by Shirl Henke
Claiborne scanned the notices. All goods purchased from Lafitte’s illegal smuggling operation would be subject to immediate seizure by the United States government. He signed it with a flourish. “The arrogant scoundrel wants a lesson in manners,” he gritted out, then skimmed a few lines from the next long document, copied out painstakingly in Darcy’s cribbed handwriting. The governor was rapidly developing a blinding headache.
If only his beloved Creole wife were still alive, but she had perished of a fever and he was widowed and alone for the second time in his life. Forcing aside personal considerations, he applied himself to signing the mountainous pile of papers where Darcy indicated. He had come to depend on his able and efficient new secretary over the past months since Edmond Darcy had begun working for him.
Explaining partially what each document entailed, the secretary opened it to the back page and held it for Claiborne’ s signature until the entire stack was complete. “That should do it for today, your excellency. Why don’t you go home for the evening? It’s getting late and I can finish up here.”
“Thank you, Darcy. I believe a glass of Madeira and early to bed would not be at all amiss,” the weary governor said, rising and heading for the door while his secretary meticulously straightened his desk.
After Claiborne was gone, Darcy slid one piece of paper carefully from the stack and smiled chillingly. The salutation was addressed to Colonel Samuel Shelby. “This was even easier than I’d thought,’’ he murmured in satisfaction as he sat down at the big walnut desk and folded the letter, then slipped it into an envelope. “I do hope you don’t take the news of your little French tart’s marriage too hard, Colonel. Of course, the governor could have mentioned that she’s already widowed and in seclusion at her country estate...or, he could have told you the truth—just as your beloved herself has. Poor thing, pouring out her heart to you in all those letters, pleading for you to come claim her and your bastard!”
His pale eyes glowed malevolently in the candlelight as the perfect features of his aquiline face were cast in shadows. He looked for all the world like a fallen angel. Satan’s right hand.
* * * *
Colonel Samuel Shelby walked out of Jemmy Madison’s office by a side door, used only when the president did not wish a special visitor to be seen. Many men from imperial ambassadors to political enemies had slipped through the discreet rear entry since the White House was first occupied by Thomas Jefferson, but Samuel’s mind was far from the military matters at hand as he walked, grim faced, down the long, twisting corridor.
Dolley Madison stood poised in the doorway of her salon, silently watching him approach. It was obvious that Samuel did not see her. The look in his eyes was a thousand miles away—in New Orleans if she did not miss her guess.
“I know the situation on the Canadian border is grave, but somehow I intuit that your thoughts veer in a southerly direction.” Mrs. Madison stepped into the hallway and gave Samuel a motherly kiss on his cheek, then drew him into the salon and closed the door.
When he first returned to Washington, Samuel had confided in her that he was pressing for the divorce from Tish because he had met a woman he wished to marry, a woman who waited for him in New Orleans. The young colonel had always kept his own council and never more so than in matters of the heart. Dolley had deduced that Olivia St. Etienne must be an extraordinary female indeed. But now the new spark seemed to have died in his eyes and his mask of cynicism was once again in place. Beneath it lay a world of pain, of that she was certain, and she wanted to know the particulars so that she might help or at the least offer consolation.
“Tell me what has you looking so preoccupied,” she commanded when they were seated on the cabriole sofa in the parlor, well out of earshot of servants after she dismissed her maid. “And don’t you dare give me another summary about the debacle when General Hull surrendered Fort Detroit to the British. Jemmy has already spoken more than enough about that!”
He smiled at her. “I could never fool you, could I?” he said fondly, his smile fading as a bittersweet look haunted his eyes before he shuttered them once more. “I no longer need pursue the divorce. Tish really is dead this time.”
Dolley gasped softly. “What happened?”
“I’m not certain really. I only learned of it yesterday when I was accosted by Worthington Soames. The senator was livid about my filing the petition with the legislature, screaming at me about defaming his beloved paragon of a daughter even in death.”
“But you’ve already told me how they faked her death once before,” she said uncertainly.
He shook his head. “There’s no fakery this time. He was like a wild man, red eyed and unshaven, crazed with grief. Tish is dead, all right. She was shot in St. Louis after I went downriver. He was too upset to give me any coherent details, but it appears to have been a robbery. Her body’s being sent back to Virginia for burial in the family mausoleum.”
“I know this sounds callous, Samuel, but now that she is truly gone, you could send for Olivia...” The bleak look in his eyes when he raised them to meet hers robbed her of breath. Surely it was not grief for Leticia Soames.
Echoing her thoughts he said, “I won’t be a hypocrite and say I’m sorry Tish’s gone but...I can’t very well send for a married woman. Ironic, isn’t it? First I was the one not free, now it’s her.”
“But how? Are you certain? Did she write this to you?” Her heart was breaking as she saw the anguish of his soul laid bare when the mask slipped for a moment.
“I haven’t received a word from Olivia since I left, even though I’ve sent a dozen letters. Governor Claiborne kindly and rather regretfully informed me of the particulars at the lady’s request. I suppose she found it awkward...” He stood up, unable to sit still any longer, and began to pace, needing to talk even though it was impossibly difficult to frame his thoughts.
Dolley was a patient listener who had spent years drawing out the shy and very private James Madison. As Samuel gathered his composure, she poured them each a glass of sherry from a decanter on the pier table against the wall. Silently she handed him one.
He took it absently. “He’s a Spanish nobleman, Don Rafael Obregón. I always thought she’d look to her own kind. After all, her parents were of the Ancient Régime, a baron and baroness, while I’m just the son of a land-poor Virginia planter. When she was impoverished with little hope of reentry into the humble ranks of St. Louis society, I suppose she changed—or we both wanted to believe she did.
“But once I learned about her uncle’s money on the journey downriver, I had this...” his voice faded for a moment as he groped for the right words, “this apprehension, a feeling deep in my guts that she just wasn’t meant to be mine. Then when I realized the extent of the Durand fortune and saw the way the Creole elite kowtowed to her, I wasn’t sure I could live in the shadow of her money, or that I had the right to ask her to give it up.”
“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 arriv
e, 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.