Long Knife (61 page)

The messenger, in drenched buckskins, saluted as George reached the bottom of the stairs. He looked quite downcast. “Colonel, sir, hit’s about Bill Myers.”

“What, man?”

“After he left Corn Island he got ambushed near the Bear Grass. Kilt an’ sculped.”

“Oh, God, no.” George thought of the trusted courier, one of the swiftest and smartest frontier rangers he had ever known, and was stunned. Then he thought of the thick packet of laboriously written letters, reports, and confidential messages, and a
chill went down his back. “And the messages to Williamsburg?” he said.

“A few tore up an’ scattered where he laid, sir. Many thought carried off.”

“And John Moore, who was with him?”

“Probably captured, sir. Here. Cap’n George sent up this letter from Jim Patten at the Falls. ’Twas ’e that found poor Bill.”

George read the letter, whose inventory of the recovered papers indicated that a score of valuable and secret documents en route to Patrick Henry had been carried away by the savages. And probably are on their way to Detroit now, he thought.

“I am deeply sorry to hear this, friend Jorge,” de Leyba muttered softly beside him.

“Aye. Well, it means I’ve got to cross back over and rewrite all those papers for Governor Henry.”
Damn it all
he thought. Days of laborious writing, just when he should be here taking leave with Teresa and her family. He looked toward the stairs as if hoping to see Teresa there, but instead there stood Maria, kerchief to mouth, staring hard-eyed. “Would you have my horse brought around and made ready, please?” he asked. “And I must see Teresa a moment before I go. Madam,” he said to Maria, “will you tell Teresa I must have a moment with her, that I’m compelled to leave?” Maria stared at him for a moment with a strange expression which he first thought was hatred, then he decided that it must be his imagination. She turned then and disappeared upstairs.

A
T HIS INSISTENCE
, F
ERNANDO LEFT
G
EORGE AND
T
ERESA ALONE
for a few minutes, and let them sit together in his study to take their leave. Outside the rain had stopped, and water drops, catching the morning sun, fell like sparks from the trees beyond the windowglass.

She sat on a divan and he knelt beside her. He held both her hands raising them often to kiss the delicate fingertips. His heart was going wild. He was confused by the strange, angelic smile on her face and the sheen of tears glinting in her eyes. He released her hands and reached up to place both of his at the sides of her face. She grasped his wrists gently, her thumbs moving and caressing the wrist-bones beneath the skin. They looked at each other’s eyes and remembered each other’s bodies. For several minutes they languished in those reveries. She smiled.

“Had we been wrong,” she said, “lightning would have struck us.”

He smiled, then frowned. “I should be able to come back soon. I expect to go and attack Detroit in June, but I think I can come back here before then. This whole territory is at peace now! I ought not be too busy to come. I …” He found himself looking at her left hand, realizing that it had no ring upon it. No ring to symbolize their secret marriage. I’ll have one made before I come back, he thought. She must have a ring on her hand. What …

“I have a keepsake for you, to hold until I can bring you back a ring.” He reached into the deep pocket of his blue coat and drew out the two little athletic medals. He held them up, one between each thumb and forefinger, and she looked back and forth between them, bemused. “My teacher, George Mason, had these made for me,” George said. “This one is for winning a footrace. This one is for winning a wrestling contest. They are a matched pair. Like you and me, Teresa. I shall give you one of ’em and keep the other. Then when we come back together, they shall come back together, eh?”

She smiled and nodded. Now tears were running down her cheeks.

“Which one for your keepsake, my love?” Her silent crying was infectious, and he found the two medallions to be swimming, vague, through his own tears.

She gazed at the one with the tiny running man in it. “I prefer to think of you running free as the wind rather than fighting,” she murmured. “Should I take that one? No! No, wait. If you have the runner, maybe he will help speed you back to me. And I shall hold the wrestler medallion here, perhaps to keep you from conflict.”

“So be it. I like that notion.”

“I should like to attach it to the silver chain with my crucifix. And wear it always.”

“Aye,” he said softly. He could hear horses outside, and the voices of Fernando de Leyba and his own guards. He put the little medallion in the palm of her hand and pressed her fingers closed over it. She began sobbing.

“But I have no gift for thee,” she said, sounding like a child rather than a woman.

He stroked her hair and tried to think what he could say. “Aye! You have, though!” he exclaimed. “The finest thing. You’ve given me what you can now give to no man else.” She looked at him, puzzled, for an instant, then understanding
dawned on her face and softened it. “And,” he said, “I swear it binds us forever.”

She swallowed and blinked, then began to rise. “They’re waiting for you,” she said. “Go now, while I can still bear it!” Teresa turned her face away and did not watch him leave the room.

M
ARIA STOOD AT A WINDOW UPSTAIRS AND WATCHED HER HUSBAND
salute, then embrace the American colonel. Deep in her lungs there was the intolerable tickling pain, and her heart hurt as well, with agony and jealous rage. Be gone forever,
diablo
, she thought after him as he clapped his hat over his red hair and swung astride the stallion.

From the moment she had seen him appear naked and soiled in the doorway of that ballroom in Kaskaskia almost a year ago, she had thought of him in ways she should not have; she had been like a woman possessed. And this morning she had seen him leave the room of her sister-in-law, and she had smelled the scent of their intimacy. And at that moment her long, fantasized jealousy of the girl had broken completely, and was diverted to an utter hatred of this troublesome George Rogers Clark. Damn you, she thought. I wish thee all the failure and loneliness and disgrace a man can bear. Take my curse with thee! And God save me from ever seeing thee again!

George turned in the saddle and looked at the governor’s house one more time before rounding a corner of the village street, where water flowed like a brooklet. His guard and the courier rode behind him, and watched him take that final look at the mansion. The house was yellow with the clean-washed early morning April sunlight.

I swear it binds us forever, he thought, remembering his last vow to his Teresa. He looked ahead down the street toward the brown Mississippi.

Vowing it to himself this way made it even more irrevocable than saying it to her. It works that way, he thought.

No other, he thought. Whatever our fates, no other for me.

I
WON’T GET BACK TO
S
T.
L
OUIS BEFORE
J
UNE, HE FINALLY ADMITTED
to himself.

Immediately upon his return to Kaskaskia, he became inundated in the myriad problems of administering a new frontier county hundreds of miles from the seat of state authority, and of preparing for a long-range summer offensive against Detroit. Days and then weeks began to flow by in a blur of time, each day distinguished from every other only by the good or bad news it brought.

He was forced to declare war on the Delaware Indians after a band of them killed a party of traders between Vincennes and the Falls of the Ohio, and other Delawares came to Kaskaskia where they became drunk and hostile and created a series of disturbances, claiming that their great chief, White Eyes, had been murdered in cold blood by white men. George sent Leonard Helm an authorization to make war on the Delawares near Vincennes and destroy their camps as punishment for having broken their treaty with the Big Knife. Helm’s frontiersmen struck swiftly and brutally; the Delawares sued for peace; and ultimately Tobacco’s Son and his Piankeshaw warriors took it upon themselves to answer for the future conduct of the Delawares. The chief chastised them severely for breaking their word and killing his friends, the Americans, told them they deserved the severe blow they had received, and swore by the Sacred Bow that he would decimate them if they did not return to their hunting and remain peaceful. Thus ended the brief war between the new American regime and the Delawares, in such a way that it strengthened further the legend of the invincibility of the Big Knives.

Daily, George made preparations for the provisioning of the
Detroit campaign, and awaited the arrival of Captain Montgomery and his five companies of militia that Governor Henry had promised to send.

When Montgomery did at last arrive at Kaskaskia, long overdue, George felt with a sinking heart that history’s misfortune was being replayed: Instead of the five companies, Montgomery had been able to bring only one hundred fifty half-starved and ill-clad men. They had been diverted to join an expedition against the Cherokees in the Western Carolina country.

This stunning disappointment was offset by his joy in the arrival of his young brother Richard, who at last had prevailed upon their father to let him join George in the Illinois country. Now nineteen, Dickie was lithe and determined, with an intensity that George easily recognized as a copy of his own demeanor at that age. After a short period of duty in Captain Robert Todd’s company, Dickie was commissioned a lieutenant.

Because of the condition of Montgomery’s little force, George now lamented that he had not marched on Detroit directly from Vincennes in April. He now fastened his dimming hopes for the Detroit campaign on the three hundred Kentucky volunteers Colonel John Bowman had promised to send to Vincennes by late June. With those added to Montgomery’s one hundred fifty and his own veterans, George could hope to mount a force of some half thousand against Detroit, and he made himself believe that that number, if his fortunes held well, would be sufficient.

In June, he received a letter from Captain Helm which cheered those hopes. From a trader recently reaching Vincennes from Canada, Helm had learned that Detroit was as ripe for an easy conquest as any fort could be. Its commandant since Henry Hamilton’s ill-starred departure, a Captain Lernoult, was apparently a man of little self-confidence and had only a handful of trustworthy royalists in the fort to help him defend it. The French-Canadian and Creole prisoners whom George had paroled and sent home to Detroit had spread his fame in the vicinity of Detroit, and many even declared openly that though they had sworn not to fight the Big Knives on their arrival, they felt themselves free to fight beside them. Helm’s letter continued:

George smiled at those images and grew ever more impatient to get his force underway to Detroit. His veterans talked of little else, and soon they had infected Captain Montgomery’s companies with Detroit fever as well.

Helm’s letter also contained information that, in the wake of the American victories in the territory, settlers were again pouring down the Ohio and through the Wilderness Road into Kentucky, and that the settlement he had founded at the Falls of the Ohio was growing in population day by day. Helm had also learned from a Delaware Indian informant that a large expedition of Kentuckians had departed from the Ohio to trounce the Shawnees in their great town of Chillicothe. This, George presumed, was Colonel John Bowman’s army, which was scheduled to rendezvous with him at Vincennes for the March against Detroit. The news that John Bowman was making such a hazardous side excursion worried and irritated George. It was, it seemed to him, a reckless attempt by Colonel Bowman to glorify his own name on the frontier. George had heard often that John Bowman was jealous of the fame of his brother Joseph and, particularly, of George himself.

Damn you now, John Bowman, George thought. If you want to make a brave name for yourself, just help me capture Detroit. Don’t waste all those lads you’ve got on a useless—nay, a harmful—amusement against the Shawnees! God, man, there’s no need to rile those savages at this moment just to gain yourself a few laurels.

But, presuming that a brother of Joseph Bowman’s could not be utterly stupid, George told himself not to worry about it, and continued with his efforts to provision his army. And that was proving to be a difficult task. Prices for all sorts of stores had been driven up as high as five hundred percent by traders outbidding each other in his absence. This caused the French and Spaniards to conceive of the Virginia currency as valueless, and they were refusing to take it. The partnership of Vigo and de Leyba, as well as Monsieur Cerré, had begun advancing considerable sums of their own property, which tormented George despite his gratitude. They will be ruined, he thought, unless some method can be used to raise the credit of the Virginia currency, or a fund sent to New Orleans. Oliver Pollock had by now exhausted his own properties, and had not been reimbursed
by Governor Henry. With a heavy heart, George wrote to Pollock in June:

Still with full faith in Virginia, not aware that she, like other states, was heading toward insolvency, George authorized his supply officer to obtain everything the army needed by drawing bills on the state, which he endorsed himself. It did not seem a prudent thing to do even as he did it, but he saw no other way to carry out his mission.