Cornwallis pursed his lips, but nodded. Deborah made her curtsy, studiously not looking at Marshall, and headed for her room. Her stomach had begun to knot. The General had reminded her that she had helped the enemy. The only way she could clear that off her conscience was by getting the information she had learned back to her father.
Chapter 3
Deborah woke and stretched, but kept her eyes closed, savoring the sensations. The featherbed was not her own, but it was soft and enveloping. As she wiggled around onto her side and pulled the quilt up under her nose, she realized there was a soft, rapid tapping on the window. For a moment, she wondered what it was. She opened one eye to investigate. Rain. Just...RAIN! And not just rain, but torrents. The clear blue skies of yesterday had disappeared overnight.
The consequences of the rain struck her. The events of last night and their implications followed in rapid succession. She and Adam had to leave today, but how could they in the storm? And the road was going to be a swamp!
She dressed quickly, grabbed her shawl, and hurried down the stairs. No one was around and she slipped out the door and headed towards the wagon. She had to find Adam and make some plans to get out of the camp. The rain was beginning to slow, but still came down steadily. Of the few soldiers outside their tents, some nodded respectfully, but most just stared at her. No one stopped her.
In place of the wagon was a low-lying, rectangular tent-like structure. There were shallow ditches around the base of the “tent” that carried the water off. It took her a moment to realize that the wagon had been covered with tarps. “Adam, Adam,” she called softly. One corner of the tarp lifted.
As soon as she was under the wagon, Adam grinned. “Welcome to my humble abode, little chick. It’s not quite as grand as that of the great ones, but it did what was needed.” His voice barely got above a whisper. He gestured her to a blanket spread on the dry ground.
She shook out her damp shawl as well as possible under the cramped conditions. “Whew! What a storm. Getting out of here is going to be awful.”
“I don’t know if we can. From the look I had outside, the roads may well be impassable for a day or two.”
“We have to.” She told him of the dinner-time conversation, emphasizing the expedition to Shelby and the troop split for winter encampment.
A low whistle greeted the end of her story. “And I thought the bored soldiers around here rattled on without a care. I was amazed at what they said, but this is important, for sure and certain.” Leaning back on the blanket, he braced himself on his elbows and studied the bottom of the wagon for a few minutes. “Yup. We need to get that back, but we can’t leave today.”
“We have to leave, Adam. We have to get this to them as soon as possible. It’s absolutely...”
“Not today. Ferguson isn’t going anywhere today. These are his troops all around us. If they were leaving today, all that around us would be empty space. And if he’s not going, then it would look mighty strange if we up and tried to travel through this mess. Think about it. The only people that are going to travel today are those who absolutely have to. The British aren’t stupid. If we left, they’d figure out mighty quick that we had a pretty pressing reason to be leaving. We don’t even have the excuse of food in the wagon. About the only thing that has to get out of this camp that quick would be information. They’d be after us before we got five miles down the road.”
“But...”
“Don’t worry. The immediate thing is Ferguson, and he’s going to be delayed getting out of here, too. There’s still time to get the information back in time for it to do some good.”
She acquiesced. That left nothing to do, and the day loomed long and dreary and dull. She went back to the house for breakfast, promising to return after mid-day.
**
The kitchen was a small building connected to the back of the house. Deborah didn’t feel like facing the British officers in the main house, so she headed for the smaller building, hoping to cajole the inhabitants into a bite to eat.
As she neared it, she heard a tremendous crash and a screech. Lifting her shirts, she ran the few yards and yanked open the door, expecting to see at least minor injuries.
“Damn that man, damn his red-coated, gold-buttoned hide!” The words lost volume, but the woman facing the cluttered counter away from Deborah still awkwardly brandished the large frying pan. “Treated like a...”
“Can I help you?”
The woman whirled and the contents of the pan went flying. The cannonade of eggs barely missed Deborah.
“Oh! I’m sorry. Who are you? What do you want?” The words tumbled out, the last bunch with a touch of hysteria.
“Pardon me, I heard a crash and thought someone might be hurt.” The woman was handsome enough, but the gaping mouth spoiled the image. A little startled at the woman’s reaction, Deborah hurried on, “There’s no problem with my dress, I assure you. No damage done.”
The woman’s mouth finally closed. Her eyes narrowed. “Who are you?” she demanded, again, suspicion coloring the words.
“I’m Deborah Morgan.” When that didn’t ease the glare, she went on, “My brother and I were escorted into camp yesterday. We’d hoped to leave today, but...” She shrugged and gestured vaguely outside. “I wanted to see if I could get a bite to eat.”
“Humph, yes, well I’m sure you and everyone else around here wants something, but I’m neither the tavern maid nor the cook.” She looked at the raw egg dripping from the walls next to Deborah. “Abigail! Get in here!” She surveyed the chaotic and somewhat dirty kitchen trappings and muttered “Though those redcoats think I am and in my own house.”
Something didn’t add up to Deborah. The woman was somewhat older than herself and well-dressed, but not elegant. Although she was in the kitchen, working, she seemed out of place. Deborah cocked her head. “Ma’am?”
The woman snapped her head around. Her eyes widened. “Oh, the British brought you here. Oh, well, for heavens sake.” Her hands fluttered...and the frying pan with them. “Pay me no mind, I’m just upset and flustered and frazzled with all these...guests.” Shoving aside a carving knife and fork to make some room, she put the pan carefully on the counter. “Breakfast will be served in the dining room in a few minutes, if you’d care to go into the house.”
The sudden formality and the apology and the nervousness made sense in that instant. The woman thought she was a British...uh guest. Deborah realized she faced the angry, but frightened, owner of the requisitioned house.
“Mistress...?”
“What, oh, Kershaw.”
“Mistress Kershaw, I am an unwilling guest of the British, just as Col. Marshall is unwilling to serve as host. They can’t want me out of here any faster than I want to be out of here, but I’m afraid it may not be able to be today. Since that’s the case, may I be of some service to you? You seem to be a bit under-staffed at the moment.”
**
The rain stopped while she worked in the kitchen, and the clouds started to thin. She and Adam decided to walk the perimeter of the British camp, as much from boredom as from a desire to estimate the British strength. The dung patties and trampled crop fields testified that the camp had once been a working farm. When they were out of earshot of the troops, they talked.
“You have to credit these lobster-backs. I was watching one of them clean their uniforms. Do you know they keep those trousers white with a brick of dampened chalk? Can you imagine walking around with wet pants during the winter?”
“Why do they do it?”
He grimaced. “Because they’re told to. Being a British soldier is a lot like being a slave. You can’t get out, and you have to follow orders. Must say though, they’ve got the system down so well that they have a very efficient fighting machine.”
“But our soldiers don’t just blindly say ‘Yes, sir!’ Why, I say one man arguing with Captain Wilcox just before we left camp.”
“That’s rather dangerous here.” He glanced side
ways at her. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but you may as well know because you may come on it yourself. One of the men did talk back to an officer today and got a taste of the lash for his troubles.”
She sucked in her breath. “Oh, no.”
He stared at a nearby bush for a long moment. “Father’s told us about his flogging, but the healed scars are rather tame compared to the raw holes in this man’s back.”
She looked back towards the camp. “Should I...”
“No!” He softened the explosion with a smile. “We don’t want you doing that for them. You’re much too valuable doing it for us.”
She looked back again and took a step. He took her arm, turning her back in the original direction and found a new topic. “What have you been doing?”
Allowing herself to be maneuvered, Deborah described her meeting with Mistress Kershaw and the eggs. “I don’t know if she’s Tory or Patriot, but I do know she’s irritated. Besides appropriating her house and her lands, they’ve drafted her male servants to take care of the officers scattered around the camp. One maid servant decided that she could do better as a camp whore...”
Adam choked, but recovered.
“...and her cook has caught the influenza, she says from Cornwallis, himself.”
He snickered, “Mayhap that’s how he’ll win the war for the English, make the colonials so sick they can’t hold a rifle.”
Smiling, Deborah said, “Even so, she is the only female I’ve met in this oppressively male place. She’s going back to her house in Camden tomorrow. She likes to check on things here but they don’t exactly make her welcomed. Still, I’ll miss her.”
“God willing we’ll be out of here, too.”
Their stroll took them closer to the camp borders and Adam slipped into his role.
“Mistress Morgan,” a voice hailed them. She turned to see Thomson waving from behind a tent. He said something to someone on the far side of it then came over to walk with them. “’Ow have you and the young man been faring?”
“Well, Mr. Thomson, well. We were supposed to leave this morning, but...” She shrugged, and he laughed. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Well, yer kinfolks’ loss is our gain. Ye’ve a lovely face to brighten a cold camp.”
“What a flatterer you are Mr. Thomson, but thank you.”
He saluted with two fingers and walked off. She laughed and said to Adam, “He’s so nice, it’s hard to think he’s...Look Adam, Major Ferguson is looking in the wagon!”
“Don’t get excited,” he muttered. “That would give the game away for certain. But damnation, I don’t like him nosing around there. I don’t trust him. He’s a reputation of being smart. Made a rifle that could win the war for the British if his estimable superiors had the good sense to outfit the troops with it. Thankfully they don’t.”
“At dinner, I had the feeling that he…was watching me.”
“Ummm.”
Ferguson saw them coming and waited politely by the wagon. “’Afternoon, Mistress Morgan.” He bowed. “Are you and your brother seeing the sights, such as they are?” The faint traces of Scotland in his soft voice went well with the cheerful smile on his face.
“Yes, Major, I had to get Adam some exercise. He’s like a child—he sits for too long and he gets fidgety, you know.”
“Yes, I have a young nephew who bounces up almost as soon as he sits down.”
Deborah found the small talk more irritating than usual. They had nothing to say! When would he leave? “If the weather holds, we hope to be leaving tomorrow morning. I’m sure Col. Marshall will be delighted to see the back of us.”
“Don’t mind Kit, ma’am.” He laughed. “He’s juggling more eggs right now than he cares to think about. Bound to make a man a little edgy. Shouldn’t have let you have the sharp side of his tongue, though. Isn’t done to a lady. I apologize for him.”
“There’s no need, Major. The Colonel and I are traveling to the same town, even if we’re going by different roads.”
“My compliments, ma’am,” he swept her a bow, “you are dealing with a...a difficult situation with grace. Good day to you.” With that he left them.
**
Ferguson’s strolling pace belied the directness of his route to the main house. He found Marshall at his desk, writing. The Colonel did not look up. Ferguson leaned against the desk edge and toyed with the silver whistle he used to signal battlefield orders to his troops. After awhile, Marshall thumped the quill down on the blotter and looked up at his friend, with a mixture of exasperation and resignation. “Well, Patrick, out with it. You didn’t earn your nickname for nothing. You’ve got something to say and you’re damn well going to get it said eventually, so you might as well say it and let me get back to work.”
“Kit, Mistress Morgan...”
“Has she gotten to you, too?” Ferguson looked at him strangely and Marshall retrenched. “You and Tarleton.”
Ferguson brushed a bit of dirt off his knee, but looked up. “Umm, I know she’s a fetching little creature, but the thing is, I was looking in the wagon earlier...”
“Umm.” Marshall sifted through some papers.
“Kit, are ye listening to me, mon?” Patrick wielded his Scots like a judge wielded a gavel. They both got attention.
“Yes, of course, Patrick.”
“Well, I was thinking. They are farmers, no?”
“Yes.” He pulled a paper from the stack and began to make some notes on it.
“Just how many blankets can one farm use in a winter?”
The Colonel kept writing and then stopped abruptly. He leaned back in his chair. “I can’t do it right now, but I think I’d better take a look at those supplies before they leave in the morning.”
“How early do you intend to get up?”
Marshall stuck his lower lip out as he thought. “I have it...”
“Good. I’ll leave you to it, then.” He clapped Marshall on the shoulder as he strode out.
Kit turned away from the contact and hoped, even as he did it, that Ferguson didn’t notice the movement. Patrick was a friend and divided his free time between two very devoted ladies both named Sally, so Kit knew the touch wasn’t anything…personal. It was just that he only felt comfortable being touched by one or two men, mainly his father and brother, these days. Anybody else made his skin crawl. He shrugged away the momentary lapse and set out to implement his plan.
**
Deborah puttered around the wagon trying to create tasks where there was no need. Ferguson’s visit bothered her, but she couldn’t say why. Like a mosquito bite that becomes more irritating the more it is scratched, the disquiet grew as she puttered and thought.
“Adam, I’m concerned about Major Ferguson’s visit. He didn’t say a word to us about going through the wagon. You’d think he’d at least acknowledge it or apologize since it’s obvious we saw him.”
Adam sat on the grass and stripped the seed heads off a grass stalk, as he had been for the past few minutes. “I thing you’re right.” He studied the dirt under his bent leg. “Why don’t you go get the horse? We’ll tie it onto the wagon. You can stay here tonight. Tell them we want to get an especially early start in the morning, which we do. I want to be gone so early that we’ll wake up the pickets on guard duty.”
Deborah went off and returned a few minutes later, empty handed. Adam could see the carefully controlled panic in her eyes as she dropped down beside him. “The guard said that he’d just gotten orders that our horse wasn’t to be released until Marshall gave permission. He told me to go, earlier. What happened?”
With his head down as he played with the grass, Adam looked up. “He’s suspicious. He hasn’t got any proof because there’s nothing here. Ferguson must have seen something that set him off. But what? What did he see?”
“There are just blankets here, nothing else.”
Adam thought for a moment. “Yup, that’s it. How many people would go to market and just get blankets?”
&nb
sp; “Oh...oh! Well, we could say that...that the storage shed with all the worker’s blankets caught fire, and we had to replace them quickly before winter.”
“That’ll do.” He went back to playing in the dirt. She worried about the possibilities this new complication created. “What do we do if they don’t let us go?’ He didn’t answer, but she knew he had to be thinking about the same thing. “That information has to get back.” He grunted. She hesitated, gathering her arguments because she knew what she was going to propose would generate a skirmish. “Could you sneak out of here tonight?”
He glanced at her and then returned his attention to the dirt. “I could, but I’m not leaving here without you.”
“You have to. One of us has to get that information back. You can steal a horse and travel faster than I could, even if they do let us go tomorrow.”
“No.”
“The information has to get back now. If we wait for them to release us, it may be too late. They may take days to let us go.”
“Deborah, I’m not leaving you here. It’s too dangerous. Remember Tarleton?”
She paled. “I can deal with him.”
“Sure you can. You’ll just give him the sharp edge of your tongue.” He wasn’t going to tell her how much protection that would be. “But think about me. The General, hell, both Generals, would have my hide.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll tell the British you wandered off, and I have to look for you. They’ll let me go with no problem. I’ll be out of here right after you.”
“No.”
Time to bring up the artillery. “Adam, if you don’t go tonight, I will.”
He stopped his drawing in the dirt. Taking a deep breath, he capitulated. “You got more than your height from Mama, little chick. How I’m gonna explain this to Pa, I’ll never know.”
“Tell him the truth!”
“What? That his little slip of a daughter strong-armed me into doing something against my better judgment? I’ll be lucky if he hangs me.”
“Sure.” She grinned. “He’ll believe you.” She grasped his hand. “I won’t see you again before you leave. Good luck and God’s speed.”