King's Mountain (4 page)

I had just turned fourteen in June, and the shape of my life had begun to occupy my thoughts for I was no longer a child, and the future seemed to be coming upon me in a great rush—unlike Jamie's fate, which would sit square in the road years ahead of him like a great braw hound, only waiting for him to reach it.

“At least no one has to die to give me a foothold,” I told him.

My brother did not trouble to reply because as soon as I said it, I knew it to be a lie. Uncle James Murray, who assumed command in Canada after General Wolfe died at Quebec, had surely reached his new eminence through someone else's demise, and it was he who proposed that I should follow him into the army. Uncle James had seen me playing with my wee tin soldiers a year or two ago, and he told my mother that they ought to think of buying me a commission in a good regiment. The idea pleased me, not least because I was a frail child, the very antipode of a great warrior. All the more reason to prove myself.

When I was twelve, and Uncle Jamie was lieutenant colonel of the 15th Foot, he prevailed upon my father to buy me a commission in the regiment so that he might shepherd me into his profession. It came to naught, though, for I was such a wee, frail lad at twelve that the regiment, looking ahead to war in Canada, had no choice but to throw me back, and to refund to my father the purchase price of my ensigncy, for I'd have been no use to them on a battlefield.

For now, there was little to do besides my lessons and to go for country walks with my sisters. I fancied myself protecting them on our rambles, though I was no bigger or stronger than they.

*   *   *

“Pattie, how shilpit you look,” said Betty, peering into my face. “Are you taken ill?”

I shook my head. “Mortal thoughts, Betty,” I said, trying to make light of it. “Consider our surroundings.”

My sister Betty and I had gone walking in the kirkyard, threading our way among the tombstones, stopping now and again to examine the mossy carving or to read a weathered inscription.

“You're not afraid of a graveyard, are you?” The voice was all tender concern, but Betty's gray eyes mocked me from beneath her prim blue bonnet.

“I am not. But I'm not a child to go larking about among the dead, either. Show a bit of respect, Betty.”

She tossed her head. “Perhaps Father should train you up for a parson instead of a soldier,” she said. “I wish I had come with Jean instead of ye, dour old man of fourteen!”

Jean is our youngest sister, and normally Betty thinks herself too grand and grown to consort with a bairn like Jean. She only wished for her now to taunt me, but my black mood and a dearth of other society in the neighborhood had combined to make the pair of them allies if not friends in the few days we had been in Pitfour, so that any excursion planned for an afternoon would necessarily have included wee Jean as well, but today she was taken ill with a summer cold, and Mother deemed it best not to let her go out walking in the damp mist of a drizzly day. Jean must stay at home with George, the youngest, who was thought too delicate to be abroad in foul weather, whether he had a cough or no. Thus my sister was left with only old sobersides—me—for company.

Betty soon tired of walking in the gloomy shade of the kirkyard. “Would you like to see the inside of the church, Patrick? It isn't grand at all compared to the kirk in Edinburgh, but there's a pretty colored window. I like to see the sun making rainbows through the glass. I thought I might try to sketch them. Will you come?”

I shook my head. On such a gray day as this, I thought little of her chances of seeing rainbows in sun shafts. “Go along, Betty,” I said. “I am happy out here, parsing the words on these headstones.”

She looked doubtful. “All right, but if it begins to rain, you must promise me that you will come inside. You mustn't take a chill.”

I assured her that, as I had no wish to catch my death in a kirkyard, I would come in the moment a drop of rain touched my cheek. With that she was satisfied, and she left me at last in peace. I strolled among the rows of headstones, more preoccupied with my own thoughts than with concern for the dear departed. Once I thought I saw a stoat slink down past a stone mausoleum in the distance. Hunting church mice, I thought, or perhaps young rabbits too fresh from the nest to know the dangers. Bit early for a stoat to be out hunting, though, surely, even if the day was dreary.

*   *   *

I had wandered alone for a wee while after Betty departed, reading the epitaphs, and wondering what my own might say in the fullness of time. The place made thoughts of death inevitable, even for a merry lass like my sister, much more so for her dour younger brother.

A soft voice startled me out of my reverie.

“There are better tombstones in Strachur.”

I spun round, alarm giving way to annoyance at being thus rudely accosted. “Who the de'il?”

In the shadow of the great tree stood a lass who looked no older than I. Great green eyes peered out at me from a whey face beneath a gray hooded cloak, the color of the rain clouds. Beneath the cloak she wore a dark homespun dress, and I glimpsed wisps of damp red hair curling at her temples. She had knelt down before a headstone, and was tracing its lettering with one bony finger.

The wind bit into me, and I shivered as I peered over her shoulder, attempting to make out the faint inscription, half worn away by weathering. The only word on the stone that yet remained discernible was “Ferguson.”

“That is my name,” I said aloud.

The pale girl nodded. “Aye. 'Tis. There be Fergusons buried at Strachur as well.”

“Are you connected to the family?” I asked her.

Solemnly she nodded again. She did not look up at me when she said it, for she was intent upon her tracery of the lettering.

I thought, though, by the clarty look of her homespun clothing and her rough speech that she was not of the gentry. A servant girl perhaps, or a nursemaid, brought hence with some family, working on a neighboring farm. “I am Patrick Ferguson of Pitfour,” I said, drawing myself up to not much height. “My father is a lawyer in Edinburgh.”

I suppose I expected her to be covered with confusion upon hearing whom she had disturbed with her ill-mannered prating, but she only shrugged, as if she had known that already and it did not trouble her overmuch. She seemed intent upon studying the stones. I wondered if she could read them or if her scrutiny was only for show.

“And who are you?”

“Nobody,” she said. I heard no bitterness in her voice. So simply was it said that it nettled me, as if to mock my own pride in my rank and lineage.

“I intend to be somebody one day,” I said. “Do you live near here?”

Solemnly she nodded. “Quite near indeed.”

I waited, but she did not say to which family she belonged. Perhaps she was ashamed to have me know, but she seemed to know a fair bit about my own people.

“And, pray, what is so special about the headstones at Strachur?” I asked her, annoyed by her complacence and by the thought that our Pitfour kirk should be outshone by some distant village in Argyll.

If she heard petulance in my tone, she did not heed it. “Some of the stanes there ha' faces upon them.”

“Faces?”

“Aye. Graven atop the stane will be a face with wings on ither side of it.”

“Angels, do you mean?”

“Not angels at all. 'Tis the
brideag
on those stanes.”

I did not understand the word and shook my head impatiently.

She raised her eyebrows and looked at me as if to question my ignorance. “Do you not know it then? And you a Ferguson?”

“I am from Edinburgh. We set no store by rustic superstitions. Anyway, I do not speak the Gaelic, which I presume that word to be.” In my tone I gave her to know how foolish and unfashionable I thought both her language and her quaint notions.

“It is an old word,” she said. “There are other names for it.”

“Well,” I said. “We have fine kirkyards in Edinburgh, too. Have you ever seen the monuments at Greyfriars?”

She shook her head. “I have not. But there will be Fergusons there, too, perhaps,” she said.

“Yes, I expect I shall be buried there one day,” I said, trying to make a jest of it.

She turned and looked at me with great green eyes, and suddenly I was put in mind of an owl's gaze.
“No, ye will not.”

The shrill scream of a small creature rent the air, and I flinched, startled by the sound, but the girl reacted not at all to the sounds of the death agony. She could not have been calmer if she had been expecting it. I supposed that the creeping stoat I had seen a while before had found its prey—a young rabbit, judging by the sound of it.

“A merciful death,” she murmured. “Scarcely any pain. Soon over.”

“I wouldn't want it,” I said.

She turned her green owl eyes on me then. “Would you not?” she said, as if she really wanted to know.

“Signifying nothing,” I said. “A death which means something would be worth the price of pain, I think. Of course, I'm meant to be a soldier.”

She nodded. “And would you die to save an empire, then?” she asked me.

I thought she might be making sport of me, but she regarded me with a grave expression as if she really wanted to know.

“To save an empire would be worth my life,” I allowed grandly. Easy enough to speak of such things in peaceful churchyards when you are yet a schoolboy, I suppose, but I meant it.

“So you would rather have a protracted death in service of a cause than a meaningless, but merciful, release?”

“I am a Ferguson of Pitfour,” I said. “I have my honor to consider. I don't suppose you could understand such a thing.”

Her eyes widened for an instant, and I thought she might reproach me for my hasty words, but then she simply shrugged, and said, “It shall be as you wish then, Ferguson of Pitfour.”

Before I could ask her what on earth she meant by that, it began to rain in earnest, and Betty appeared at the church door, shouting for me to make a dash for shelter before I caught my death in the downpour. I pulled my coat up to cover my head, and hied myself off toward the sanctuary. When I turned to look for the owl-eyed girl in the gray cloak, she had gone.

CHAPTER THREE

August 1780

When Isaac Shelby came to find me in August of 1780, it put me in mind of the time four years past, at Fort Watauga, when I had allowed four young girls, armed only with wooden buckets, to venture outside the wooden walls. Shelby's news made me recall the one thing I had learned from the incident of the suffering cows: that it is better to attack than to be besieged. Shelby had come to tell me that an even greater war might at last be coming into our territory.

“We cannot wait for them to attack us here, Sevier. We must go out and meet them.” When he told me that, I found myself thinking of young girls going forth into the fields armed only with wooden buckets.

Our strategy had changed, and so had the enemy.

*   *   *

Isaac Shelby and I were old friends, and, more than that, comrades in arms, for we had fought together in many a battle on the frontier. The country had been at war now for four years; and we had done our share of fighting, though not with George Washington's Continental Army, whose battles were taking place elsewhere. We had little enough time to think of the northern campaign, and day to day we had little evidence of our own eyes that anything was amiss beyond our valleys.

The larger war was not here. The Continental Army was fighting it in the northern colonies—Pennsylvania, New York—and they left us to fend for ourselves. We were
beyond the pale,
that ancient term for those who lived removed from civilization. When bands of Indians attacked our farms and killed our neighbors, no standing army marched to our rescue. So we built our own forts and served in a citizens' militia, and we protected our own.

The truth was that those in power didn't want us out there on the frontier in the first place. We would have been easier to manage if we'd all stayed hemmed in on the coast, within half a day's ride of one of their cities, where their troops were quartered and their rules enforced with the rope and the lash. The British had signed a treaty back when they were fighting the French, who were in league with the Indians. To end that war, the British agreed that no whites would settle the mountain lands—the Treaty of Paris, that was, and nobody asked us settlers what we thought about it—but they could no more stem the tide of folk heading westward than they could dam up the ocean.

When they finally realized that the frontier was going to be pushed west whether they liked it or not, they started to parlay with the Indians to reach yet another agreement, which would be a fine alternative to fighting, if the savages could be trusted to keep their word. A dozen years back at Fort Stanwix, the government made a treaty with the Iroquois that was supposed to give them the rights to the lands south of the Ohio River. But the Iroquois nation does not speak for all the Indians, and the Shawnee who hunted there would not abide by it—I reckon nobody asked their opinion, either.

We suffered for that.

Battles were waged and, thankfully, won by us—but not without a heavy toll. Our eventual peace treaty bought us only a little time. The revolution itself commenced up in the Massachusetts colony some six months later, but it did not touch us that soon. Between the Indians and the vicissitudes of farming, we on the frontier had little time to spare for thoughts of war with our British overlords. By 1780, though, we had been bloodied in the fighting, and we did know that the war would reach us soon enough. The Continental Army's struggle looked grim, and the outcome was by no means assured to be a happy one. Shelby was just on thirty, but with his hawk-billed nose and his ramrod carriage, he seemed a stern man even in idle times. He had arrived at my farm that afternoon with his grim tidings, only to find that he was intruding upon a joyous celebration already in progress. In truth, though, I don't think his somber nature stood out against our revelry any more than it might have on any other day. It was late summer, a time of harvest and plenty, and my second wife and I were newly married, so we were hosting a barbecue for all our neighbors. A pig was roasting on the spit, and the long tables had been dragged out onto the lawn and laden with bowls of food.