He stared at me for so long that I wondered whether he had understood what I’d said.
“Call it fate,” I said gently, “or call it bad luck. But it wasn’t your fault. Or hers.” Not mine. Nor Jamie’s.
He nodded, slowly, and leaning forward, laid his head on my shoulder for a moment.
“Thank ye, Auntie,” he whispered, and lifting his head, kissed my cheek.
The next day, he was gone.
THE GREAT DISMAL
June 21, 1777
WILLIAM MARVELED AT THE road. True, there were only a few miles of it, but the miracle of being able to ride straight into the Great Dismal, through a place where he vividly recalled having had to swim his horse on a previous visit, all the while dodging snapping turtles and venomous snakes—the convenience of it was astonishing. The horse seemed of similar mind, picking up its feet in a lighthearted way, outpacing the clouds of tiny yellow horseflies that tried to swarm them, the insects’ eyes glinting like tiny rainbows when they drew close.
“Enjoy it while you can,” William advised the gelding, with a brief scratch of the mane. “Muddy going up ahead.”
The road itself, while clear of the sweet gum saplings and straggling pines that crowded its edge, was muddy enough, in all truth. Nothing like the treacherous bogs and unexpected pools that lurked beyond the scrim of trees, though. He rose a little in the stirrups, peering ahead.
How far? he wondered. Dismal Town stood on the shore of Lake Drummond, which lay in the middle of the swamp. He had never come so far into the Great Dismal as he was now, though, and had no notion of its actual size.
The road didn’t go so far as the lake, he knew that. But surely there was a trace to follow; those inhabitants of Dismal Town must come and go on occasion.
“Washington,” he repeated under his breath. “Washington, Cartwright, Harrington, Carver.” Those were the names he’d been given by Captain Richardson, of the Loyalist gentlemen from Dismal Town; he’d committed them to memory and punctiliously burned the sheet of paper containing them. Having done so, though, he was seized by irrational panic lest he forget the names, and had been repeating them to himself at intervals throughout the morning.
It was well past noon now, and the wispy clouds of the morning had been knitting themselves up into a low sky the color of dirty wool. He breathed in slowly, but the air didn’t have that prickling scent of impending downpour—yet. Besides the ripe reek of the swamp, rich with mud and rotting plants, he could smell his own skin, salty and rank. He’d washed his hands and head as he could but hadn’t changed nor washed his clothes in two weeks, and the rough hunting shirt and homespun breeches were beginning to itch considerably.
Though perhaps it wasn’t just dried sweat and dirt. He clawed viciously at a certain crawling sensation in his breeches. He’d swear he’d picked up a louse in the last tavern.
The louse, if there was one, wisely desisted, and the itch died. Relieved, William breathed deep and noticed that the swamp’s scents had grown more pungent, the sap of resinous trees rising in answer to the oncoming rain. The air had suddenly assumed a muffled quality that deadened sound. No birds sang now; it was as though he and the horse rode alone through a world wrapped in cotton wool.
William didn’t mind being alone. He’d grown up essentially alone, without brothers or sisters, and was content in his own company. Besides, solitude, he told himself, was good for thinking.
“Washington, Cartwright, Harrington, and Carver,” he chanted softly. But beyond the names, there was little to think of with regard to his present errand, and he found his thoughts turn in a more familiar direction.
What he thought of most frequently on the road was women, and he touched the pocket under the tail of his coat, reflective. The pocket would hold one small book; it had been a choice on this journey between the New Testament his grandmother had given him or his treasured copy of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. No great contest.
When William was sixteen, his father had caught him and a friend engrossed in the pages of his friend’s father’s copy of Mr. Harris’s notorious guide to the splendors of London’s women of pleasure. Lord John had raised an eyebrow and flipped slowly through the book, pausing now and then to raise the other eyebrow. He had then closed the book, taken a deep breath, administered a brief lecture on the necessary respect due to the female sex, then told the boys to fetch their hats.
At a discreet and elegant house at the end of Brydges Street, they took tea with a beautifully gowned Scottish lady, a Mrs. McNab, who appeared to be on the friendliest of terms with his father. At the conclusion of the refreshment, Mrs. McNab had rung a small brass bell, and…
William shifted in his saddle, sighing. Her name had been Margery, and he had written a perfervid panegyric to her. Had been madly in love with her.
He’d gone back, after a fevered week of reckoning his accounts, with the fixed intent of proposing marriage. Mrs. McNab had greeted him kindly, listened to his stumbling professions with the most sympathetic attention, then told him that Margery would, she was sure, be pleased with his good opinion but was, alas, occupied just this minute. However, there was a sweet young lass named Peggy, just come from Devonshire, who seemed lonely and would doubtless be so pleased to have a bit of conversation whilst he was waiting to speak with Margery…
The realization that Margery was just that minute doing with someone else what she’d done with him was such a staggering blow that he’d sat staring openmouthed at Mrs. McNab, rousing only when Peggy came in, fresh-faced, blond, and smiling, and with the most remarkable—
“Ah!” William slapped at the back of his neck, stung by a horsefly, and swore.
The horse had slowed without his noticing, and now that he did notice…
He swore again, louder. The road had disappeared.
“How the bloody hell did that happen?” He’d spoken loudly, but his voice seemed small, muted by the staggered trees. The flies had followed him; one bit the horse, who snorted and shook his head violently.
“Come on, then,” William said, more quietly. “Can’t be far off, can it? We’ll find it.”
He reined the horse’s head around, riding slowly in what he hoped was a wide semicircle that might cut the road. The ground was damp here, rumpled with tussocks of long, tangled grass, but not boggy. The horse’s feet left deep curves where they struck in the mud, and thick flecks of matted mud and grass flew up, sticking to the horse’s hocks and sides and William’s boots.
He had been heading north-northwest…. He glanced instinctively at the sky, but no help to be found there. The uniform soft gray was altering, here and there a heavy-bellied cloud bulging through the muffling layer, sullen and murmurous. A faint rumble of thunder reached him, and he swore again.
His watch chimed softly, the sound strangely reassuring. He reined up for a moment, not wanting to risk dropping it in the mud, and fumbled it out of his watch pocket. Three o’clock.
“Not so bad,” he said to the horse, encouraged. “Plenty of daylight left.” Of course, this was a mere technicality, given the atmospheric conditions. It might as well have been the far side of twilight.
He looked up at the gathering clouds, calculating. No doubt about it: it was going to rain, and soon. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time he and the horse had gotten wet. He sighed, dismounted, and unrolled his canvas bed-sack, part of his army equipment. He got up again and, with the canvas draped round his shoulders, his hat unlaced and pulled well down, resumed a dogged search for the road.
The first drops came pattering down, and a remarkable smell rose from the swamp in response. Earthy, rich, green, and … fecund, somehow, as though the swamp stretched itself, opening its body in lazy pleasure to the sky, releasing its scent like the perfume that wafts from an expensive whore’s tumbling hair.
William reached by reflex for the book in his pocket, meaning to write down that poetic thought in the margins, but then shook his head, muttering, “Idiot,” to himself.
He wasn’t really worried. He had, as he’d told Captain Richardson, been in and out of the Great Dismal many times. Granted, he’d not been here by himself; he and his father had come now and then with a hunting party or with some of his father’s Indian friends. And some years before. But—
“Shit!” he said. He’d pressed the horse through what he’d hoped was the thicket edging the road, only to find more thicket—dark clumps of hairy-barked juniper, aromatic as a glass of Holland gin in the rain. No room to turn. Muttering, he kneed the horse and pulled back, clicking his tongue.
Uneasily, he saw that the imprints of the horse’s hooves were filling slowly with water. Not from the rain; the ground was wet. Very wet. He heard the sucking noise as the horse’s back hooves struck bog, and by reflex he leaned forward, urgently kneeing the horse in the ribs.
Caught wrong-footed, the horse stumbled, caught himself—and then the horse’s hind legs gave way suddenly, slipping in the mud, and he flung up his head, whinnying in surprise. William, taken equally unaware, bounced over his rolled bed-sack and fell off, landing with a splash.
He rose up like a scalded cat, panicked at the thought of being sucked down into one of the quaking bogs that lurked in the Great Dismal. He’d seen the skeleton of a deer caught in one once, nothing still visible save the antlered skull, half sunk and twisted to one side, its long yellow teeth showing in what he’d imagined to be a scream.
He splashed hastily toward a tussock, sprang atop it, and crouched there like the toad-king, heart hammering. His horse—was it trapped, had the bog got it?
The gelding was down, thrashing in the mud, whinnying in panic, muddy water flying in sheets from its struggles.
“Jesus.” He clutched handsful of the rough grass, balanced precariously. Was it bog? Or only a slough?
Gritting his teeth, he stretched one long leg out, gingerly setting foot on the agitated surface. His boot pressed down… down… He pulled it hastily back, but it came readily, with a ploop! of mud and water. Again… yes, there was a bottom! All right, now the other… He stood up, arms waving storklike for balance, and…
“All right!” he said, breathless. A slough—no more, thank God!
He splashed toward the horse and snatched up the canvas bedsack, loosened in the fall. Flinging it over the horse’s head, he wrapped it hastily round the animal’s eyes. It was what you did for a horse too panicked to leave a burning barn; his father had shown him how when the barn at Mount Josiah had been struck by lightning one year.
Rather to his astonishment, it seemed to help. The horse was shaking its head to and fro but had quit churning its legs. He seized the bridle and blew into the horse’s nostrils, talking calming nonsense.
The horse snorted, spraying him with droplets, but seemed to collect itself. He pulled its head up, and it rolled onto its chest with a great swash of muddy water, and in almost the same motion, surged heavily to its feet. It shook itself from head to tail, the canvas flapping loose and mud showering everything within ten feet of the animal.