“Well she sure knows how to cook.” Mose smelled the bowl as he passed it off to Zeke.
Zeke took possession of the bowl and the spoon. “I’m sure there’s plenty more in the kitchen. Get ye some.”
“He already had some,” Isaac countered.
Mose grinned and bounced his lanky form. Zeke was struck once again at just how young the youngest member of their team really was. He couldn’t be more than one and twenty now, and he’d been with them for at least the last three years. Weariness didn’t seem to sober Mose the way it had the rest of them. A glimmer of light entered the place where Zeke had practiced the grim determination to do what was right. He was glad he’d fought for his new country.
A new country.
Only time would tell what that would mean for all of them. But that was all right. For now, he was glad the fighting was over.
Zeke thanked the Lord for his food and started in on his feast, the first he’d had in a while without the whiz and bangs of muzzle and cannon fire in the distance. His friends filled him in on the battle and how they got him home in Aggie’s wagon.
Mama’s biscuits. The first bite melted in his mouth. Oh yeah, he’d missed these.
He finished half the stew and both biscuits before he rested back against his pillows.
“Are we still on? Have ye decided a route?” He directed his question to Isaac. They were supposed to be organizing a wagon train to Kentucky. Zeke didn’t want to slow them down.
“We will wait until ye are ready.” Isaac’s calm scratched at Zeke’s anticipation. He was ready to start his new life now. The dull ache in his leg flared to a lightning strike as he shifted to a straighter position. On the other hand, he could wait a couple of days until he could at least stand properly. Zeke did not want to be carried to Kentucky in the back of wagon. He wanted to ride into the new land of opportunity ready to take on all challenges.
“I will be ready.” His full belly dragged him to sleepiness.
“Yer knee’s tore up.” Mose’s wide-eyed declaration caused him to take a longer look at the many-tailed bandage and leather splint holding his leg rigid from his calf to his thigh.
“Doc says he’s not sure the knee will bend. The ball entered just below yer knee, and he is not sure how far up the damage went.” Gordon, once a teacher, was sure to supply needed details that otherwise got left out. Zeke turned his gaze to his oldest friend.
“What else did he say?”
“Not much,” Gordon said. “The ball went clean through yer leg. The reason ye’ve been out so long is because Aggie gave ye something for the pain until we could get ye here. Ye’ve been out for three days.”
Zeke looked to Isaac. “When the field doc didn’t get to ye in what Aggie thought was a timely manner, she took matters into her own hands and got ye out of there.”
Tommy Thornton’s wife, Agatha, known to the unit as Aggie, stood behind the others as she usually did. She’d adopted them all since the beginning. Adding their clothes to her cleaning and mending piles. Cooking for them, bandaging them. When Tommy died at Guilford Courthouse, she’d stayed on to care for them, and they’d vowed to protect her until they could get her home.
“Thank ye, Aggie.” Zeke allowed himself to slip a little further down into the mattress.
Fierce brown eyes engaged his own. “I am glad ye’re feeling better.”
Isaac cleared his throat. “We have decided that we will wait to go west until ye can make the journey. It will give us all the chance to prepare.” He must have seen the grimace Zeke tried to contain as he eased his leg down the bed as he stretched out to sleep. “It’s a long way, Zeke.”
“I’ll give ye that.” But Zeke was itching to get started. His boat building business in Norfolk, torched in 1776, had yet to be rebuilt due to his service in the Continental Army and the subsequent burnings. Norfolk was a great place for a boat building business, but it was too strategically important. Zeke no longer wished to be perched on the edge of a precipice always in danger of tumbling into the water. Nor did he want his livelihood in constant threat of reduction to cinders because somebody somewhere wanted what he had. Nope. He longed for wide open spaces where a man could breathe in the grace that God gave him. That’s where he was bound, and no amount of leg healing was going to hold him back. “I am going west as soon as I can.” Once again he drifted to sleep.
Good as his word, Doc Jones came the next day and every day after that until Zeke was out of danger. By January, he could get around tolerably well with a cane. By April, Zeke had reconciled himself that his right leg just didn’t bend like it used to and it probably never would. He could live with that, just like he could live with the achy pain that accompanied him every night as he lay down to sleep.
Two
January 1782
Outer Banks, North Carolina
Wiping away more tears from her tear-sore face, Beti Boatman wondered how she could have gotten the entire distance to Doctor Campbell’s before she remembered the treasured memento. It seemed nothing could go right today. And so it should be, her spirit jabbed. Laying her father in the earth had been the hardest thing she’d done yet. To do it twice? It wasn’t really twice, but going through the motions at the empty, decoy grave had upset her nearly as much as the true burial. Grief swelled her chest so full she could hardly breathe. She secured her father’s dogeared Bible in her saddlebag. Magnus nickered and sidestepped. Beti stilled.
No one should be here now.
The meager three guests had left hours ago. She stepped gingerly toward the open door. Bruised from the events of the day, Beti tucked in as close to the door as she could, barely letting an eye show. She watched with that one eye as two men started to dig in the freshly mounded earth.
Looters.
Shivers wobbled her spine all the way to her fingers. She needed to get out of here before they discovered she was here and alone. Quickly she stepped to her horse. Beti let her hands slide down Magnus’s crest to his withers. Warm and strong, he wouldn’t let her down. She primed the pan of her firelock. She took a deep breath and peered out at the men once more. Only one was fully visible.
Tall and rounded topped by a dark tricorn and covered in a frock coat, he ordered the other man. The other man hunched just out of eyesight. A growing mound of earth masked their horrible work. The tall one spoke, his voice lost to her in the wind. She had to hurry, only a few minutes would bring their fury to the house. Hot anger took root in her belly and burned the shivers to cinders.
It was people like this that caused her to have to leave the home she loved so dearly. People who came after them year after year looking for a buried treasure that as far a she knew didn’t exist.
Not to mention townspeople who couldn’t accept a pardon whether it came from the King of Heaven or the Kind of England. Her father had both. She slipped the firelock into the saddle sheath. Soon she would be gone, and no one would trouble her again. Beti pulled leather gloves over her wrists careful to tuck her mother’s bracelet under the gauntlet.
Beti mounted Magnus and turned him to the back entrance of the barn. It would buy her a few seconds. Once she’d gotten down the long drive, the road to town was fairly straight. Doctor Campbell’s house was just on the outskirts. On a good day she could get there in thirty minutes. If Magnus flew, she’d make it in fifteen. If she had to duck into the woods, she wasn’t sure how long it would take. Beti prayed. She didn’t want to shoot anyone, but those men didn’t want to cross her today.
“Ready, boy.”
Magnus stamped. She squeezed her legs and whispered “Get up!”
They bolted out the door. Down the dirt path. A quick look over her shoulder told her the men were just finding out the earthly remains of Ethelred the Black didn’t reside in the mound they’d excavated. The tall man looked up. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel the menace of him reaching for her. Sharp talons of fear sliced through her belly chilling the angry fire she’d used to nurse her courage. She urged Magnus forward down the familiar road. Her cap hadn’t a chance against the gallop. She swiped it off her head, and her closely pinned hair began to fly. They reached the canopy of the wood. Normally she would feel safe under its covering. Forgotten were the number of times she’d safely hidden from the townsfolk among its welcoming branches.
A blur of white and silver blazed by to her left. What was that? Fear bristled her neck prickling down her spine. It appeared to be man-sized yet it moved without sound . Whatever it was moved through the trees faster than Magnus on the best day. Beti leaned in over the pummel. “Come on boy.”
