Camp Follower: A Mystery of the American Revolution (36 page)

A simple lesson
in psychology.
 
If you suspected one
course of action would yield a more repulsive outcome than another, your
imagination worked with the unknown to enhance anticipated unpleasantness, and
you avoided the course with the more disagreeable outcome.

Instinct wailed
at her that the particulars of the game were very familiar and intimate to
her.
 
Refuse the challenge
, her
soul whispered.
 
Play the fool
.

She and her
party returned to their campsite late morning.
 
As soon as Helen entered her tent to fetch the desk, she sensed
something amiss and straightened to scrutinize the interior.
 
Without knowing how, she knew someone
outside her party had visited her tent.
 
Her gaze swept over her cot and portmanteau to rest on the desk.
 
Disbelief clenched her chest.
 
Oh, no, the journal.

She opened the
desk, and much of her tension relaxed.
 
The journal lay intact, its pages ordered the way she'd left them after
her last entry.
 
Yet when she'd closed
it again and backed off to allow her pulse to stabilize, she clung to alert.
 
Her privacy
had
been violated, and
deep in her senses, she'd registered evidence of the intrusion.
 
She couldn't bring it to the surface because
the clues were minimal, and the intruder was clever.
 
But she was convinced of it.

Notify the
provost marshal?
 
His men would swarm
over camp, frightening the intruder.
 
No, if the secret visitor returned, she must find a way to nab him on
her own.

***

Just before
reveille on Wednesday December twentieth, she jolted awake, her heart slamming
her ribcage over a dream in which she'd joined the Dare game.
 
The boy offered her the bucket, her
imagination inflated the vileness of the experience into something
insufferable, and she backed away.
 
"Play the fool!"

Badley wants
you dead.
 
He's broken your contract and
stranded you out here
.
 
Memory
reprised Fairfax's words with startling clarity and vigor.
 
Metaphors and dream wisdom came together at
that moment, and she sat, pieced together what she'd lacked perspective to see
in Wilmington.

The horror in
her bucket was poverty.
 
Prescott knew
she was so afraid to touch it that she'd consider the unconventional to escape
it.
 
Badley provided her escape in the
form of an assignment with the Legion.
 
To accelerate her decision making, Prescott falsified the notice of
creditor transferal and lease increase, which explained Chapman's inability to
locate whomever had sent her the notice.

No editor named
Samuel Kerr had organized the assignment.
 
Badley had no agreement with a new London magazine.
 
Prescott and Badley wanted her gone from
Wilmington, dead if possible.
 
To that
end, they'd sent her on a hazardous assignment.
 
A land torn by war offered plenty of cover for bank drafts Badley
would never send.
 
Cut off her funds
while she was in the hinterland, and she couldn't escape to safety.
 
If she died a hero's death on some backwoods
battleground, Badley might eulogize her in his
Review
, print letters
he'd received from her.

The vehemence
with which the two men sought her demise was incomprehensible.
 
They'd tried to run her off for nine
years.
 
Silas Chiswell's widow should
have followed him to the grave within a year, spirit and health broken from
paying his debts, reduced to near poverty.
 
But few people knew about Nell Grey.
 
Helen hadn't always been a lady with servants, fine food, and pretty
gowns.
 
For the first seventeen years of
her life, she'd lived in a hut, gone without meals, been beaten and detested.

Those first
seventeen years had helped her survive the past twelve years like some gnarled
root overwintered in the soil.
 
If she
expected to survive the hinterlands, she'd have to bring to the surface that
tough, scrappy, wounded part of herself, claim it, let it guide her.

Because without
a doubt, Badley and Prescott intended to kill her.
 
Adam Neville: their minion?
 
How Neville, Treadaway, and their desk fit as pieces or pawns
she'd yet to elucidate.
 
Each action
from the two men and everything they said she must regard as suspect — half-truth
at best or outright lie.

For all
Fairfax's ambiguous and frightening morality, transmitted in no uncertain terms
with the first impression he made, he'd lied to her but once, in Badley's
parlor, about terminating his search for David.
 
But he possessed a far better tool than mastery of lies for
navigating the halls of Parliament.
 
He
manipulated truth into shapes that served his purposes.
 
In the murky realm of developing hunches and
conjectures into solid evidence, he reigned supreme.

She drew the
blanket over her neck to block a wintry draft.
 
Confiding in and trusting Fairfax about the whole conspiracy ran
contrary to her logic.

Alas, she could
hardly confide in Jonathan when, at every opportunity, he reinforced his belief
that Badley wasn't the ogre she believed him to be.
 
She expelled a long breath.
 
No.
 
She could borrow money from
Jonathan, but she couldn't yet confide in him.
 
That morning, all she had was hunches and conjectures.
 
Jonathan, a man of science, needed solid
evidence.

Either she
produced evidence for him, or she trusted Fairfax.
 
An unpalatable choice for breakfast, to be sure.

Outside, the
Legion's drummer beat reveille.
 
Hearing
the Pearsons move about in the next tent, Helen rose into a stretch and decided
her course.

The story about
Tarleton was a gem: not to be abandoned.
 
With more gritty detail of the war, she could name her price at any
London paper.
 
There were tangential
stories to be elucidated from her weeks with the Legion, such as the one about
Thomas Brown.

But only a
minority of the world's valiant carried swords, spears, or muskets.
 
She revisited her seditious thoughts upon
the Santee Road: showing the victims of war as heroes for what they'd
endured.
 
They weren't alone in
suffering war's hardships.

A story lay
obscured among the civilians who followed the army, one without the glitter of
braid and gold buttons.
 
Civilians as
courageous.
 
People without money or
titles as brave.

What a bizarre
twist that made for a feature.
 
Why, it
was unconventional enough to stir debates in London coffeehouses and taverns
for months.

Now that she'd
considered it, quitting the Legion and returning to Wilmington wasn't an option
after all.

Chapter Thirty-Six

SALLY, A PLUMP
woman with brown hair, wrung a man's shirt into a fearsome cylinder and jabbed
toward the creek.
 
"Perkins gropes
my bum again, I'll shove this bayonet down his gullet."

"You do
it," said Jen, up to her elbows in suds.
 
"They pay us for laundry and fancy they got a right to more."

Helen rinsed
Roger's shirt in her washtub.
 
In her
homespun clothing and Hannah's shawl, she fit right with in the three
laundresses at the creek.
 
Her apron had
collected grime, her back and arms ached, and her fingers had begun to resemble
some queer, dried fruit.

"Watch out
for Brady."
 
Liza flogged a
stocking with her fist.
 
"He tried
to 'pay' me with a lift of my coats — as if I'm not a decent wife with a
daughter to raise and a legionnaire husband, as if futtering the likes of
him
is some sort of reward."

"They're
going soft.
 
The Colonel needs to run
'em."

"Aye, I'm
far more fond of the whole stinking regiment after they've marched for sixteen
hours straight and are too tired to eat."

"Jen,
since it was your idea to run 'em, we appoint you to stroll to the other end of
camp and make the suggestion to Colonel Tarleton."
 
The unified laughter of the three laundresses
sliced the cold air with a harpy edge.

Helen grinned
with empathy.
 
In the half hour she'd
washed her party's underclothes, she'd heard a world different from the chatter
of officers' wives.
 
Camp women didn't
skirt the pebbles and stones of war, as the officer's wives did.
 
They trudged in the ruts.

Hannah was
shocked when Helen proposed her scheme, but she'd kept it secret from the men,
accustomed herself to addressing "Nell" instead of Mrs. Chiswell by
the time they found the laundresses.
 
Nell
.
 
Layered in time's dust, odd memories
stirred: rum fumes in her face.

Jen, closest to
Helen, nudged her arm with a soapy forefinger and returned her to 1780.
 
"Hullo, Nell, not much of a talker, are
you?
 
We don't bite."

Helen pointed
to her throat and coughed.
 
"Sore
throat."
 
Not only did she not want
to influence the content and direction of their conversation, but the less said
the better to avoid her concocting a colonial accent over what was obviously
not American-grown speech.

The laundresses
murmured commiseration.
 
Jen scooted a
few inches closer to Liza, as if "sore throat" translated to
"leprosy" or "smallpox."
 
"Nan's doing poorly."

Liza shoved
hair from her face.
 
Soapy water
dribbled a channel across soot on her cheek.
 
"Pneumonia, I'm sure of it."

Bitterness
chomped Sally's tone.
 
"She won't
never get well on a half-pound of pork and rice and a pint of peas each
week."

Jen
snorted.
 
"And so
we
wash
clothing.
 
King George provides the
soap, and we each get a shilling and a sixpence per dozen pieces washed, and we
buy more to eat.
 
God save the
king."

I eat,
therefore I must launder, thought Helen, and wrung out the final shirt of her
collection with solemnity.

"Nell!
 
Hullo, Nell!"
 
Hannah waved to her up on the trail.
 
"Finished yet?"
 
Helen waved back.
 
"Hurry
up."
 
Hannah meandered off toward
their campsite, her market basket full.

Helen dragged
the washtub apart from where the women labored and overturned it to drain rinse
water toward the creek.
 
Then she piled
in squeezed-out garments and straightened.
 
A groan escaped her.
 
She kneaded
her lower back.
 
When she was seventeen
years old, washday hadn't hurt.

Sally, Liza,
and Jen chuckled at the groan — the chuckle of sisterhood — and sent wishes for
her health.
 
Up the trail, Hannah
awaited her and, with a scowl, reached for the tub.
 
"Mrs. Chiswell, give me that heavy thing and take my
basket.
 
Look at your hands!
 
You'll need to apply salve on
them."
 
They headed for their
campsite.
 
"I don't understand why
you did this.
 
Who
wants
to
launder?"

For Helen's
trouble, she hoped she'd gotten everything clean enough.
 
Her hands looked irritated by soap, but
she'd no laundering scheduled for the morrow.
 
"It's research."

"What has
laundering to do with Colonel Tarleton?"

"The
washerwomen are part of the environment created by the Legion."

The blonde
frowned into the tub.
 
"Let me
launder, please."

Concern wove
through Helen.
 
"Did I do a poor
job of it?"

"Ye gods,
no, madam.
 
I'm amazed that a lady like
you could accomplish such a menial task so well.
 
But —"
 
She gnawed
her lip.
 
"You're supposed to
portray a gentlewoman.
 
What if an
officer's wife recognized you out there?
 
How would you explain it?"

Much depended
on her ability to call upon Nell Grey, become a woman of the lower class
again.
 
At that, she seemed to do well,
for the washerwomen had opened up in her company as they never would have with
an officer's lady.
 
It had been a matter
of undoing Jonathan's teachings on posture and etiquette.
 
Her success also depended upon luck, and she
knew she'd have to avoid drawing attention to herself.
 
"I shall have to use caution."

"You don't
mean to launder again?"

Helen gave her
hands a rueful grin.
 
"All right,
perhaps I shall visit the kitchen next time."