of Virginia for the crown.
It was a magnificent prospect to a man who had been born out of wedlock to an English earl, to a man who had been trained for war at a military academy, who expected nothing other than his officer’s pay and an occasional chance to loot a Southern plantation in return for his service.
He swept the gold and the purse into Whipple’s hands. “Tell me how you came by them. Tell me what proof you have that they belong to him.”
Ezra Whipple told him of the fight that afternoon, and of the blonde girl, and of the little room in the Black Thistle ordinary and the chest it held. Then he showed him the powder horn with its scrolled Stafford crest.
“It will be enough.” Emerson laughed, and there was cruelty in the sound.
Whipple stood up and put the gold in a pocket. He said hoarsely, “Your worship may have need of me in later times. I’ll not be far away.”
Emerson looked at his grossness, at the pig eyes and hulking shoulders. He smiled faintly. “It may be as you say. Don’t go far away.” Then he swept up the green sash and the hunting shirt and the powder horn and paced lazily toward the deserted dining room.
They were moving in the stately steps of a minuet as he came through the archway of the ballroom, its glass chandeliers and candles blazing, the music washing across the officers in their scarlet jackets faced in blue and silver, and over the women with their arms and shoulders bared. The paneled walls were rich with pine wainscoting, and the dark, polished flooring was so bright that it caught and held the reflections of officers’ boots and swinging panniered skirts.
He stood with the hunting shirt and sash in a hand, savoring the moment. Laura Lee moved easily with Stafford, laughing up at him, cajoling him as she was wont to cajole himself. A few moments from now those lovely brown eyes would be wide in terror. Stafford would be wrestling against the grip of a score of hands, being dragged outward to the nearest tree!
Laura Lee Stafford would be a widow soon. He would remain behind to comfort her, after the others were gone. The anticipation of that comforting was in him as he made his way to the musicians’ dais.
The music ceased abruptly at the wave of his hand. In the silence, men and women turned toward him curiously. Colonel Emerson spread out the hunting shirt and sash on the spinnet.
“Colonel Stafford, I’ve just been handed your uniform. It marks you as an officer in Morgan’s Rifles. I find you out of uniform at the moment.” The Colonel paused, savoring the stunned shock on Stafford’s face, the dismay in Laura Lee’s white cheeks. He said lazily, “I presume you know the rules of war, and what happens to a spy when his enemy catches him?”
The gloating was clear in his voice. His hand lifted the powder horn and held it high above his head for all to see.
“Gentlemen: his powder horn, with the Stafford crest worked into it! I ask your aid in hanging this man for a spy!”
There were some who cried out against such a return for Stafford hospitality, but the majority of officers had seen those expert riflemen of Dan Morgan’s cut more than one command to pieces behind them, and so they surged forward now, crying out harshly, dragging at their swords with eager hands.
Stafford stood still, the shock of discovery paralyzing his muscles.
Laura Lee gasped beside him, her hand working tensely at his forearm, “Deny it, Billy Joe. Deny it! You can save yourself that way!”
He could not save himself. Something in the face of Colonel Edmund Emerson whispered that he would listen to no argument. Something also told Stafford that it was not because he was a rebel that the Colonel was so eager to hang him.
Stafford was aware that everything in his life was crystallizing at this moment. Like his father before him, he had been born on this side of the Atlantic, and the vast freedom of the pine forests and the distant blue mountains was in his blood. Against that love of liberty was balanced the love he gave his wife. Not to embarrass her, not to extend into a perpetual bitterness their sometimes angry quarrels over a supposed duty to George III, he had run away four years ago. Now his absence was explained; now all the world knew him for a rebel.
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
