with his mission? Had to
be done that way, most effective, doing it for his race, a greater good.
The storm raged, lashed at him.
“Hey! Here comes Powhatan!” someone yelled, and everyone stopped and turned. Those men that were lighting torches for burning the Negroes’ homes dropped the materials, stared out toward the woods.
A single Indian was approaching them, dressed in buckskin, musket in hand, moving at an easy trot. His name was not Powhatan, of course, but no one knew what his real name was, and rather than ask, everyone just called him after that long-dead chief. He never seemed to object.
He was a sometimes scout, sometimes guide. Dunmore had finally broken down and engaged him for this business.
They had been hunting the Negroes for a week, forging out into the woods with dogs and horses, charging over trails and slashing through bracken, but they had found nothing. The dogs had picked up trails, sure enough, had set up great choruses of baying, had raced off like they had a fox treed, but it had always come to naught.
The damned Negroes had been leading them astray. Dunmore finally smoked it. They were sending a few of their men out to lay false trails, doubling back, splashing through streams, creating long meandering trails that dead-ended far from wherever it was the rest of them were hiding.
It was pointless. Hire a savage to catch a savage, Dunmore had concluded at last. Those Africans and their jungle ways. Perhaps a Red Indian could find them. He had all but given up hope that white men and dogs could.
He spurred his horse and rode toward the Indian, as did some of those others on horseback, wealthy planters who by tacit understanding were part of the decision-making cabal. They reined up around Powhatan and the red man looked up at Dunmore, and Dunmore alone, because Dunmore was the one who had put the gold in his hands.
“They about three mile from here. In a meadow. Tents, fire. They have scouts out in the woods, maybe what you call pickets. I can show you. But no dogs. That is why you don’t catch them. They hear the dogs, lead them away from the camp.”
“Damn it!” Dunmore said, and almost added “I knew it!” but since the dogs had been his idea he did not. “Very well. We will leave two of the more useless ones back with the dogs. McKeown, that lazy Irishman, and that big fellow. Let’s get the others ready to go.”
“And no horses,” Powhatan said, “we not surprise them with horses.”
The other men on horseback, wealthy planters all, looked at one another, uneasy, and Dunmore knew that they did not wish to go on foot. Three miles in and back was a long way for men used to riding. And being on foot put them at the same level as the laborers and mechanics. It actually gave the Indian, practiced woodsman that he was, a certain superiority.
“No, we need the horses. Can’t hunt them down without the horses. The speed they give us, and the fear they bring to these Negroes, will more than make up for a want of surprise.”
Powhatan shrugged and leaned on his musket. It occurred to Dun-more that the red man probably did not care one way or another about this fight. That did not matter, as long as he played his part.
Ten minutes and they were ready to go, Powhatan in the lead, the lower sort on foot following him, and then the men on horseback, feeling like the crusaders of old.
A crusade indeed, thought Frederick Dunmore. A God-given mission to rid this New World of a terrible and growing plague. A chance to murder my own demons.
It was amazing. Elizabeth could hardly believe how the people settled into their new life out in the woods, living like Indians, hunting, gathering edible plants, tending fires. Less than a week after fleeing Marlowe House and it seemed as if they had been living in that clearing for a year or more.
She tried to help. She wanted to be a part of it, in a useful way, but the other women seemed to feel it was their job to take care of her, to not let her expend any effort.
And she quickly discovered that there was precious little that she could do in any event that would have been of help.
She was not without skills; she could write a neat, round hand, could organize a formal dinner with the skill of a field officer, could lay out, plant, and tend a gorgeous garden. She kept all the books at Marlowe House with great accuracy. She could satisfy a man in any way he might wish-intellectually, socially, carnally-but none of those skills found a practical application there in the Virginia woods.
It was embarrassing. Even more so when she recalled how she had been certain these people could not get on without her.
All this she considered as she walked back up the now-worn trail from the stream to the camp. In her hands, two buckets, the water sloshing over her skirts and soaking through to her skin. It felt good in the heat of the summer morning. The smell of the pines was pungent. Birds flashed by, here and there, no longer concerned by the presence of these new creatures of the forest.
From the fields, the peal of children laughing, women singing at their work.
“Here, Mrs. Marlowe, let me get that.” It was Plato, stepping up behind her, easing the buckets out of her hands even as he spoke.
“Plato, no, I am perfectly capable.” She held tight to the handles, tried to pull the buckets back. Water spilled over the rims.
Plato pulled against her. “Please, Mrs. Marlowe, it ain’t proper…”
“Plato, damn it…” At that, the young man let go of the buckets, just at the moment that Elizabeth had redoubled her efforts at pulling them from him. She stumbled back, knew she was going down, tried to retain her dignity in that instant when her balance was lost, but it was too late. She landed hard on her posterior, the buckets tumbling over, soaking her completely.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Mrs. Marlowe, Lord help me, I-”
“Never you mind, Plato.” She struggled to her feet, fending off Plato’s help. Her wet, heavy skirts clung to her legs. She kicked one of the buckets out of her way, ignored the pain that shot through her toe.
Plato looked miserable, desperately unhappy about what he had done, quite at odds with the Plato of a few moments before, strutting around the camp on guard duty, one of Thomas’s best fowling pieces over his back, a brace of pistols thrust in his belt.
Awkward as he might be in rendering domestic help, Elizabeth was impressed with the skill he had displayed in the kind of Indian-style warfare that they had been carrying on with Dunmore and the others.
It was a war that she and the other women had only heard about. It took place miles from the camp and involved not fighting so much as leading the searchers and their dogs on wild-goose chases.
“Here, let me fill those for you again,” Plato said, bending over and grabbing the buckets. Elizabeth had been about to do the same, and if she had not anticipated Plato’s move they would have knocked heads. She was grateful that she had seen it coming; slamming their skulls together would have been the end of it for her.
Plato grabbed up the buckets, smiled, and was heading for the stream when they heard a commotion at the far end of the camp, something happening. He dropped the buckets again and he and Elizabeth trotted off, Elizabeth holding her skirts up from her ankles, much encumbered by the heavy, wet cloth wrapping around her legs.
Two of the scouts were back, Wallace and George. Ashanti. Skilled woodsmen. They could move like deer through the thick bracken, disappear into the undergrowth. They had been a big part of keeping the white searchers away.
Now they came trotting into the camp with an urgency that they had not displayed before, waving the others over to them. They were already talking when Elizabeth reached the edge of the crowd.
“They coming again,” George said. “No dogs. Saquam is leading them.”
A murmur ran through the crowd gathered around the scouts.
“Who is Saquam?” Elizabeth asked Plato.
“An Indian. A scout. The white people call him Powhatan.”
“Why is he helping Dunmore?”
“Don’t know. Money, I reckon. Saquam has friends who slaves. He’s helped some escape, but he’ll do pretty much whatever someone will pay him for.”
Caesar spoke up. “Body of me! Saquam will find us, all right. Dun-more and them others couldn’t, with their
