1812: The Rivers of War (65 page)

Outside, in the corridor, Ball’s eyes still were fixed on the war clubs belted to the waists of the brothers. The gunner was cursing himself for not having brought a pistol, though there’d seemed no reason to do so.

That door wasn’t close to being thick enough. The sounds coming through it couldn’t have been mistaken by an idiot.

He was pretty sure all hell was about to break loose. Even with a pistol, dealing with James and John Rogers would have been a chancy business. Especially James.

He heard John clear his throat. Startled, Ball looked up.

The two brothers were exchanging a look of some sort. James had his arms crossed over his chest. John had his planted on his hips.

“I think we should go,” John said.

James nodded solemnly, and uncrossed his arms. “Yes. We should respect our sister’s privacy.”

With no further ado, he started walking down the corridor toward the stairs leading to the lobby. John followed, shaking his head.

“Who cares about
that
? If she finds out, we’re dead men.”

Ball brought up the rear, also shaking his head.

If Tiana’s father had been there, the situation might have turned explosive. Although it was hard to tell. Captain John had adopted many of the Cherokees’ attitudes, for all that he jibed at them for their heathen ways.

But he wasn’t there. He’d left the city again, on one of his never-specified “expeditions.”

Ball was pretty sure that Cherokees were all crazy. On the other hand, they were crazy on
his
side, so he wasn’t going to worry about it. Even if the craziness did seem surprisingly infectious.

In the middle of his dark musings, in his own room, Robert Ross heard Driscol’s half cry, if not the words themselves. Tiana’s response came through the door even more clearly. The meaning of the sounds was …

Well. Obvious.

He smiled at the ceiling, feeling his gloomy mood lighten. The Church of England wouldn’t have approved of the doings in that other room, of course. Indeed, no church that he knew of would. But, for Robert Ross also, his childhood upbringing had been many years ago. Many worlds ago.

Ross
approved
of that couple. So let the preachers and parsons be damned.

There was silence in the salon, for perhaps two minutes. Driscol and Tiana just nuzzled each other, too exhausted to do anything more.

As the seconds passed, Driscol found himself—for the first time in months, really—deeply missing his absent left arm. His right arm was pinned under Tiana, and as tightly as they were embraced, there was no way he could pry it loose.

Nor did he want to, for that matter. But he
did
wish he still had another hand, to caress that beautiful and precious face.

“I love you,” he murmured, looking into her eyes. Her face lay not more than two inches away.

“Good.” Her eyes crinkled from a smile. “I’d hate to think you were just taking advantage of my girlish enthusiasm. Not that I didn’t enjoy that more than anything I’ve ever done before in my life.”

The smile remained, but her gaze became solemn again. “Come back to me, Patrick.
Please
.”

There was no sensible answer to that. Driscol would survive the coming battle, or he wouldn’t—and very little that he did would have much effect on the matter. Battles were chaos incarnate, ruled by whimsical gods who struck down whomever they wished.

But he was pretty sure Tiana understood that. The plea was just her way of expressing her own love.

He slid out of her, finally. Half regretting the softness, and half cherishing the prosaic intimacy of the moment. If he survived the next few days, there’d be many such moments in the future.

Tiana, obviously, shared his sentiments. “Next time—and all the times after that—let’s get
all
our clothes off first.” A long, bare leg stroked down his own, twitching a bit once it got past the knee. “Wool’s
itchy
. And I’m not too fond of all those buttons and hooks on your tunic, either.”

He hadn’t had time to remove the coat, beyond pushing it up and out of the way. It did, indeed, have a multitude of buttons—purely decorative, those—along with the eyelets and hooks to keep it closed. Far more than it needed, really, for practical purposes. The military just naturally seemed to dote on the things. That was true of every army Driscol had ever seen.

Of course, if he’d taken the time to remove the coat, the vest underneath it was woolen also.

“All our clothes,” he echoed. He was able to lift himself up enough to stop the things from pressing any longer into Tiana’s chest. She started to hold him back, by reflex, but not for very long.

Passion spent, the rest of the world was coming back, with its insistent demands. Driscol could hear, again, the sounds of the battalion in the street below getting ready for the march.

He could hear them, he belatedly realized, because the window was open.

Seeing his startled gaze, Tiana’s eyes followed. “Oh, who cares?” she said. “It’s not as if everyone doesn’t know where babies come from.”

The mention of babies caused Driscol to wince. Then, wince again, when he felt the wetness of their still-intimate contact.

Which was
very
wet. In every sense of the term, that had been the most explosive coupling of his life.

“Ah…”

“You and your stupid ‘ahs’!” she laughed. “Stop worrying, Patrick. Or if you must, worry about staying alive in the battle.”

But Driscol had adhered sternly to duty his entire life. “What if you get pregnant?”

Stern duty would not allow any fiddling with tenses, either. “
Are
pregnant.”

Even lying on her back, Tiana’s shrug was graceful. “I might be. It’s close to the right time of month. And so what if I am?”

She stroked his cheek. “Patrick, I’m a Cherokee. There’s no such thing as a bastard among us. The baby would be brought up like anyone else in the clan. And would give me something to remember you by. The best memory I could ask for.”

It wasn’t the first time Tiana had made Driscol feel as if she were twice his age, instead of the reverse. Fervently, silently, he pleaded with whatever God might be to allow him a full lifetime to spend with the woman.

The prayer came with some apologies, too. Not apologies for what they’d done, but for some of his past thoughts.

Not about Tiana, but her people. Other than his personal attachment to Tiana and her brothers, Driscol had shared none of Houston’s fondness for the Cherokee. Just another tribe of barbarians, to Driscol’s way of thinking, who’d added the civilized vice of slaveholding to their native ones.

Now, belatedly, it was occurring to him that the girl he so deeply loved had not appeared out of nowhere. Athena might have sprung full-blown from the brow of Zeus, but Driscol didn’t live in the world of Greek myths. However many of Tiana’s qualities were her own, something—
somebody
—had to have cast the mold in which they’d been able to form.

So, too—and not for the first time—Sam Houston seemed much older and smarter than he, at times. There could be a great stupidity brought on by too much scar tissue on the soul. Driscol had seen it in other people, and could now see it in himself. Sam’s cheerful and friendly attitude toward the human race, as foolish as it might sometimes seem, was ultimately a much wiser way of passing through a life and its work.

So Driscol suspected, at least. What he
knew
, for a certainty, was that testing that hypothesis was a far more attractive prospect than continuing to amass evidence for its opposite.

Driscol wasn’t just tired of the killing trade. He was increasingly getting tired of the whole business of hating altogether.

It seemed … empty, in the end. Where the young blue eyes gazing up at him were like pools of clear water with no bottom at all. He could swim in them for a lifetime, and be refreshed every day. Cleansed every day.

“I love you,” he repeated. “But I must be going now.”

“Yes,” was all she said.

Once outside the hotel, Driscol tried to project the troll’s fearsome countenance.

It was … difficult.

The assembled ranks of the soldiers on the street by the Trémoulet House were too precise, the shoulders of the men too square, their eyes too much to the front, their gear and weapons held too properly and too well.

Driscol glanced up at the window of Tiana’s suite.

Wide open.

An entire battalion was doing its level best not to grin from ear to ear. Or even burst into outright laughter.

“Damn the bastards,” he growled, trying desperately to catch the troll before he fled the scene altogether.

He glared at Charles Ball. The sergeant avoided his eyes, but there was a trace of a smile on his face.

“What are
you
grinning at, you black ape?”

“Nothing, sir. Just, ah, pleased to note that your sweetheart took your departure so well. She’s a plucky lass.”

In the end, Driscol couldn’t think of anything to do other than smile himself. Under the circumstances, the troll seemed as ridiculous and out of place as a warthog at a wedding. Or a christening.

“Yes. Indeed, she is. A very spirited woman.”

He even looked back—twice—as the battalion marched off. And made no attempt to hide the fact from his troops.

They were very long looks, too, since Tiana was now standing in the window. It might be the last time he would ever see her.

After the battalion had marched out of sight, Tiana went to Robert Ross’s room and knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he said.

Once she entered, she looked around, almost hopping from one foot to the other. Then, not seeing anything better to do, she sat down on a chair next to the general’s bed and clasped her hands in her lap.

“I was wondering if I could stay here, for a bit. Might be quite a bit.”

Ross looked up at her. “Of course, my dear. Stay as long as you’d like.”

Her fingers started twisting. She managed to stop them after a few seconds.

“Tell me about your life, Robert,” she said abruptly. “Not your military career. Your
life
. Your boyhood. Your wife. Your children. Living things.”

After a moment, she added: “Please.”

“Bunch of niggers. They’ll be useless, you watch and see.”

Commodore Daniel Patterson swiveled his head to stare at the marine who had made that remark to a man standing next to him. Both men were part of the battery Patterson had placed ashore on the west bank of the Mississippi. They were watching Major Driscol and his “Freedmen Iron Battalion” as they disembarked from the ferries that had carried them across the river.

Patterson was about to issue a reprimand when the marine’s companion made it unnecessary.

“Maybe not, too,” the man said sharply. “And what do
you
know about it, anyway?”

He was a sailor, not a marine. The U.S. Marine Corps didn’t allow black freedmen to join its ranks, but they were common in the navy. No one knew for sure, because no records were kept detailing the navy’s racial composition, but somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent of the naval ranks were composed of freedmen—and the percentage was often much higher in the combat units.

Watching Driscol and his men as they energetically dug themselves in and prepared their positions, Patterson felt whatever doubts he’d had himself vanishing. Driscol’s implacable determination was obvious, as was the fact that he’d successfully transmitted it to the men who followed him. Patterson was a bit astonished at the discipline of the unit, in fact, since he knew that they’d only had the benefit of less than a month’s training.

Being a white man, it was hard for him to know exactly what went on in the minds of black men. But Patterson knew from a
friend that Captain Isaac Hull, in his report on the
Constitution’s
victory over the
Guerriere
, had remarked that the black gunners who’d made up a sizable part of the
Constitution’s
crew had fought even harder and better than the white ones. Determined, it seemed, to prove themselves.

Patterson suspected he was seeing the same thing here. The more so since Driscol obviously had established a rapport with his men, despite the major’s grim demeanor. He was the sort of white officer who could lead black soldiers well, because he was able to maintain the needed discipline without making his men feel that he was distrustful of them. Indeed, he seemed able to instill confidence in them and the conviction that they could succeed.

So by late afternoon, Patterson was in a far better mood than he’d been just a few days earlier. A good part of that was because, in a rare moment of military good sense, General Morgan had ordered Driscol and his battalion to take position on the right flank of Morgan’s line.

Praise the Lord.

“General Morgan likes to call it the ‘Morgan Line,’” Patterson told Driscol, when they had their first private conversation that evening. He and the major were standing on the open ground next to the riverbank, which gave them the best possible view of the terrain.

He kept his voice and facial expression impassive.

So did Driscol.

“Does he now?” mused the newly arrived major. His pale eyes moved up and down the trench in question. “I’d think the ‘Morgan Scratch’ might be a more suitable term.”

Patterson had to choke down a laugh. Where Jackson, on the east bank, had turned the Rodriguez Canal into a formidable line of fieldworks, Morgan on the west bank had been satisfied to dig a shallow ditch and call the piled-up dirt behind it a “breastwork.” The fieldworks were so shallow that men had to crouch or even lie down in order to be protected by it. And that “moat” could be leaped by a ten-year-old girl.

Driscol’s gaze came to rest on the left wing of the “Morgan Line,” next to the river itself.

“That seems solid enough, though,” he commented.

Relieved both by the major’s competence and his ability to
keep a straight face, Patterson decided he could speak more openly.

“Yes, I agree. It’s the only bright spot in the picture. Morgan’s got two six-pounders positioned there, along with a twelve-pounder. The gunners are a mix of Louisiana militiamen and navy regulars, with other Louisiana militiamen on hand to provide infantry protection. Best of all, they’re under the command of Lieutenant Philibert of the navy. They’ll do well enough, I’m sure, when the fray starts.”