Read Online King's Mountain by Sharyn McCrumb - Free Book Online Page A

thought better of it, for he only shrugged and said, “He takes special food, and he’s particular about the cooking of it, so there’s a cook in camp just to look after him, apart from them that does for the rest of the men. He has a washerwoman already—leastways we call her that—and I am his body servant, seeing to his clothes, and cleaning his boots, unpacking his cases, and the like.”
    I stared at him, trying in my mind’s eye to picture this runty fellow nipping about the commander’s tent, setting up a silver teapot upon an officer’s trunk and spooning cane sugar into a china cup. I almost laughed. “You do for him? You? I thought he’d have a black slave, same as most of the quality folks from around here.”
    Elias Powell shook his head. “We’re all blackamoors to him, girl.”
    *   *   *
    I always got the feeling that he talked to me the same way another person might talk to their favorite hound, more to hear the sound of their own voice than to be understood or answered back by the listener. Maybe it was on account of my mare’s nest of red hair, which folk have said gave me the look of the Irish over the water. ’Course the commander, he was a Scotchman, but I don’t suppose there’s much to choose between them, for judging by the ones I have seen, they both have voices like music and pale skin that reddens and burns in the sun.
    Elias Powell sat me down on a rock that first day, while he went to see if it was convenient for the commander to look me over. It wasn’t above a quarter of an hour before he came back and motioned for me to follow him to a tent pitched in a clearing a little away from the rest of the camp. I had smoothed down my hair as much as I could, and brushed the mud from my skirts. Now I resolved to stand up straight and meet his gaze to show I wasn’t to be bullied or cowed by a man, no matter what his station.
    As I stooped to go through the tent flap, Elias Powell gripped my elbow again, and in a harsh whisper he said, “You mind your manners here, girl! He’ll have you flogged if you sass him, but, worse than that, you will make him think ill of my judgment, so have a care.”
    I nodded to show I understood, and then I wrenched free of his grasp and followed him in.
    The officer didn’t take any notice of us at first, so we stood there at the entrance waiting to be spoken to. He was sitting on a little stool scratching away with a quill and ink on a bit of paper set atop a polished wooden box. I could not decide if he was trying to put me in awe of him by taking no notice of me standing there, or if he was so lost in thought in his letter-writing that he had not seen us come in. I didn’t mind, though, for it gave me a chance to look him over, same as he’d be expecting to do to me. He wasn’t young by my lights—he’d see forty afore I ever saw twenty-five, but he held his years better than poor men do, and he was still a fine figure of a man—clean and carefully dressed, as if he were a-settin’ in a fine parlor instead of in a tent on a piney ridge. He was light-haired and angular, and I wondered from the strained look on his bony countenance if he had been ill or wounded. As soon as I had that thought, the officer shifted a bit on his stool, and I saw that his right arm was bent up close to his chest and that even when he moved, it did not. That surprised me, for I could not see how a man with only one good arm could command an army. I would have expected him to be sent home to his rich family, or perhaps to some sort of job back home that could be done with papers at a desk, for surely he could not ride and fight, maimed as he was. I didn’t feel sorry for him—he looked so grand and stern that pity would be an impertinence. Besides, wounds are the wages of war.
    Elias Powell shuffled his feet and made a little noise in his throat, so