He was not ashamed of the truth. It was only that he hoped to protect Laura Lee. It came to Stafford in this instant of his exposure that he was somewhat symbolical of the entire South. The Southern colonies were torn with inner dissension between loyalty to the crown and rebellion. Father and son, nephew and uncle, cousin and cousin were on opposite sides. Even as his own family was being torn apart now, so other families, from the Georgia settlements to the Piedmont uplands of Virginia, were being sundered by this war.
The scrape of a sword blade coming out of its scabbard called him to his senses. Men were pressing forward. Hands came reaching out to grasp him.
Stafford moved like a panther.
His years of fighting and starving with Morgan had made a steel spring of his big body. One moment he was standing motionless, as if dazed with despair, then he was five feet away, gripping the arm of a captain and whirling him sideways off his feet, flinging him against the men who ringed him in.
He needed no weapon in his hand. There were too many men around him to swing a sword, even if he should yank one from a scabbard, and too many men for any of them to fire a pistol, for fear of dropping a fellow officer.
Women were screaming, fainting into the arms of their escorts, unconsciously aiding him as he drove for the garden windows. Majors and captains must pause and attend to the women who fell into their open arms. More than half the others were unaware of what was taking place until after Stafford hit the tall, glass-set doors and was through them and out onto the terrace flaggings.
The night air was cool on his face. He put a hand to the rail and vaulted it, and angled his run toward the big white stables. He did not see Ezra Whipple come up out of the shadows with a musket at his shoulder and take aim.
Stafford was diving for the darkness of the stables as the musket blazed. The ball caught his jacket at the shoulder and tore a hole in it. If the light had been more even, and Stafford a little slower of foot, the ball would have caught him in the forehead, where it had been aimed.
Old Gem came out of a stall, leading a big black gelding.
“Here, Master Billy! The fastest thing on four legs we own!”
“Good, Gem! How’d you know?”
Old Gem smiled, showing glistening white teeth. “I hear the noise. I see you come out the door. I can saddle a horse in the dark, real quick.”
The stirrup was underfoot, taking his weight, and then his leg was going over the saddle and he came down hard into the saddle. The other end of the stable was open to the meadow. Gem cried out, and Stafford heard his old palm hit the gelding as his own toes rammed its sleek black sides.
The gelding erupted into full gallop. Head bent, Stafford went out the west door, riding low. Behind him were the hoarse yells and outcries of angry men. A voice was shouting into the stable, but Old Gem would be fading to invisibility, through the roofed arcade that joined the stable with the carriage barn. In a few minutes the old slave would be tucked in his bed, stupid with sleep when they came to question him.
Stafford rode at breakneck speed for a mile, then swung the gelding southward into the pine barrens that ranged for miles beside the Dan. No man living could find him in these barrens. Stumbling Bear, a Cherokee brave who had met his death with Cornstalk in the Ohio country in ’77, had taught him woodlore in his youth. Sometimes a group of Carolinians, on their way to Boonesboro and the blue-grass country of Kentucky, stopped overnight at the big Stafford plantation. Those men had added their own wisdom to the canny teachings of the Cherokee.
Finding a branch tipped with foliage, Stafford broke it off close to the bole and used it as a drag along the ground behind him. Switching it back and forth, making it seem some grotesque tail that waggled as the horse walked, he obliterated his hoofprints in the sandy soil.
The rhythmic sway of the horse as he walked put a bemusement in Stafford. Behind him, a part of his life was ending. No longer would he chase a giggling, teasing Laura Lee through the upper rooms of the Hall, to catch and subdue her breathless with kisses. Never again would they ride side by side across the meadows to survey the ripening wheat and the little white puffs of budding cotton. The disunity between them, which they had tried to ignore as long as it was secret, was now an open sore.
Laura Lee was a loyalist. He was a rebel. From the agony of spirit inside him, he knew at last the wrenching fury that was splitting his Southland. For his country, because of this wild hope for freedom that was inside him, he was giving up his wife and all his wealth.
When he was five miles into the barrens, he dismounted beside a little stream and sat a while, brooding at the water as it gurgled over the pebbles and between fallen pine branches. The scent of forest underbrush was strong around him, and somewhere a wolf howled its hunger.
“It isn’t the wealth I mind losing,” he told the brook, “but Laura Lee.”
Yet Laura Lee was as determined in her way as he was in his own. She had called him traitor and turncoat when he first broached the idea that she go North, as so many Southern women were doing, at the start of the revolution. Fiercely she had challenged him, using tears and sobs to distract him from his beliefs. Finally, almost in desperation that last night, she had used her body.
A wry grin twisted his mouth as he remembered that night. He groaned and struck a fist to his knee. “If only I could convince her I was right! If only I could change her mind! She could live like a queen on those little chests of gold in the icehouse. She wouldn’t want for a thing! Just so I could get her North, in Philadelphia or Boston, away from these British officers who bedazzle her eyes with visions of society!”
And what sort of man could he call himself, an inner voice asked, if he gave up now, and rode off like a beaten creature? One last try, one last and final argument! He was her husband. Once she loved him deeply. Perhaps she loved him still. He came to his feet eagerly, a pulse of excitement making him shiver. She had been wanton with him short hours ago, welcoming home her husband as a loving wife should do. Were those sighs and soft moans only acting? If she loved him as much as it seemed, she might be willing to listen to him at last.
“No, by God!” he breathed through his teeth. “She couldn’t have been play-acting! She loves me! She told me as much today! Since she loves me so, she’ll do as I say, to please me!”
He laughed, and there was no memory of their former quarrels in that laughter. Like a boy he went to the gelding, talking in careless fashion to the big black horse, rising easily into the saddle. Sweep her off her feet! Give her no chance to refuse! Make her agree! Then bring her with him, stirrup to stirrup at a mad gallop for Charlotte Town, where Dan Morgan was gathering his men.
She can go North under the protection of Old Gem and some younger slaves, he thought. I’ll hire rifles to go with her, if need be.
As he rode he hypnotized himself with delusions that were born of his desperate need for affection and belief after the years of starvation and loneliness. He rode flushed and confident in his eagerness.
It was long after midnight when he came in sight of the Hall and its six towering white columns. The gigs and carriages were gone from the drive. Only the moonlight on white columns and Flemish brickwork relieved the darkness of the house. Quietly he walked the black across the grasses of the yard, until, by mounting onto the saddle, he could reach up and grasp the lowest crossbar of the latticework bordering the west wall. There was no sign that there were British soldiers still about, but he took no chances.
He pulled himself upward, foot by foot. The house was silent, dark, seemingly deserted. Now the middle bar was under his shoes, now the topmost.
A hand fumbled to find the window open against the autumn air. Then his leg swung over the white sill and he was halfway into the bedroom when he heard a voice cry out hoarsely.
A man and woman sat