Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (59 page)

   
“But she offered to, didn’t she?” Somehow Dolley knew it was true.

   
He laughed a hollow, bitter rasp, then finished off the sherry and set the glass down on a dainty table. “Yes, she did, but that was when...oh hell, forgive my lack of delicacy, Dolley, that was when we both thought she could be carrying my child. I suppose until she knew that wasn’t true, she was ready to walk away from all the wealth and position she’d been born to. But remember, I was gone with only the promise to secure a divorce. It might have taken a year or longer before I could marry her, if I wasn’t killed first.” He shook his head, the pain and bewilderment of the betrayal still numbing.

   
“And being in New Orleans, rich, young and beautiful, surrounded by swains, she succumbed without even the courtesy of sending you one word by her own hand.”
   
Righteous motherly anger warred with a niggling thread of hope that there was still some chance this was all a horrible misunderstanding.

   
“If it had been the ordinary post, I’d have assumed all our correspondence had been lost, but I’ve seen Claiborne’s courier pouches arrive, filled with official documents and personal mail—but no word from Olivia...until she asked the governor to inform me of her marriage.”

   
Dolley walked to his side and squeezed his arm. “Samuel, I am so very sorry. You deserve so much better from life.” Almost afraid to ask, she nevertheless did. “What are you going to do now?” There was a coiled urgency in him, tensile and ready to explode. So palpable was his despair, she could feel it.

   
He smiled with his lips but his eyes were bleak as a storm swept sky. “I’m going to serve with Harrison in Indiana Territory. It seems after my success on the Missouri with the Osage, I’m perceived by the war department as the perfect man to learn the battle strategy of Tecumseh and the Shawnee Confederacy. I’m going over the British lines into Canada.”

   
Dolley blanched. “Samuel, that is virtual suicide. You cannot!”

   
“I am...and I must, Dolley. We’ve already suffered incalculable setbacks on the high seas. Our navy is outmanned and outgunned by more than twenty-to-one. We can’t dare lose our strategic positions on land or the British will cut a corridor all the way from Upper Canada down the Mississippi to the Gulf. I have to go.”

   
“Be safe, Samuel. Don’t take any foolish chances, no matter how disillusioned you feel right now, promise me. I shan’t let you go lest you give me your word,” she commanded sternly.

   
Samuel smiled with a small bit of his old charm. “Ah, Dolley, if only I could have met you before Jemmy did...” He raised her hands to his lips and kissed the backs of them.

   
“Such flattery for an old married lady, Samuel, but you can’t deter me. Have I your pledge—no rash heroics to endanger yourself?”

   
Bowing to her he nodded. “No more than I’ve ever endangered myself.”

   
As he departed, the president’s lady stared after him, bemused, her mind turning over various reasons why Olivia St. Etienne would have betrayed him. “A rich suitor from an aristocratic background similar to her own? A secure life free of the worries Samuel’s work would bring to a marriage? No, none of it made sense if the girl were anything like the way he had previously described her.

   
Then another thought struck her. She could be carrying Samuel ‘s child. What if the girl found herself pregnant and alone in a strange city with no friends or family to turn to and the child’s father was a thousand miles away—not to mention already married and unable to offer her and her baby the protection of his name? Would she wed the first man who offered her such protection? Dolley simply did not know enough about Olivia to make the judgment. Yet there seemed no other answer.

* * * *

   
During the next three years the war became a long and bloody stalemate, not the quick, easy march to Quebec that the War Hawks in Congress had envisioned. Canadians, much to the chagrin of the American Army and population, fought determinedly beside the British to repel Yankee invaders. Although American privateers inflicted substantial losses on British shipping, the Royal Navy effectively blockaded the whole Atlantic seaboard. A peace negotiation dragged on its desultory course in the Low Countries while both Britain and the United States strove for more clear-cut victories to strengthen their positions at the bargaining table.

   
Samuel spent over a year on the Canadian border, slipping information quietly back through the American lines, intelligence which eventually resulted in several British defeats. By October of 1813 at the Battle of the Thames, the Indian Confederacy of Tecumseh was broken and the great Shawnee war chief himself perished valiantly in the fighting. After the threat of an Anglo-Indian alliance in the north was over, he was sent south where the Red Sticks of the Creek Confederacy, allied with Britain and Spain, had left the Florida-Mississippi border running red with blood. His fluency in Spanish enabled him to pass himself off as an imperial officer from Madrid. By the fall of 1814, Shelby had gathered some priceless information and headed posthaste back into American territory, desperate to reach Madison and Monroe...

* * * *

   
Samuel reined in his lathered horse and listened for sounds of pursuit. After his escape from the Pensacola jail, he had headed for Mississippi Territory where he knew American forces were gathering to finish off the last of the Red Sticks. The swampy country along the Gulf Coast was nearly impassable and he had not slept in at least three days. Leading his stolen mount, he had hacked his way through jungle-like undergrowth rife with poisonous snakes and dangerous bears and cougars. Altogether not the route home he would have chosen, Shelby thought wryly as he crested a slight ridge and looked down on yet another twisting river.

   
He used a glass to check the area spread below him, then consulted his map. “This must be the Tallapoosa River,” he murmured, knowing it was the site of a series of Creek villages friendly to the Red Sticks. Avoiding them and locating the Americans proved easier than he might have anticipated when he heard the belching of cannon fire. Several small artillery pieces were pounding a long breastwork, seemingly to little avail. Musket fire and the loud keening cries of Indians filled the air between the booming reports.

   
Carefully, Shelby made his way down the hill toward the American forces. He grabbed hold of the first soldier he found, a militiaman. “Who’s in command here?”

   
‘‘Genr’l Andy Jackson, Ole Hickory hisself,” the man said, spitting a wad of brown tobacco juice near Shelby’s feet and looking at him with suspicious eyes, even though both men wore the same sort of travel stained, age-softened buckskins. “Who th’ hell air ye?”

   
Samuel had grown used to the insolent, undisciplined manners of the militia or “dirty shirts” as the British disdainfully called them. Although difficult to control and keep under enlistment, there were no more deadly guerilla fighters anywhere on earth...when they decided to join the war.

   
“I am Colonel Shelby, regular army, and I have vital dispatches for General Jackson. Where is he?”

   
Something in the big dark-haired man’s voice bestirred the militiaman to decide it might be wisest to answer the officer. “Over there. Th’ skinny feller,” he said, pointing to where an officer was barking furious orders to his men.

   
Samuel made his way toward Jackson, past the milling troops to where the general’s small tent had been haphazardly erected. A rickety campaign table stood in front of it with several maps and other papers lying on it. Andrew Jackson was tall and thin to the point of emaciation, with craggy angular features and a ramrod straight posture so severe even the thick mane of iron gray hair on his head stood starkly upright as if at full military attention. He riveted Shelby with a pair of intense blue eyes that fairly shot sparks like a lightning storm. “And who the hell air ye?” he asked in a nasal Tennessee hill country twang. His eyes raked Shelby’s mud-stained buckskins and unshaven face disdainfully, although after weeks of marching and camping on muddy riverbanks his own grooming was little better.

   
Shelby saluted. “Colonel Samuel Shelby, regular army, General Jackson.”

   
“Ye’re a touch out of uniform, Colonel.”

   
“I was sent from the War Department on a special mission, General.”

   
“Then ye’re also damned far from yer headquarters,” Jackson snapped, completely unimpressed by any connection to the military bigwigs in the capital.

   
“I’ve just come from Spanish Florida and I have urgent information that must reach Washington. If you could spare me a fresh mount and some ammunition, I’d be most grateful.”

   
One shaggy gray eyebrow lifted and those incredibly fierce eyes blazed hot enough to scorch steel. “I’ve nothing to spare, Colonel.”

   
Samuel struggled to contain his impatience, knowing how he must appear to Jackson. “With all due respect, sir, what I’ve learned about British plans could change the course of the war before year’s end. Napoleon’s been defeated decisively. Britain and her allies are overrunning France itself.”

   
“By the Eternal, I don’t care if the damned Europeans cut one another’s throats down to the last man jack of ‘em! To use a phrase a man fresh from Florida might understand, I am up to my ass in alligators! My forces air fightin’
 
several thousand of the bloodiest savages who ever raised the war cry on this frontier. The British general staff’s schemes are of even more remote interest than the future of that Corsican banditti Bonaparte.”

   
Samuel had encountered this same single-minded fixation all too often in military men to be surprised, especially in those who had come to command through the ranks of their state militias, as had the backwoods politician Jackson.

   
“The British schemes are a bit more dangerous than you might imagine,” he replied, concealing his growing frustration. “They’re going to attack New Orleans from their base in Jamaica. Already troops are assembling in the Caribbean. You may not give a tinker’s damn about the rest of the country, but before year’s end redcoats will be sailing up the Mississippi River if we aren’t prepared for it!”

   
Jackson did pause to consider now, stroking his angular jaw and studying Shelby who did not flinch beneath his unwavering stare. “Ye have this on good authority?”

   
Samuel pulled an oilskin pouch from beneath his buckskin shirt and opened it. “The best,” he replied, grinning. “None other than Britain’s closest ally in the new world, the Spanish governor of East Florida.” He handed the correspondence between the Spanish and the British to Jackson, who could only read what the British officers in Jamaica had written. It was enough.

   
“Ye’ll get yer horse, Colonel, and a dozen men to escort ye—as soon as the battle’s over here at Horseshoe Bend.”

Chapter Twenty Six

   
Andrew Jackson had been a man of his word. Samuel reached Washington and made his reports to Madison and Monroe. After traversing over a thousand miles across the Appalachians Shelby was then given another impossible assignment. Because of an old contact made with a French privateer whom he had met in the Caribbean years earlier, Samuel was selected to find out if the Haitian expatriate’s professed loyalty to the United States was genuine.

   
Now he found himself crawling in the slimy, foul-smelling water of a Louisiana bayou, watching the undulating progress of a cottonmouth moving gracefully in front of him, his pistol trained on it, hoping against hope he need not shoot. He had spent five days making his way from Barataria to New Orleans and was almost out of ammunition.

   
If the swamp didn’t get him, Governor Claiborne might well hang him as an accessory to piracy. In his shirt he carried a set of papers from the British Admiralty addressed to the residents of Barataria, attempting to recruit their services for an invasion of New Orleans. A captain’s commission and a thirty thousand dollar stipend had been offered as a bribe to their leader, who had no intention of accepting. Instead, he had given the documents to Shelby. Now all Samuel had to do was convince Claiborne that Jean Lafitte was a loyal American.

   
Grinning, he recalled an old backwoods saying. “This is sort of like winning a lottery and then finding out the prize is a live grizzly.”

* * * *

   
A heavy fog hung on the marshes at the edge of Lake Borgne, adding impaired visibility to the even greater misery of the chill damp December night. The three men standing furtively beneath the thick gray moss clinging to the low-lying limbs of a massive willow tree stamped their feet and clutched their cloaks tightly against the cold.

   
“You said you would supply us with guides who could show us the back way through these infernal swamps into New Orleans,” the tall imperious officer said in the clipped nasal tones of the British aristocracy.