Love Not a Rebel (30 page)

“I knew what I wanted, madame, from the very moment that I saw your face,” he told her.

His lips brushed hers. “Betray not my heart, Amanda, that is all that I ask.” He rose and then was gone.

For long moments she lay in the bed, feeling the tingle of his kiss upon her lips. Then she cried out and leapt to her feet, throwing open her armoire to find a heavy white velvet dressing gown. She quickly hooked the garment about her and tore down the stairs. Thom stood in the hallway with a silver tray and a very traditional stirrup cup upon it. “May I?” she begged him, awaiting no answer but running out to the porch steps in her bare feet.

Eric was mounted upon his huge black stallion at the front of a disciplined line of troops. Amanda, her hair like a stream of wildfire against the white velvet, ran down the steps to her husband’s side. The officers who had been shouting out orders fell silent, and Eric turned from his study of the men behind him to see her before him.

That was how he would remember her in the long nights to come. Proud and wild with tousled flaming hair,
a soaring spirit with her emerald eyes, pagan with her bare toes showing upon the earth, exquisite as the white velvet outlined her body. She handed him the cup, and a cheer went up that warmed his soul and tore upon his heart.

He drank the whiskey and set the cup upon the tray. “Godspeed to all of you!” she cried, and again a chant rose, a cheer for the lady of Cameron Hall.

And he thought that he just possibly detected tears within the emerald beauty of her eyes.

Eric leaned down and kissed his wife’s lips. Then he rode forward, toward the west.

X
  

October 1774

T
wo divisions came against the Shawnee that fall, marching toward the Ohio River. Lord Dunmore led his men from the northern part of the valley. Eric was not with him. It had been decided that he would take a number of his old Indian fighters and accompany General Andrew Lewis, a man Eric highly respected, one of Washington’s stalwart colleagues from the campaign against the Frenchman Duquesne. Lewis led his men by way of Fort Pitt while the governor’s men came through the Great Kanawha Valley.

The Western militia were an interesting breed of men. The majority of the men were clad in doeskin, and many of them had taken or displayed an Indian scalp upon occasion. In the Virginia Valley, life was still raw, and men eked out their livings. The Indians had a name for Lewis’s men; they called them the Long Knives, an acknowledgment of their prowess with the weapons.

But they weren’t after just any Indians. As Eric rode with Lewis, the general explained much of a situation that had not changed. “We encroach upon the land. Hostiles kill white settlers, then the settlers turn around and they don’t seem to know if they’re after a Delaware, or Cherokee, a Shawnee, or another. Inevitably they kill an Indian from a friendly tribe and then that tribe isn’t so friendly anymore. A lot of trouble started with the establishment of trading posts out here—greedy men selling so much liquor that they create a savage out of any man. But now we’re going after Cornstalk, and there ain’t any man alive could call that man anything but a savage when he fights. You mark my words. The Delaware and Cherokees themselves, they tremble at the name Cornstalk.”

“So I have heard,” Eric agreed. Cornstalk was a powerful voice among the Indians. He was trying to form a confederacy of all the Ohio tribes.

Lewis looked up at the sky. “Dunmore could be in some difficulty for this one,” he advised Eric. “The territory might well be Canada—according to the Quebec Act. If not, it’s still disputed between Virginia and Pennsylvania.”

“He is determined to fight the Shawnee, and that is that.”

“Didn’t you get enough of Indian fighting back when the wars were going on?”

“I was asked to raise men.”

“There ain’t been a war whoop heard in the Tidewater region, not in a long, long time. Well, if we meet up with Cornstalk, we’ll hear plenty.”

Eric learned the truth of that statement at Point Pleasant where they found the Shawnee under Cornstalk. Tension raced high throughout the forces as the commanders conferred, but the Shawnee were the first to attack.

And Eric heard the war whoops, blood-curdling, savage, just as Lewis had said. The Indians appeared like painted devils, glistening in the sunlight, attacking with their cries. Yet above the roar of those cries and above the roar of his own orders, Eric heard Cornstalk. The Shawnee warrior, painted generously himself, cast his voice out over his
people like that of God—or Satan. His men spurred forward, unafraid of steel or bullets, unafraid of death itself.

The militia fought well. Men stood their ground, and did not falter or fall back against the onslaught of the savage fighters. War whoops rose from the white men, and hand-to-hand combat came quickly. Eric was unhorsed when a Shawnee warrior fell atop him from a tree. As he rolled in the mud, he saw the brave raise his knife against him. Eric latched his wrist about the warrior’s, aware that his life lay at stake. He strained against the Indian’s slick muscles, and just as the blade neared his throat, Eric found the burst of energy to send the Indian flying. He did not waste time, but leapt upon the Indian, bringing his own blade swiftly home within his enemy’s chest. A gurgle of blood rose on the brave’s mouth, then his dark eyes glazed over and Eric was quickly up on his feet again, wary for his next opponent. One of his men, a distant Cameron cousin, hurried his horse to him. “Down the lines, sir, we have to hold here!”

They did hold, but Eric fought even as he shouted new orders, and the hours passed by slowly and painfully. Still he heard the haunting shouts of Cornstalk, and he realized that the Shawnee were still coming.

Then darkness came at last, and the Shawnee slipped away across the Ohio, shadowy silhouettes in the night. The militia had taken the day. But even as he realized that there were no more opponents to fight, Eric looked about the darkened field before him. Men lay everywhere.

“All right! We’ve got to tend to our wounded,” he called sharply. Then it all came home to him, the horrible cries of the dying, the screams of pain that had not ceased. He began to hurry, hearing from one sergeant that two hundred of their own number lay dead, entwined with the glistening bodies of their enemies.

It took well into the night to sort the living from the dead, to bring what aid they could to the wounded and the dying. He was anxious to find Damien, whom he hadn’t seen since very early in the day. He did not want to return home without his wife’s cousin. Amanda had, he thought,
very specifically entrusted his life to Eric, and she would expect the young man to survive.

Dismay and despair claimed him as he searched the men. At last he found Damien on a stretcher with a surgeon examining a bloody head wound. He grinned at Eric. “Knocked me for a loop, it did! I thought I was dead. But it’s hard to keep a good man down, eh, sir?”

“Aye, Damien, it’s hard to keep a good man down,” he agreed.

He went past the tents of the men, conferred with Lewis who wanted to start building a fort the next morning, then hurried onward to his own canvas shelter. He had a bottle of good Caribbean rum with him and as he cast himself down upon his pallet, he was glad of the liquor. Home seemed a distant place now. All that danced before his eyes were the bodies of the Shawnee. He saw red, the color of blood, and it colored everything.

A chill shook him. He had come very close to death himself. Once he had fought so haphazardly and with undauntable courage. He had been a lad then. He had not seen himself as being mortal. Age had taught him that all men die, and age had even allowed him to accept the prospect of his own death. Now he was fiercely determined not to die.

He smiled, because even here, even in this wilderness with the stench of oil and blood so strongly with him, he could close his eyes and see her face. “I will not die, madame, to thwart you, love, if for no other reason!” His hands shook, and so he drank more deeply from the rum bottle. His marriage had brought more to him than he had dared hope, but the idyll of their days had been rudely marred by the quarrel before he left. There was more going on than he could see, though he could not pinpoint what. She despised him for being a “traitor,” yet she laughed in his arms and she came alive when he reached for her. The line between love and hate was thin indeed. He wondered on what side of the line her true emotions lay. He had taken her from her father—and from Lord Hastings—and for that she seemed pleased enough. But still there was something there, something that he did not
trust. He almost imagined that Sterling held something over his daughter, but he did not know what it could be.

He shrugged, tossing over, praying that he could sleep. He did not. He tossed again and wondered what went on back in the Tidewater. He did not want to stay in the west any longer. Men were meeting in Philadelphia, things were happening, his wife was home—alone—and he was caught up in this wretched battle against the redskins. Robert Tarryton would have married his duchess by now. He wondered if Amanda had attended the wedding, and he wondered how she fared at Cameron Hall.

His heart quickened suddenly. Maybe she had conceived an heir for him. A son … a daughter. A child to teach to love the land, to ride, to plant, to stand by the river and learn to read the wind.

She did not love him, he thought, and he wondered if she still carried any feelings for Robert Tarryton. The thought angered him, and he breathed deeply, tossing again. She did not need to love him to conceive an heir. And if she ever went near Tarryton …

She would not. She had a fierce pride and would surely keep her distance—if only to make Tarryton pay.

Then he wondered if Tarryton was haunted at night like this, lying awake, wondering about Amanda. No, he could not wonder so fiercely, for he had never known the explosion of heaven that it was to possess her. To touch her and fall … in love.

He smiled bitterly in the darkness. Love would be a very dangerous weapon in her hands. He had to take care that he not give her the chance to use it.

He tossed again, and remembered her eyes, then the rise of her breasts, the rose color of her nipples, the fragile ivory beauty of her skin. He wanted to go home.

It simply wasn’t to be. In the morning they started a crude fort. When the fort was done they rode north again against the Shawnee across the Ohio. They met with Dunmore’s forces.

There, finally, the governor announced that they should disperse and return to their homes

The militia were angry, for they were so close to ending
more of the fray. General Lewis was in sympathy with his men, Eric thought, but he was a commander, and a Virginian, and his opinions were certainly not clear to those around him.

He asked Eric to accompany him as they backtracked home. Eric bit down hard upon his desire to return as rapidly as possible to Cameron Hall and agreed that he would do so.

She should have been delirious with joy, Amanda chastised herself as she sat in the arbor by the river, her shoes and stockings cast aside, her bare toes wiggling in the cool grass. Above her the trees danced and swayed and the sun fell down upon her with the same curious dappled light that had touched them both when she had come here with Eric. It seemed so long ago. The weeks had become months, and summer had given way to fall, and now it was November.

She had everything that she had wanted. She had her freedom, she had the run of this magnificent estate, and in Eric’s absence, her every wish was considered to be law. It had not been difficult to slip into the role of mistress here for there was not much that differed from Sterling Hall. Though the estate would have run quite competently in Eric’s absence with or without her, she loved involving herself and she had tried to enter into the management of the hall unobtrusively. She had earned Thom’s mistrust when he had discovered her assiduously going over the books, but then she had been careful to praise him lavishly with her very best smile, and then point out where they could perhaps reduce an expenditure here or there and use the savings to improve upon the house.