King's Mountain (7 page)

“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 over. 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.

Elias Powell shuffled his feet and made a little noise in his throat, so perhaps he had decided that the commander had not seen us enter.

He did glance up then, only for a moment, and then he bent over his paper again and scratched another line or two, and then signed his name grandly with a flourish before he laid aside the quill and turned to look at us. “Well, Powell, what is it?”

The little manservant was as meek with his master as he had been high and mighty with me, and I saw that he was one of those weak terrier fellows who tailor their tempers to the measure of those about them. I had no intention of bowing and scraping to the man, not even if he had been the king's son instead of a Scotchman, so I kept my eyes steady on him, for I didn't see there was much that he could do to me however I behaved.

Powell shifted from one foot to the other, still keeping his gaze directed at the dirt floor. “Begging your pardon, sir. This here young woman has presented herself here at camp, asking to be taken on in some capacity, and I thought I'd bring her along to you, to see if she would suit.”

Without a word the officer looked over at me, and found me staring back at him, bold as brass. I doubt if he'd have stood it from a man, but he didn't seem to mind it from me. He took care not to show even a flicker of a smile.

“So, you are a servant of the king, are you, girl?”

“Only if he pays me wages,” I said. “Same as anybody.”

Powell edged me aside. “She's only a simple girl, sir, and the rights of this conflict are beyond her ken. But she might suit as a maid of all work.”

The officer was still looking at me, and he said to me—not to Elias Powell—“Well, what use are you? We have no cows to milk and no floors to scrub.”

If he meant to frighten me, he had made a poor job of it. All that time he had kept us waiting while he wrote had given me time to think up my piece, for I knew he'd be asking me something of the sort, and I had my answer ready. “You've clothes, haven't you? I don't reckon you wash them yourself when they get dirty.”

“We engaged a washerwoman already.”

“Mending, then. I am a dab hand with a needle, sir. And I can be useful tending the sick. I done that before.”

“Still, I suppose there is enough work at camp for you to do, helping the cook as well as the laundress. And if you can be of any assistance to Dr. Johnson, there is some value in that.”

“I can do all of that well enough.” I would have told him I could break horses and mend cannons if it would have made him take me on. But I judged that a womanly silence would do more for my cause than any further arguments about my skills.

He thought the matter over for what seemed like a good long while to me, holding my breath, but at last he said, “Well, young woman, if you are in my service, I should expect you to comport yourself properly. No goings-on with the soldiers, no drunkenness, or slatternly habits. Do you understand?”

I nodded, and forced myself not to grin.

“See that you do, because if you do not abide by my rules, you will be dismissed at once.”

“As long as I have my keep, I'll do what you say,” I told him, and that was true enough. I might miss taking a drink now and again, but I don't reckon anybody would make free with a smelly bunch of soldiers if they had any other choice.

He looked back at his manservant. “All right, Powell, I suppose her keep will cost us little enough. She may stay if she behaves herself.”

“I'll see to it, sir,” said Powell, shooing me out of the tent ahead of him.

So that's how I came to be on the king's side in this war. Maybe if I had chanced upon an encampment of the other side that day, I might have cast my lot with the Americans, for I never yet had a conviction—political, religious, or heartfelt—that could not be scotched by an empty belly or the need for a dry place to sleep.

Elias Powell took charge of me for the rest of the afternoon, rabbiting on about camp rules, and washing, and a long recital of the commander's wants and wishes. “And mind you keep yourself clean in body, girl,” he added, “In case he adds you to his list of wants.”

I shrugged. “That will cost him extra.”

He took me to the cook's tent, and saw that I was given a bit of boiled beef and corn, soldiers' rations, for my midday meal, washed down with a pot of ale. I wondered whose cows had been taken to feed the army, but even if they had come from the farm of someone I knew, I would have eaten it just the same, for my going hungry would not change anything for them that had lost their livestock.

Finally, when I had finished my food and Powell had run out of commandments, he took me along to one of the tents used by the commander's servants, where I would be staying, alongside the other maidservant. “Go on inside,” he said, “and tell her you're here on my say-so. Reckon she can tell you whatever else you need to know,” and I decided that he had thought of somebody else that he needed to order around, and on account of that, he was willing to let me go for a while.