1824: The Arkansas War (13 page)

Eliza was considerably more broad-minded than most people of her class, but she still retained most of its basic outlook. Whereas at the age of fifty-seven there was very little left at all, in Robert Ross, of the young man from Anglo-Irish gentry who’d enlisted in the 25th Foot right after graduating from Trinity College in Dublin. Except courage and determination, he liked to think. The years and the wars had burned most of it away, especially that horrible war in America. And what had remained had been slowly scoured off by his years working with Clarkson and Sharp. He was no Quaker, like so many of the supporters of the antislavery movement, and never would be. But their piety was contagious, in its own way.

The general who’d been active in the British army had never wondered much about such things. No need to, really, when it was obvious that God was an Englishman. But his years since Napoleon’s defeat rubbing shoulders with the men in the antislavery movement had undermined that certainty.

What was left was Ireland itself. Bleeding, tortured Ireland. Ross had never seen anything he could do, in his life, that would have benefited Ireland. But perhaps he and another Irishman, on another continent, could prevent another such endlessly suppurating wound.

It seemed worth a try, at least. There was some evidence in the New Testament, if you looked at it properly, that Jesus would favor the Irish. Quite a bit, actually. Perhaps more to the point, Ross had read the Bible front to back three times over since his return from America. Noticing, each time, that nowhere was God’s color recorded.

He might even be black. Worse yet, He might have no color at all. How, then, to explain one’s inaction, knowing of the
Brookes?
For Eliza, as for most Englishmen and Englishwomen—most members of the antislavery movement, for that matter—the blacks depicted as so many spoons in a drawer were miserable and suffering souls. Faceless, for all that.

But, at the age of fifty-seven, Robert Ross could now see his own wife and children on that ship. Something which, he could now understand, Patrick Driscol had been able to see since he was a boy.

“Dear God, I miss the man!” he said, as surprised as he’d ever been in his life.

Over dinner, when he told the children their plans, his oldest son raised an objection.

“I’d like to go, too.”

Mrs. Ross shook her head. “David, your education—”

“Oh, Mother! I’m sick of boarding schools. Fine enough for the younger ones, but I need a change. Trinity can wait a year or two.” Pouting, a bit: “Besides, it’d be good for me. Broadening of the horizons, all that. Boys my age do it all the time on the continent. The Germans even have a name for it.”

“Wanderjahr,”
his father supplied. “Yes, I know.”

He and Eliza looked at each other. After a moment, she shrugged. “As stubborn as he is, I suppose we may as well. He’d just waste a year at Trinity with sulking.”

Robert nodded. “Very well, then.”

Naturally, that immediately stirred up the other four children. But there, Robert held the line. Leaving aside the fact that they were too young to be interrupting their educations and forgoing the salutary discipline of boarding schools, there was the factor of disease to be considered. At nineteen, David was old enough that he’d be taking no more risk than an adult.

“No,” he said. Then, swiveling his gaze as he’d once had cannons swiveled: “No. No. No.”

Three days later, he set off for London. The ship he and Eliza and David would be taking to America wouldn’t leave for weeks yet, and he had some final business to attend to.

Clarkson approved. No surprise there. Thomas Clarkson was the brawler of the movement. The man who, though no more a Quaker than Ross, had decided at the age of twenty-five, in June of 1785, that slavery was an abomination. And had devoted the rest of his life to ending it—throwing into that cause his fine education at Cambridge, his unflagging energy, and his extraordinary skills as a political organizer.

“When will you return, Robert?”

Ross shrugged. “Hard to say. Not for a year, certainly. Probably two. Possibly three.”

Clarkson’s gaze was direct, as always. Intense blue eyes looked out from under a veritable shock of hair, much of which was still the bright red of his youth.

Looked down, rather. They were standing together in Clarkson’s cluttered office, and Clarkson was a very tall man.

“And maybe never,” he stated.

“Oh, that’s nonsense, Thomas. I can’t deny I’m looking forward to seeing America again. But you may rest certain that I have no intention of
living
there.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. You may not live there, but you could easily die there.”

Ross made a little grimace, indicating skepticism. “You can’t ever rule that out, of course. But the risk of disease is not as bad as people think. Our army suffered terribly, true enough; those were the worst conditions imaginable.”

“That’s not what I meant, Robert,” Clarkson repeated. “And you know it.”

Ross said nothing, for there was nothing to say. After a moment, Clarkson slouched into his chair. “Well, so be it. We’ll miss you greatly, Robert. Having a military figure of your prominence allied with us has been a tremendous boon to our cause these past years.”

“You think I shouldn’t go, then?”

Clarkson shrugged. “I didn’t say that. Nor do I even think it.” He was silent for a much longer moment, his elbow perched on the armrest and his chin propped on a fist. Now, however, he bestowed that startlingly direct gaze on a stack of shelves covered with books and papers.

Finally, very quietly, he said: “Whatever we do here in England—even in our Caribbean possessions—is really a sideshow. In the end, the issue will be decided in America. For the first time, over there in Arkansas, men are finally beginning to test all the premises upon which all sides in this dispute rest their case. If that test succeeds…”

He smiled then, for the first time since Robert had given him the news. “A soldier’s business, that, in the end. Which I am certainly not. Whether you have God’s blessing, I couldn’t begin to fathom. But go with my own, Robert Ross. Go with my own.”

Wilberforce disapproved. No surprise there, either. Leaving aside the issue of slavery, and despite his notoriety as the leader of the antislavery movement in Parliament, William Wilberforce was a profoundly conservative man. He was opposed to extending the suffrage to men who were not propertied, and he was opposed to tactics that relied upon mobilizing the masses instead of persuading the elite. He disapproved in particular of women who chafed against their proper place in society.

He disapproved strongly of the theater, too.

“Why, Robert? What can you possibly do in America—not even the United States, but that preposterous little nation called Arkansas—that you can’t do here? Think, man! Please put our cause above your own whimsy. You are the only significant officer in the movement. I can’t tell you how invaluable an asset that’s been to us in Parliament.”

So it went, for two hours.

Ross divided the rest of his time in London between lesser luminaries in the movement for which he had formed a personal attachment, and major luminaries in society as a whole for whom his attachments had grown very loose indeed.

Still. Protocol, as it were.

Wellington was gracious. No surprise there. He disapproved quite strongly of Robert’s attachment to the antislavery movement. But, in the duke’s case, that was simply due to his general conservatism. Wellington was no admirer of slavery.

Beyond that, the large and powerful Wellesley clan and its political allies had a debt to Robert Ross. The defeat of Wellington’s brother-in-law Pakenham at the Mississippi might have produced a corrosive political issue in the years after the war, with Wellington’s many enemies using the defeat as a stick against Wellington’s own military accomplishments. True, Pakenham’s valiant death in the final struggle against Napoleon had sapped most of that possibility. But the long and detailed analysis that Ross had published after the war concerning the campaign in the Gulf—which had been full of praise and admiration for Pakenham—had settled the question entirely.

Finally, there was politics, which was now Wellington’s field of combat.

“I’m afraid many of my fellow Tories—Whigs, too, never mind what they claim—are too influenced by their immediate commercial ties to the slave trade and the Caribbean plantations. There is every reason in the world for England to welcome the creation of another nation in North America, south of Canada, regardless of the color or creed of its inhabitants. Especially located where the Confederacy is, in the heart of the continent. If it survives, it would serve as a useful check on American ambitions. A natural ally for England.”

The duke gave Robert a skeptical glance. “Mind you, I question whether those niggers and wild Indians are up to the task.”

Robert smiled thinly. “As to the first, we could visit Thornton’s grave and ask his ghost. He’s buried not far from here.”

Wellington smiled back. Just as thinly, but it was a smile. Thornton had been one of England’s best regimental commanders. He’d died on the Mississippi, and his regiment had been shattered by the black soldiers of the Iron Battalion.