, Judson felt the first drops of rain. Before long, with thunder rambling intermittently, the drizzle changed to a downpour. He was quickly soaked to the skin.

  The woods grew darker, the faint trail increasingly difficult to follow. Squinting through the rain, he saw the way ahead blocked by an immense, lightning-felled tree.

  He decided to bear to the left, go around. He was thankful for the deerhide trousers; brambles grew among the ferns.

  The forest smelled of rich earth that steamed as the rain slacked off. But for several minutes, the fall had been torrential. Footing was hazardous.

  He reached the rim of a gully perhaps ten feet deep. He started to work his way along it, keeping an eye on the position of the fallen tree on his right. When he was well past it, he’d cut back to the trail and—

  Weakened by the rain, the gully’s edge gave way under his left boot.

  Judson flailed, toppling over with a yell that went echoing through the dense trees.

  He struck the gully bottom, left leg bent back under his right knee. At the moment of impact, the leg was lanced with an excruciating pain.

  He lay gasping for a minute or so. He searched the crumbled side of the gully until he located his rifle and haversack, both dropped during the fall. He braced his hands in the mud beneath him, straightened his left leg—

  The fierce pain exploded again.

  Damn! He’d twisted something, badly.

  He floundered onto his chest, tried to push up that way. But the moment he gained his feet, he grimaced and clenched his teeth. He’d never get a quarter of a mile on that leg. Not till he rested it. Overnight, at least.

  He attempted a few abortive steps, only to give up in exquisite agony. He was conscious of the clock ticking in his mind, every wasted moment spelling ever more certain failure to find George Clark at Pittsburgh. Christ, he’d crawl on—!

  But good sense prevailed. The scant amount of time he’d gain if he kept going would be better spent letting the injury repair itself a little. Better to make his camp and start at daylight. By then, he might be able to move faster.

  Trying to control his anger over the sorry turn of affairs, he clawed his way up the mud and rock of the gully side, retrieving his rifle and tossing it up to the rim, then the haversack. After what seemed an endless climb, he reached the top. He pulled himself over, resting his cheek on a fern while he gulped air. Thunder rocked the forest. Rain began to patter the back of his neck.

  No damn possibility of finding dry wood now, he thought. The best he could do was drag himself to the nearest large tree—and hope that the lightning he saw flickering in the west would not strike the particular tree he selected. Actually, he couldn’t very well avoid trees, they grew so
closely here. One was no more or less dangerous than another.

  Lugging rifle and haversack, he reached the big maple he’d chosen, settled himself so his spine rested against the trunk. The new leaves overhead would protect him from all but the heaviest rain.

  The injured leg throbbed. What a blasted, damned piece of bad luck! He was so close! Less than thirty miles to the forks—

  Still, there was nothing to be done except rest and wait for morning. He let his mind drift, trying to free it of frustration and fury. The patter of the rain and the murmur of the receding thunder had a soporific effect. His eyelids grew heavy. Leaning the back of his head against the maple bark, he yawned—

  And popped his eyes open, disoriented, alarmed—

  Blind—

  No, no—he’d only slept. Till dark.

  All around him, the woods were still. The silence was accentuated by the occasional, barely audible scurry of some nocturnal animal, or the drip of water from a branch. The air was cool, moist. He rubbed a hand across his mouth, reached down to the aching leg, squeezed it and winced.

  Thirsty, he groped for his canteen. He had it tilted, ready to take a swallow, when he heard the sound—

  A yipping bark that slid higher, into a howl.

  Wolves. Somewhere out in the darkness.

  He understood instantly how vulnerable he was. The howl multiplied, two, three, perhaps four predators blending into a weird chorus that set his teeth chattering. He couldn’t run away from them. He had to stay here and defend himself here—

  At least he had the rifle, and the hunting knife in his boot.

  Thunder again, booming. He fumbled for the haversack, face and chest covered with a sudden sweat. Laboriously, he loaded the rifle, readied it in his lap while the howling grew louder.

  As a new thunderclap died away, he heard another sound. The drip from the trees was quickening. The rain was starting again. Heavy enough to reach his protected position and soak him—

  A streak of lightning zigzagged through the sky, showing him three black-nosed snouts not four yards from where he lay. Fangs shone white and animal eyes glowed until the lightning flickered out.

  He swallowed, heard a wolf’s guttural snarling; heard clawed feet moving across the wet earth—

  He flung the rifle to his shoulder, aimed it blind in the dark, triggered it—

  The damp powder in the pan didn’t ignite.

  Swearing, he fought to his feet. He almost yelled aloud at the agony in his leg. But he had to stand up. They were coming. Three at least. The Lord alone knew how many more might be gathering further out in the impenetrable black of the woods.

  He hunched his right shoulder, snaked his hunting knife out of his boot sheath, closed his teeth on the blade’s dull edge and gripped the rifle muzzle with both hands. He concentrated all his attention on the sounds of the wolves closing, cruelly aware of the one central fact of his situation:

  He would kill them, or he would be killed by them and never reach the forks of the Ohio.

  The rain beat down harder, making detection of noises more difficult.

  Well, he thought, if this is the end of it, at least I needn’t be ashamed of how it happened.

  He tried to buoy his confidence with a silent assertion that he would not permit himself to be killed.

  Well and good. That didn’t alter reality. He could very well die in the next few minutes even if he made a thousand resolves. The most disheartening part was realizing that if he did perish, George Clark would never know how he’d tried to catch up to him and honor his pledge to serve—

  Strangely, though, when he accepted the possibility of dying, a deadly sort of calm swept over him. It helped him take a firmer grip on the rifle muzzle, and almost completely forget the terrible pain in his leg.

  A snarling, clawing thing of fur and fangs hurled against him. Judson wrenched his head aside. The twisted leg gave way.

  He lurched against the tree, slid, landed on his side, gashed the corner of his mouth on the knife clenched in his teeth. Fangs tore through his deerhide trousers. He brought the rifle whipping over and down. The wolf’s jaws loosened as bone cracked.

  Judson kicked at the flopping, clawing animal. Beat at it with the rifle stock, smashing, smashing—

  The wolf let out a weak yelp and fell away from him—

  Just as the other two converged, snapping, slavering—

  He clubbed at them, kicked them while the rain fell steadily. He switched his rifle to his left hand, took the knife out of his mouth with his right, stabbing and clubbing simultaneously, hardly a man any longer; he was an animal almost as savage as his attackers.

  His knife opened the throat of one of the wolves. The other clamped its jaws on his left arm, shredding flesh, starting blood running.

  Crazed with pain, Judson dropped the rifle from his left hand, lashed his right hand over and buried the knife in the wolf’s belly. In its death-throes, the animal bit him to the bone.

  Judson screamed, jerked back against the tree, knocking his head hard. The gut-stabbed wolf twitched at his feet and lay still.

  He panted, tried to close his left hand into a fist, could not. He felt warm blood trickling down over his knuckles.

  But they were dead. All three, dead. He was safe from—

  Lightning lit the forest. He let out a single short sob of despair.

  The glow in the heavens showed him two more, jaws dripping. Thunder pealed as they crouched to spring.

  CHAPTER II

  The Guns of Summer

  TO PHILIP THERE WAS a peculiar and frightening familiarity about this moment. The heat reminded him of Breed’s Hill. So did the dull glare of bayonets; the scarlet coats—

  The British foot soldiers were advancing from the east, through steam rising after the most recent downpour. The sunlit vapor fumed up between the trees like some outpouring of infernal ovens, lending a spectral quality to the figures of the enemy.

  He was awash with sweat. It ran down to the tip of his nose, rivered over his chest and along his legs, soaking clothing already wet from the June rain. He guessed their position to be somewhere to the west of the little Jersey hamlet of Monmouth Court House. While the ghost-soldiers marched toward them through the mist, the Americans waited in a north-south line on the east side of McGellaird’s Brook, a ravine whose bottom resembled a swamp more than a creek.

  The army of thirteen thousand had marched north from Valley Forge a week ago. Philip guessed that perhaps half that number of men were strung out in advanced positions to which they’d moved starting around seven that morning. Thus far, Philip’s contingent had met only light resistance.

  The temperature in the woods had to be close to a hundred. Up and down the line men lay fallen, fainted away. A few others struggled to revive them, without much luck.

  Philip’s musket felt slippery in his hands as he squinted through the steaming air. Each breath he took was labored. He heard the British infantry drummers hammering the cadence somewhere behind the dim figures advancing in the steam between the thickly clustered trees.

  Sword pulled and ready, General Anthony Wayne slipped along the rear of the American line. His sweat-sheened face showed an emotion that might have been frustration—or rage. From the brush where he crouched near Breen and Royal Rothman, Philip heard Wayne repeat the same command over and over:

  “Hold fire. Hold fire until your officer signals.”

  The handsome, flamboyant young general—as dirty, stinking, sand-covered and fly-bitten as the rest of them today—passed within a yard of Philip. Wayne broke step, stopped a moment as recognition registered.

  Philip was too weary to return Wayne’s brief, comradely smile. But he did ask a question:

  “Are we to hold, General? Our own drum signals don’t make much sense.”

  Wayne’s mouth wrenched. “As long as I have charge here, we’ll not only hold, we’ll attack. As for the signals—I’ll be damned if any officer in this sector can make sense of ’em
—or knows what our esteemed commander’s up to. Order, counter-order, disorder—that seems to be the rule for the morning. Charlie Lee didn’t want this action in the first place. So we’ll just forget him, eh?”

  Wayne smiled again, the kind of bravado grin that had given the young Pennsylvanian a reputation as a commander impatient with hesitation and virtually unconcerned about his personal safety. Philip watched the general move off through the sodden weeds, working his way south along the ragged line awaiting the redcoats.

  They were much closer now. Philip could distinctly see facial features through the confused interplay of sunlight and steam. Far away, thunder rumbled. Another storm.

  Or could it be cannon-fire?

  In Breen’s eyes—in Royal’s—in the eyes of all the stubbled, sweating men watching the advancing enemy, Philip saw the same concern that kept a triphammer rhythm of fear going in his own chest.

  The army had not formally engaged the British since leaving Valley Forge on the twenty-third of June.

  And now the British had a new commander.

  Unfortunately so did all the Americans holding advanced outposts in the field this morning. To a man, they distrusted the general who was supposed to be giving the orders. As Wayne had said, Charles Lee had argued against this pursuit. Despite all von Steuben’s training, the Americans, Lee was convinced, were still no match for British regiments—

  Very shortly they would resolve the issue. Resolve it in this patch of Jersey marshland where the tree trunks were surrounded by pools of water left from the huge storms that had alternated with intense heat and humidity for days on end. Philip watched the British closing in the ordered ranks he remembered so well from Breed’s Hill—

  Then suddenly, from behind the marching redcoats, he picked up a terrifying new sound.

  “Oh Jesus,” Breen exclaimed. “They’re throwin’ cavalry at us!”

  Philip peered through the sweat blurring his eyes. The British infantrymen were flanking right and left. Into the openings burst the hard-riding vans of mounted units; men in green-faced blue coats and hussar busbies, their drawn sabers flashing—