by Donald Smith
What he saw ahead was life with a woman he knew he loved, Toby, and fatherhood. And years of working in the tobacco fields and pine orchards of what might be an ever expanding Woodyard plantation. He looked into a future of being a good friend to his neighbors, the people of Craven County, in whatever ways he could. Lending food and livestock and tools and hours of his time when needed to help them through hard stretches. Certain these favors would be returned when needed. And keeping up his volunteer service as a constable. Maintaining order at public meetings. Serving writs on people who needed to answer for skipping Sabbath services or missing militia musters or making drunken fusses in public. Arresting those who would do more serious harm to his countrymen or the Crown.
These waters looked somewhat familiar and yet fresh and new, full of unforeseen moments. As for Comet Elijah, Harry contented his mind. Florida seemed as good a place as any to die again.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE GODS OF WRITING ARE KIND TO PRACTITIONERS OF HISTORICAL fiction. They allow us to fill as many gaps as we wish in the written record of whatever bygone day, for whatever reason, catches our attention. The only limits are imagination and some measure of the laws of plausibility. Many of the characters in this book are based on real people, including a few historical figures like George Washington and a gangly teenaged Virginia fiddler named Thomas Jefferson. Several key characters with made-up names were suggested by real people, including the French spymaster, who readers may find the most remarkable of any they meet here. Such a person did exist, and after the war did retire to France to live out his life on his own terms. As for the constable himself, I had an ancestor in that part of North Carolina just around that time who served in the same kind of position, a volunteer constable, and later as a militia officer. The real Henry (“Captain Harry”) Smith exists today as no more than the faintest of shadows formed by two brief lines in a 1930s family genealogy, and his birth and death records. Harry Woodyard’s story, with his family’s roots in the swampy back country around Albemarle Sound, and his efforts to fulfill his mother’s ambitions for him and her family name in the up-and-coming Pamlico region, is imaginary. But it is entirely plausible. All I did was fill in some gaps.
I’m indebted to the authors of more than one hundred histories, journals, and travel logs I’ve digested about old North Carolina and, more broadly, America, in this crucial but much under-appreciated period of our history, when foundations were being laid for the American Revolution twenty years later. Prominent among my history sources was Fred Anderson, University of Colorado professor and author of Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. (When I told him I was writing a novel about a constable in colonial North Carolina during the French and Indian War, he observed, “You are entering virgin fictional territory.”) I based much of my point-of-view depiction of the climactic Battle of the Plains of Abraham on his account, the most detailed and nicely written one I have seen. Also especially useful were Noeleen McIlvenna’s A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660–1713 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Alan D. Watson’s A History of New Bern and Craven County (Tryon Palace Commission, 1987); Gertrude S. Carraway’s Crown of Life: History of Christ Church, New Bern, N.C., 1715–1940 (Owen G. Dunn, 1940); Dwight C. McLemore’s The Fighting Tomahawk: An Illustrated Guide to Using the Tomahawk and Long Knife as Weapons (Paladin Press, 2004), and the marvelous four-volume series of North Carolina folklore collected by Duke University Prof. Frank C. Brown between 1912 and 1943, in collaboration with the state’s folklore society, which he founded. Many of the oral traditions he came across in his wanderings have unmistakable origins in the period of this book and earlier.
Of course, as with all historians whose works have formed my understanding of these times and events, I take responsibility for any inaccuracies—or, as I might prefer to call them, artistic licenses.
I also owe an untold number of novelists whose works I’ve read in a lifetime, including recently David Liss, who assured me (when I needed assuring) that a good story will find readers no matter the era in which it is set; James Grady for his riveting story lines and painterly writing; James W. Hall for his mysteries set in the weirdness of South Florida, and Charles Frazier for the lessons he teaches in, among other subjects, narrative voice. As is true concerning factual content, though, any shortcomings in the literary department are entirely my own.
My thanks to the first person in the New York publishing world who gave me any reason to think I could write a novel that people might want to read: my agent, Jennifer Unter. Thanks to the creative team at Pegasus Books, including the sharp-eyed, deft-handed editor I was lucky enough to have, Maia Larson. Also to Maria Fernandez who came up with the typography, and Kara Davison for her brilliantly conceived and executed cover art, with its circlet of stars suggesting an independent America just beginning to emerge from the mists of the future.
I can’t thank enough three friends who read early manuscripts for their encouragement and wise counsel along the way: Barbara Mathias-Riegel, Punch Wray, and Cathy Healy. Thanks to my two lovely daughters, Hillary and Jessica, for being the delightful people they are; and to my older brother Kendall, who as a child experienced bits of a rapidly disappearing old North Carolina that I, growing up mostly in Northern Virginia, did not.
And finally, the most thanks of all to my wonderful wife, Pat Durkin, an estimable writer herself, and student of natural history, who read earlier drafts, and who has supported me for so long with love, encouragement, and kindnesses large and small. My gratitude to her is beyond measure.
THE CONSTABLE’S TALE
Pegasus Books LLC
80 Broad Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10004
Copyright © 2015 by Donald Smith
First Pegasus Books cloth edition September 2015
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
ISBN: 978-1-60598-861-0
ISBN: 978-1-60598-862-7 (e-book)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company