Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase (17 page)

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Authors: David Nevin

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical

BOOK: Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase
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“Order! Order! Order!” the chair screamed.
The excitement inside infected the rotunda. Men and women were standing, on benches, on boxes, waving their arms and shouting. They surged around the entrances, blocking her view. She was in a fury; she pushed and yelled—
Someone burst from the floor, member or clerk, she didn’t know, and bellowed, “It’s busting wide open!”
“Danny …” Dimly she heard the voice.
“
Danny!”
She whirled. Carl sagged on the bench, both hands pressed to his chest, a desperate look in his eyes, a look she recognized with sheer horror as that of a wounded animal.
“Carl! For God’s sake!” She got an arm around him just as his head rolled back and he made a terrible choking noise. He sagged against her and started to fall forward. He was more than twice her weight, and as he tumbled to the stone floor the best she could do was cradle his head.
She screamed for someone to fetch that doctor from the floor. She tore open his cravat, buttons flying from his linen shirt. He panted, his eyelids fluttered, and a long, desperate moan burst from his lips.
“God, it hurts, it hurts!” he gasped.
“Where is that damned doctor?” Her scream was drowned in the tumult. She stroked his cheek. “Carl, Carl baby, don’t, don’t …” But she couldn’t say it.
Dimly she heard the roll call going on and on; and then, as Carl Mobry gasped and choked and his breathing slowed, she heard a roar.
“Jefferson wins!” someone shouted. “Jefferson is president!”
The rotunda rang with cheers. “Jefferson! Jefferson! Jefferson!”
The noise made sort of a shield that wrapped her in her horror like a shroud as she watched her husband die. She put her head on his massive chest and sobbed, and the celebration roared on and on all around her.
MONTPELIER, VIRGINIA, LATE MARCH 1801
Anchored to Montpelier by the old gentleman’s stubborn grip on life, though he was rarely conscious, the Madisons awaited news of the vote with increasing anxiety. The relief when word came was like a dam breaking. Ecstatic letters from Albert Gallatin and Sam Smith, more measured remarks from Tom, rapt accounts in half a dozen friendly papers—and a shocking letter from Danny.
Now, a month later, opening another letter from Danny, Dolley felt still the sudden shock of the last: Carl dying at the very moment of their success. How life can change, turn upside down in an instant, dreams canceled, demands and responsibilities and pressures crashing around you, and not a soul to really help. She looked at Jimmy, who was reading a report forwarded from the State Department. They were in their bedroom, he lying on the big bed, pillow doubled under his head. It was nearly three in the afternoon. Dinner had been served at two. She was in her chemise, folded into a love seat with a new novel from Paris. Jimmy was older than she and sometimes he looked dangerously weary. She didn’t want to think of life without him and decided she must take better care of him … .
By now they had had a dozen reports on the inauguration from newspapers and letters. Dolley had repeatedly to stifle something rather too much like anger; they should have been there. It was a great national pageant, and they had earned the right to be part of it. But Jimmy wouldn’t hear of leaving his father to die alone.
Sighing, she settled deeper into the love seat and opened
Danny’s letter. But in a minute she looked up. “Listen to this, Jimmy. She’s going to keep the business!”
“But not run it herself?”
“Says that’s what she intends.”
“Can she do that?”
“She’s clever, quick, smart as can be. And Carl taught her all about it.”
“Yes, but a woman alone …”
“Well, some women have businesses. A few. And Danny is strong.”
“She remarries; her husband will own it.”
“Maybe she won’t remarry.”
“Well, she’ll have lots of opportunities. She’s a very attractive woman.”
She glanced at her husband, a little surprised. He rarely seemed to notice women, but of course he did; all men did.
“Lots of detail on the inaugural; you’ll want to read this. Hah! Says we were sorely *missed—well, I should hope so!”
She turned over a page. “Why,” she said, “Mr. Adams wasn’t there. He refused? What—oh, here it is. Seems the Adamses packed everything in a wagon, called their carriage at four on the morning of the inauguration, and drove away. What was he thinking of? Isn’t the outgoing president supposed to be there?”
Jimmy had put down the report. “It is strange. I don’t suppose there’s any rule, but you’d think …” His voice trailed off. “Bad form, really,” he said in another moment. “He owed Tom his presence, and he owed it to the image of orderly transition. But you know, poor old devil, it tells you how hard this loss really did hit him. You remember he was always having his feelings hurt, slipping off into depression, agonizing over things, some new fuss cropping up regularly. I suppose he couldn’t see this loss as just one of those things; maybe nobody could. But on the evidence of this breach of etiquette, I’d say he’s going off a wounded main …”
“Must have hurt Tom too,” she said. “They’re the oldest of friends, aren’t they?”
“From the beginning. From the time I was still learning my letters. Tom is hoping to smooth things over, but I’ll wager he’s not so sanguine after this.” He sighed and added, “Though given the way Mr. Adams packed the courts before he left office, I don’t know why I’m wasting sympathy on him.”
It had been the small act of a desperate man terrified of a future under a new theory of government. President Adams had created dozens of new judges, Federalists all, in a series of midnight appointments in literally the last hours of his administration, saddling the new administration with hostile judges sure to fight the new government’s every move. And then he’d packed his bag and gone off to Braintree in Boston’s shadow, leaving his one-time friends to deal with the tangled mess of appointments he had created.
Jimmy returned to his report and she resumed reading, but in a moment she interrupted again. “Listen to this! Danny says she saw Aaron after he was sworn in as vice president, and he seemed all out of sorts. Said Tom had cut him dead. Said he went to offer congratulations and pledge he’d do all he could to make the administration successful and so forth and so on, and Tom barely touched his hand, gave him a faint smile, and turned instantly to someone else. She says Aaron was quite dismayed. Says—my, this is odd, too—she had a momentary sense of a child about to cry and then Aaron was his old self, offering her condolences even as he managed to imply that he would be more than willing to help assuage her pain.”
“Really? She says that?”
She nodded. “Aaron being Aaron, you know. But Tom cutting him—”
“Well, of course. Burr destroyed himself with that little trick.”
“Oh, Jimmy—”
“What? He can’t be trusted, that’s all. He’s self-focused to the core. Sacrifice his friends, his country, everything to his own selfish hopes. You can’t trust such a man.”
That was Aaron’s great flaw, all right, but she thought Jimmy was making much of it and said so.
“Oh, do you!” He leaped off the bed, standing with legs spread, staring at her with startling anger. She was amazed.
“He’s a scoundrel. Sent that damned oaf to trick me, gambling that no one else would see the danger in time to block the tie. All purposeful, you know. And then, with the tie, he refuses to step back, he tries to steal the presidency of the United States! As if it has no more significance than the presidency of some whist club. Nobody voted for Aaron Burr for president, nobody! But he tried to steal it.”
“Yes, but—”
“Dolley, damn it, there aren’t any buts!”
She thought she’d better not let this get out of hand. With more asperity than she felt, she snapped, “Mr. Madison, don’t you yell and curse at me!”
“I didn’t curse at you.”
“You said damn.”
“I didn’t say damn you. I said damn it, the whole miserable imbroglio that cost us such agony. Look, what was the opposition saying all along—that the full practice of democracy must end in mobs and violence, that the common man can’t control himself. And what happens? We win and we can’t control ourselves. Before we can even take office, one of our own tries to steal it all. Good God! Must have seemed we were proving their nastiest point. Now the public will be watching us twice as closely so we’ll have to be twice as careful.”
“Really, Jimmy.”
“Really, my foot! Aaron Burr ruined himself with that action. He proved my father right. High levels of any calling demand force of character, and Mr. Burr proved he lacks that. He might as well be dead so far as this administration is concerned. No one will trust him. He’s finished before he starts.”
Poor Aaron. Jimmy was right, she was sure, both to the justice and to the wisdom of keeping the new vice president
at arm’s length. She wouldn’t trust him herself on anything that mattered. But it was sad. He was a man of charm, of striking intellect, of real ability, all fatally flawed by self-focus. She could hear him making his subtle approach to Danny, self-serving to the end, Aaron being Aaron. She smiled. He was an old friend and he’d been a very good friend when she’d needed one. Jimmy and Tom might write him off, but she knew she wouldn’t.
NORTH OF THE OHIO, APRIL 1801
Capt. Meriwether Lewis, U.S. Regular Army, First U.S. Infantry, a tall, rangy man with heavy wrists and big fists, on duty now as regimental paymaster commanding a squad of five men and an iron-fisted sergeant, a sack of banknotes lashed to a separate pack horse—pay for who knew how many soldiers scattered at their lonely forts through the vast forests north of the Ohio—rode along a lightly defined trail feeling supremely pleased with himself and his duty and life itself. It was April and spring had come to the Ohio woods. Tall hardwoods, oak and elm, ash, and here and there a shagbark hickory, were dusted with green fuzz that made them look new and innocent and somehow pure. The clean odor of earth still damp from snowmelt combined with that of new grass. Deep in the forest floor he saw flashes of color, first wildflowers, and he could hear woodpeckers boring holes from which fresh sap would dribble to catch the nosee-ums soon to appear.
It seemed to Captain Lewis that he was born to ramble. Ma wanted him back to run the plantation and maybe he’d go someday, but he had many a mile of trail to cover first,
many a far-off place to see. Nowhere in the world, so it seemed to him, was he more at home than on the trail, in unmarked forest, sign of game wherever you looked if you knew how to look, long satisfying days as the sun lowered, then a rude camp, beans and bacon in a pot over a fire kept low so as not to signal everyone in creation you were there, sourdough browning in a skillet, coffee heavy with sugar in a tin cup, and then a pipe, take the first sentry rotation yourself and then roll in a blanket to sleep dreamless sleep. Maybe someday he’d go back to the plantation, but not today and not tomorrow.
He rode about fifty yards ahead of his men, beyond their tiresome badinage but within easy hailing distance, aware of the gentle rhythmic sound of hoofs on damp soil. Presently they came to a settlement, eight or ten houses and a store with a barn and a corral alongside.
He drew up by a community well with a horse trough. “Get a drink and water the horses, but keep the boys together. We’ll be moving right on.”
“Yes, sir.”
He headed for the store, noting a heavy man sprawled on a bench, nose crooked on his face. A horse was tied to a post and two or three others were hitched to the top rail of the corral. The near horse, a roan mare, stood with right rear hoof turned up on the toe, weight cast on her other side. Something odd there.
“Loose shoe, I think,” he said, nodding toward the horse.
The fellow looked at him. “That so? ’Taint mine.” There was lazy insolence in his voice.
Lewis went inside. The storekeeper was a round little man with small eyes. He wore a leather apron.
“Well,” he said, “rider through here yesterday; he said that wretch Jefferson done been inaugurated. Reckon the country’ll go to hell now.”
“I don’t think so,” Lewis said. “And I wouldn’t call Mr. Jefferson a wretch.” He could feel his heat rising.
“Well, hell,” the storekeeper said, “my own personal view, he’s about as fine as they come and it’s high time some new
blood turns the country around. But you’re the first army officer I ever met who thinks like I do.”
Lewis bought a half-pound of chocolate, paying more than he liked, broke it in pieces on the well cover, and passed it out to his men. Chocolate was some treat on the trail. The man with the crooked nose was gone and so were the horses.
“Which way did they go?”
“Way we come, sir,” the sergeant said, pointing. His name was Rollo and he’d been with General Wayne at Fallen Timbers and he was nobody’s fool. “I had my eye on ’em, but they went opposite to us.”
“Good.”
Riding along at their easy pace, trot a mile, walk a half mile, pause for water at every stream, he thought about the storekeeper. Damned if it wasn’t true, army officers seemed Federalist to a man, especially the new ones coming in over the last two or three years when Mr. Adams was packing the army—
There! Fresh hoofprints appeared on soft dirt. He reined up. Yes, cut in from the left, way he would have gone if he’d wanted to circle the town. He followed along, studying the sign. Three horses—no, four. One favoring the right rear hoof. Within a half mile the loose shoe was evident, and in another half mile he came on the shoe itself. He glanced back. Sergeant Rollo was studying the sign, bent over in his saddle.
At a stream Lewis swung down.
“Sergeant, you and Jenkins come with me. Rest of you stand by here. Tie that pay-sack horse to a tree—I don’t want him straying. Full alert, pieces primed—let yourself be surprised and you’ll answer to me.”
Rollo and Jenkins following, they tramped a mile in silence, climbed a hogback, came down its far side step by careful step, and saw them where he’d expected to find them, positioned for ambush in an old windfall, trees tangled and graying.
His men shook powder in their pans as Lewis drew his heavy pistol. He checked flint and priming. They were quite
close when the man with the crooked nose sensed them and turned.
“Lay down your pieces slow and easy,” Lewis said, voice brassy and loud. “Now, boys, you waiting for someone?”
“Why, no, Cap’n, no we wasn’t. Just resting a bit. See, we’re going on right now—”
“You lying son of a bitch, you were dreaming on robbing the U.S. Army, and I’m here to show you that ain’t near as easy as you had it figured.”
“No, that ain’t it at all—”
“Jenkins, wrap their pieces around that tree.”
Jenkins seized each rifle by the muzzle and swung it against a young oak. He dropped the bent barrels in a clattering heap.
“Sergeant, give this ugly bastard a kick in the balls; I want him to remember us.”
The fellow cupped his hands over his groin and Rollo stepped in with an overhand smash that broke his nose with a sound like kicking a melon, and blood sheeted down his shirtfront. Rollo hit him twice low in the gut and then smashed the nose again. The bastard screamed and fell, and Rollo put two solid boots to his ribs before Lewis called him off.
“I want him alive, Sergeant.”
Rollo laughed. “He’ll think about us every time he breathes for a good six months.”
So
, Lewis thought, riding on, the men strung out behind him, couple of hours to go before camp,
Mr. Jefferson is president. Imagine that
. Lewis’s plantation was two miles from Monticello and Mr. Jefferson bought all his hams from Ma’s smokehouse and Lewis had lavished a case of hero worship on Jefferson for just about all his life. At least ever since his own daddy died in the Revolution, and he was only a tad then.
After a while Ma had married Captain Marks and they’d gone off to a place he had in the Carolina wilderness, and
Merry had spent most all his time in the woods, packing a rifle longer than he was, cornmeal in a sack and a piece of sowbelly, old skillet dangling from his shoulder bag, living off the land. But the plantation was his by right of being firstborn, and when he was thirteen he decided he was man enough to run it so he came home and did a right creditable job, the guidance his uncles gave him less necessary year by year.
He would go visit Monticello whenever Mr. Jefferson was home, and my, the things he learned about scientific methods and what made the weather act like it did and why tobacco wore out the land and how to use the plow with the curved moldboard Mr. Jefferson had invented and how an animal’s biology wasn’t all that different from our own and what books an educated man should know. Loaned him books right out of his own huge library too.
Nor was it all one way. Mr. Jefferson had never been west of the Blue Ridge, and he listened respectfully when Merry talked about tracking critters through untouched woods and dressing out a pelt for the ants to clean and how to tell the plants apart and the new plants he’d found and reading what Mr. William Bartram’s wonderful new book said of his travels in the forest and going him one better, finding a plant that it looked like even Mr. Bartram, the great naturalist, didn’t know about. And one day Mr. Jefferson said with a note of wonder in his voice, Why, boy, you are a first-class naturalist, self-taught and that’s the best way. I believe you can match anyone in America.
Well—he was some proud!
And that’s why he’d worked up his nerve and asked Mr. Jefferson—
But that brought Mary Beth Slaney to mind. He’d been nineteen then and Mary Beth eighteen, hair the color of honey, freckles all over the place, changeable eyes going green to gray, and you could never tell what she would say in that low voice that was like a fiddle when it was crying. He’d been over that night a hundred times, a thousand times. She’d been sitting on the steps of the turnstile that led to the
orchard and he’d been standing, restless as always, and the quarter moon had cast just enough light to see the intensity of her expression … .
He’d been rattling along—she’d always said she loved to listen to him—and he’d been telling her the wonderful news he’d heard. That Mr. Jefferson, him secretary of state then way up yonder in Philadelphia, this was 1793, Mr. Jefferson wanted to send an expedition for science and whatall out into the wild unknown Far West, on to the Stony Mountains said to be as high as the Blue Ridge—and the Blue Ridge was four thousand feet in places, so he’d been told—on past the Stony Mountains and right on to the salty shores of the Pacific Ocean!
Her smile was gone; he could feel her drawing away … .
“And you want to go along,” she said.
Her voice was small and distant, he remembered now; then he’d scarcely noticed.
“More than that—lots more. I intend to
command
it.”
At which she laughed: Loud, musical laughter, bright as a bell, infuriating as a lash across his shoulders.
“Oh, Merry, sweet Merry, you can’t go commanding things. You’re just nineteen; no one would—”
“Why in tarnation not?” He was choking on anger. “I know the woods good as any man. I know plants and trails and tracking and the way the animals do. He said so himself!”
“Yes, but—”
“And I run the plantation and folks mind what I say. I reckon I could lead men; they’d do what I say or get a fist in the mouth. And the Indians out there, I’ve dealt with Indians, got along all right, I reckon I could handle—”
Abruptly his anger fled. “Oh, Mary Beth, don’t you see? Across a whole
continent
! Think of it—going where ain’t nobody but Indians gone and not many of them, opening hundreds of miles, maybe thousands of miles nobody knows a thing about. Why, it would be—”
She was crying. He stopped and swallowed, staring at her. “What—what’s the matter?”
Then she was off the stile and in his arms. At once he was wildly excited and so was she, her mouth open and lifted to his, arms locked around his neck, her body thrust hard against his, her sweet breath warm on his face, and he ready to burst. “God, I want you, Merry. Don’t talk so. It frightens me bad. Let’s get married. I want you—I wake up in the night wanting you. I dream you’re inside me—”
She laughed, wild note in the still night. “Listen to me, way I’m talking. Ma would kill me. But it’s true. Oh, Merry darling, let’s get married and make love and have wonderful children and teach them all you know—”
But he couldn’t imagine giving up the great dream, and they walked back in silence; didn’t even speak when they, reached her house and she walked steadily up the path to the door and she never looked back once.
Next day he wrote Mr. Jefferson asking for the command. There was no answer. Much later he learned that Mr. Jefferson had chosen some Frenchman, scientist of some sort; and then it turned out the Frenchman was a foreign agent sent here to subvert the government or somesuch and it all was canceled. Not another word about going to the Pacific.
He rode along now, thinking of Mary Beth Slaney. What would it have been like? He’d joined the army the next year, and he was happy. Ma wanted him to come back. Captain Marks had died and she’d come back from Carolina, but he had a sight of rambling yet to do. He’d decided it was a Meriwether trait, from Ma’s side of the family. That’s what she got for giving him the family name; it meant he was predestined for rambling.
But even today he could feel Mary Beth Slaney’s breath sweet on his face. Still, if he’d laid her on the moss and taken her right then, she achingly ready and willing, he’d have been lost. He’d be on the plantation, locked in place, his rambling hunger stifled. Yes, and he’d be mounting Mary Beth most every night, and he’d be a man of importance in the county with a significant plantation and a family coming on. He was happier now, riding the trail, rambling, sleeping on the ground. He sighed. Mary Beth had loved him since he
was thirteen; he could see that now. Lately he’d found himself thinking of having a woman for more than her body, though he liked that part of it too, but a woman for her company, for the way she saw things, for the empty place in his soul or his heart or wherever such ideas might lodge … .
He shook his head and at last gave rein to the thought that had been in his mind for hours. As soon as it was clear Mr. Jefferson would run for president, Lewis had thought, if he’s elected, he’ll have the power to
order
an expedition to the Stony Mountains and on to saltwater. And now he was elected … .

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