Chase the Dawn

by Jane Feather

  “I think that perhaps I should cook,” Bryony offered tentatively. “Since everyone except me has produced something. But Ben is a great deal better at it than I am.”

  “Your presence is sufficient gift.” John bowed formally, offering the heavy pleasantry with a wicked gleam, and Bryony laughed as she curtsied.

  “My thanks, sir. But I must protest, you do me too much honor.”

  “Far too much,” agreed Ben. “We have no platters. See what you can contrive.”

  “Dock leaves?”

  “Or some such.” He cracked the eggs into the bacon fat sizzling in the skillet, and Bryony went off to hunt for broad, firm leaves that could serve as platters.

  Eggs and bacon maneuvered off a leaf with the blunt edge of Ben’s clasp knife tasted better than anything Bryony had ever eaten before. That morning, with the hot sun on her neck and the cheerful raillery of her companions, deliberately creating an atmosphere of ease and relaxation to combat the hell of the previous night and the anticipation of the hell awaiting them in the battle to come, would remain forever in her memory. She fell asleep on the grass, as suddenly and as easily as a kitten, exhausted with play, will collapse where it stands.

  “We should try to do the same,” Charlie said soberly. “There’s no telling when we’ll have the chance again.” The earlier lightness dissipated as it must. It had been chimera only, a moment to be snatched from a fearful uncertainty; a moment that would stiffen the backbone again.

  Ben lay on the bank, closing his eyes, feeling the sun’s heat against the lids, creating a red glow that filled his internal vision. He put a hand out to touch the curled figure beside him. His palm flattened against her hip, and just the feel of her was sufficient to remind him to count his blessings. But how long would it—could it—last …?

  “Colonel, General Gates wishes to see you immediately.” The adjutant had spoken only the first word of his sentence and Benedict was instantly awake. He glanced at the sun and judged that he had perhaps been asleep for thirty minutes—not much to recompense for a sleepless night, but better than nothing.

  “Very well, Adjutant. I am on my way,” he replied quietly, anxious not to disturb Bryony, although she looked as if it would take an earthquake to return her to the land of the living. He went over to the river and splashed his face with cold water before reporting to the general for orders that he already knew he would not want to follow.

  Half an hour later, a bugle sounded its imperative note, and Ben shook Bryony awake, ruthlessly ignoring her protests, her pleas for five more minutes as she curled tighter on her side. “I will be quite awake then,” she begged, her words slurred with sleep.

  “No!” Ben yanked her over onto her back. “You have to be on your horse in three minutes!”

  Bryony’s eyes shot open, and she blinked into the set face above her. Something had made Ben exceedingly angry. With a hasty apology, she scrambled to her feet and stood swaying in the sunshine as her blood rearranged itself in her body. The bugle sounded again, and all around her men were running to fall into the columns already re-forming. “I feel dreadful,” she groaned, stumbling over to her mare.

  “No more so than anyone else,” Ben snapped, catching her around the waist and swinging her into the saddle.

  “I was not asking for sympathy,” she retorted, gathering up the reins and swallowing her yawn. “Why are you so angry now?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. You will ride in the van again, and this time you will stay there—is it understood?”

  “Where will you be?” Bryony found that she was waking up rapidly; indignation was a powerful spur.

  “Wherever I am needed,” he replied curtly. “Is it understood?”

  Bryony nodded. “I suppose so. Quite frankly, when you are in this mood, I cannot imagine wishing to go in search of you. I am just as tired and irritable as you, as it happens, but I do not take it out on you.”

  She looked so rumpled and pink in her indignation that Benedict could not help a sudden chuckle. “It is most unjust of me, lass, I agree, but I have no time for either apologies or explanations at the moment.” He swung onto his own horse and cantered off without further expansion.

  “He makes me so cross!” Bryony declared to John Davidson, who had been audience to the spat. “I have done nothing to my knowledge to annoy him. It is always the same when something has angered him. I always have to play whipping boy!” She glared into the middle distance, then recollected that it was perhaps not decorous to discuss one’s husband in such fashion. A sideways glance at her companion, however, was reassuring. He did not appear in the least embarrassed by her confidence.

  “He’s greatly concerned for your safety,” John said after a minute. “Gates is insisting on meeting Cornwallis head-on as soon as we come up with him. His battle plan, Ben is convinced, will be a disaster, and the men will have been granted no respite to recover from the march. Ben wishes to find a safe place for you, well away from the battlefield, but he cannot do that if he doesn’t have the time to reconnoiter.”

  “Oh.” Bryony absorbed this information, then said carefully, “I think it would be best if you forgot what I just said, John. If you please.”

  John grinned at her. “He does have a regular pepper pot of a temper, doesn’t he? But he is under a great deal of strain at present.”

  “Well, I wish he would not worry about me,” Bryony declared. “I have told him all along that I will have a care for myself. He has his duty to do, and I will not interfere.”

  It was mid-afternoon when they approached the small town of Camden and the British army encamped in a field outside. Bryony sat on her horse and observed the enemy with a mixture of awe and anguish—the clustered tents beneath the fluttering flags; the red-coated figures, tiny in the distance, going about their business, presumably as much a prey to fear and uncertainty as those who stood around her, gazing in their turn, for the moment silent. It was the first time that she had beheld the British as enemy, and if it had not been for Benedict Clare, she would be looking in the opposite direction, seeing enemy in those with whom she now marched. In a few short hours, these two forces would join battle, and she wondered whether there were any familiar faces to be found under the British flag. Her father, perhaps? But he would not have left her mother, surely? Not so soon after her daughter’s defection.

  “Yes, it is a somber spectacle.” Ben came up suddenly on her right. “Cornwallis has only highly disciplined regulars with him, each one with years of battlefield experience.” He sighed bleakly. “They will make mincemeat of our men if they get the chance.”

  “I was wondering if there was anyone I knew over there,” Bryony said, still following her own train of thought.

  Benedict shrugged and gave a short laugh. “That is the reason for the tragic mien, then?”

  “I cannot somehow see the comic aspects of the situation,” she retorted, nettled at the sardonic tone.

  Ben, plagued by anxiety for her safety, racking his brain for a solution that Gates seemed determined to deny him, said sharply, “If you are regretting your choice, it is a little late, I fear.”

  Bryony flushed with anger. “I did not say that. But I do regret the necessity for having to make it,” she returned sharply. “I do not myself give a tinker’s damn whether King George rules the Colonies or not, and I wish I understood why it is a matter of such desperate importance to you. It is not your country. Why must you fight someone else’s battles?”

  It was the first time that she had expressed these sentiments, and her tone was far from conciliatory. Fatigue, sorrow, uncertainty, fear for those she loved on both sides, and indignation that Ben could not understand how she might feel torn, even though she would never go back on the decision she had made, lent an unfortunately truculent note to her voice.

  Benedict’s eyes flattened in that dreaded fashion as the old bitterness welled, and he forgot his resolution to keep her safe from its bite. “Because I can no longer fight the ba
ttles in my own country,” he pronounced coldly. “But why should a Paget question the foundations of her wealthy, privileged world? Of course you do not give a tinker’s damn for injustices visited upon others, only insofar as it disturbs your own peace.”

  He swung his mount and rode off, leaving Bryony sickened at the suddenness and viciousness of the attack. He hadn’t spoken to her in that manner since the afternoon in Paul Tyler’s house when they had pledged themselves to tread the same path. And she still did not understand why her admittedly snappish question should have produced such a savage reaction. Unless it had something to do with what had earned him the sentence of bondage. Paul Tyler had said that it was a secret that should not lie between them—that it would bring them unhappiness. But how could she force the confidence?

  Tears pricked behind her eyes—a familiar sensation that she now always associated with Benedict’s seemingly unprovoked attacks. She dashed the tears away with the back of her hand and sniffed vigorously. “Charlie!” She hailed the young man who had dismounted and was talking with a group of officers. He came over immediately, smiling although his eyes were grave. “Charlie, I am going into the town,” Bryony said briskly. “Will you tell Benedict that he may find me there when he is finished with this … this killing? I will be quite safe, and he need not concern himself in the least.”

  “You cannot just go,” Charlie said, aghast. “Ben will have made plans for you.”

  “I have made my own,” she said, wheeling the mare. “I do not wish to be a burden to him.” Before Charlie could say or do anything further, she went off at a gallop down the dusty road. She had no idea what she would find in the town of Camden, but Bryony did not think she could bear another such encounter with Benedict with the battle so close; the possibility of the end to love and the end to all that was familiar was now so tangible as to seem almost inevitable. The hurt went too deep—that he should turn upon her when she was already vulnerable, prey to confused sorrows and the sharp edge of panic.

  So lost was she in this slough of despond that the pounding hooves behind were almost upon her before she noticed. Benedict seized the mare’s bridle and hauled her to a stop. His eyes blazed in a whitened face. “How dare you do such a thing!” he rasped. “To leave such a message!”

  “I merely said that I would take a care for myself and you were not to concern yourself,” Bryony protested, as white as he. “You have weighty matters on your mind; I wished simply to lighten your burden.”

  “Don’t you play such a game with me!” he raged. “How could I possibly not know where you were and be unconcerned? As bad as it is, at least when I put you somewhere, I’ll know where to find you afterward.”

  “If there is to be an afterward,” she said, the fight suddenly leaving her. It had been absurd to ride off like that and expect him to put her out of his mind while he concentrated on the business of war. But that had not really been the motive, anyway. Anger and hurt tended to muddle clarity.

  “There will be!” he said with fierce intensity. “Sweet Jesus, Bryony, I cannot explain what happens to me sometimes. I am afraid for you, for me, for every man on that damn field, and I can do nothing about it.”

  “You could explain what happens to you if you would tell me why you sometimes hate me. I understand that it comes out when you are worried or distressed in some way, but I don’t understand anything else, and I don’t think I can go on living with you if you will not tell me.” She was horrified by the words of ultimatum even as she recognized them to be the truth.

  Ben swore, a short barnyard oath. “You have a fine instinct for picking your time, don’t you, lass?”

  “I am sorry,” she said in a wooden voice. “I realize this is not a convenient time or place, but I just thought I would mention it.”

  “Well, now that you have mentioned it and I have duly taken note, the matter must rest. We are going back to the column, and if you break rank again without my permission, I daresay that I shall discover I cannot live with you.” Still holding the mare’s bridle above the bit, he turned both horses on the narrow road.

  “I am quite capable of guiding my own mount,” Bryony declared frigidly.

  “Just so long as you guide her in the right direction!” He released the bridle, however, and they rode back to the army in grim silence. Benedict hustled Bryony to the rear, where a makeshift camp had been made and women and a few children milled around among the supplies and pack mules.

  “You will be as safe here as anywhere,” he said. “And at least I’ll know how to find you.”

  Bryony looked at him, desolation etched on every feature. “I do not wish it to be like this, Ben.”

  He gripped her hands in a painful squeeze. “Sweeting, forgive me once more. I cannot do what I must unshriven.”

  She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Forgive me, too. I should not have laid such a burden upon you at this time.”

  “I will not let such a thing happen again,” he promised softly. “There is nothing to tell you, and you must not think of it further.” Then he kissed her in hard affirmation and rode off without a backward glance, because he dared not take one.

  Bryony watched until the bright copper head was swallowed in the press. Why would he not tell her? She knew so much already, what could there possibly be that he did not consider fit for her ears?

  Throughout that night, three thousand men took up battle positions, facing an army half their size. It was no wonder that General Gates, in the gray light of dawn, should have surveyed his massed troops with a complacent eye as line upon line stretched before him. Two thousand men of the North Carolina militia formed a solid center. Maryland and Delaware veterans under General Gist and Baron de Kalb brought up the rear. But Benedict Clare could feel no justification for complacency as he rode the front lines, sensing the uncertainty, the anxious shufflings, the whisperings, and the movements within the lines—all manifestations of fearful and untried men facing fire for the first time.

  The redcoats, ranged in orderly lines, stood with apparent relaxation despite their numerical disadvantage. For several minutes, time ceased and this corner of the world hung suspended in absolute silence.

  Bryony heard the silence as if it were a fanfare, the ominous presager of battle. She had spent the night soothing a fractious baby whose mother was burning with fever and unable to nurse the child. It was a task that gave Bryony some purpose, a much needed sense of usefulness, and she found, although she had had little experience of babies or small children, that she was quite successful. Now she stood in the dawn, the sleeping baby in her arms, waiting for the silence to break. Then a bugle called, a drum began to beat, and the first cannon bellowed.

  Brushing her hair away from her face with her free hand, she walked wearily over to a fallen tree stump and sat down to wait, as women had done since the dawn of civilization while their men dealt and received death in the name of religious conviction or territorial aggrandizement—rarely in the name of anything worthwhile, she reflected, absently allowing the babe to suck on her little finger. In a minute, the milkless finger would cease to satisfy and she would have to resort to the rag soaked in goat’s milk to answer the most basic need of this pathetic scrap of humanity. Perhaps, if one was forced to pay more attention to the basic needs of survival, one would be less willing to sacrifice survival for concepts, Bryony thought, knowing that by these abstractions she was somehow distancing herself from what was happening a mile or so away. Contemplation of the reality was not possible if she wished to retain her sanity.

  Suddenly, she could no longer ignore the events around her. Men were running through the camp, running and yelling, throwing away their muskets as they hurtled in blind panic, trampling upon those who were in their path. It was only a few to start with, but as she stood, hand to mouth, eyes wide with incomprehension, the few became a torrent of wild-eyed humanity, shouting incoherently while the sounds of battle continued behind them. Bryony did not think she could ever have imagined s
uch a sight, as she ran instinctively with the baby onto a hillock out of the path of the floodtide. Three thousand men marching in column or camped in a field was one thing, but three thousand men on the run was a heart-stopping, petrifying sight. Surely it was not the whole three thousand? But she recognized the insignia of the North Carolina militia and knew that Ben’s worst fears had been realized. The center was broken.

  As she watched, a sight that filled her with a dull fury burst upon her incredulous vision: General Gates, astride a lean, powerful racehorse well-known for its speed, tore across the camp, a few members of headquarters’ staff, not so well mounted, trailing him. They vanished in a cloud of dust up the road to the north as his routed army poured forth in his wake. Dear God, where was Ben? He would not flee, she knew it, even as she cursed him for the stiff-necked pride that would keep him knocking at death’s door in the face of impossible odds….

  Benedict had not seen Gates leave the field; he had seen only the breaking of the front line when the green troops had thrown down their muskets and fled in panic at the first major salvo from the British ranks. He had seen the center disintegrate and the First Maryland veterans in the rear thrown into confusion as their ranks were burst asunder by the fleeing multitude. He spurred his horse with desperate resolve, rallying the veterans, finding himself alongside Baron de Kalb as they charged forward onto the field, a small band of soldiers with them. Across the field, he saw Mordecai Gist with his own band, also fighting hand to hand as one bayonet charge succeeded another. None of them realized until later that they were fighting the entire British army in a battle already lost, their commander in flight miles to the rear.