CHAPTER 38

“And what’s this?” demanded Tiana’s father, the moment Driscol entered the salon of the suite where he and his family had set up residence in the Trémoulet House. Captain John Rogers waved a vigorous hand at the window. His left hand, not his right—which held a glass of whiskey rock-steady all the while. “I’d have thought you’d be out there with the rest of them, playing your part in that desperate business tonight.”

Driscol glanced at the window. There wasn’t much to be seen, since night fell early this time of year. Still, even with the window closed to fend off the winter chill, the cannonades to the south were quite audible. Naval guns, from the sound of it. Jackson had ordered Commodore Daniel Patterson to bring the schooner Carolina down the river after nightfall, to begin bombarding the British camp on the Villeré plantation, while Jackson launched his night attack.

“None of my business, that,” Driscol grunted. “When the general asked, I told him my men would be well-nigh useless in that sort of fighting.”

“The darkies not up to it, eh?” Rogers jeered. As was so often the case, the captain’s tone was half ridicule and half . . . something else. Hell-Fire Jack was a rogue, sure enough. But he was also, Driscol had come to conclude, a very intelligent and cold-blooded sort of man. The constant jests and jibes were his way of probing friends and enemies alike.

So, as he invariably did when dealing with Captain John Rogers, Driscol refused to take the bait.

“Of course not,” he responded mildly, without even a hint of irritation. “They’ve had less than a week’s training, and there’s nothing more difficult to carry off than a complicated three-pronged night attack like the one Jackson is attempting. I’ll be doing well if I can get my artillery unit ready to stand firm in broad daylight.”

“So Sharp Knife is a madman, is that what you’re saying?”

“No, actually, he’s not. His plans will all fall apart, of course. I doubt if even the emperor’s Imperial Guard could manage what Jackson is asking his army to do. He’ll have to call off the assault eventually, when it starts coming to pieces.

“But that doesn’t matter. All that matters tonight is that Jackson is responding immediately to the British landing. Whether he wins or loses this battle, his assault will stop the British from driving forward. That will buy him time to get our forces ready and our defensive positions erected.”

Without waiting for an invitation, Driscol took a seat across from the divan where Tiana was resting. She smiled at him but said nothing.

It was a very serene smile; almost astonishingly so, on such a young face. If nothing else, Tiana had inherited her self-confidence from her father. Even at the age of sixteen, she was quite capable of watching a test of wills such as the one that was taking place between her sire and her intended husband, without worrying herself over the outcome.

Intended husband. She’d made that clear, too, without saying it in so many words. Driscol still had no idea at all why she’d made the decision, but he didn’t doubt the decision itself. He certainly didn’t doubt his own reaction, once it had finally seeped into his bones. It was the most profound desire he’d ever felt for anything. As if a man drowning in darkness had suddenly found a lifeline.

Of course, when the drowning man’s name was Patrick Liam Driscol, he’d seize the lifeline in his own unique manner. A sergeant with sixteen years experience in war is not a man to do anything without considering all the angles first. Any intelligent sergeant would see it that way and, being honest, Driscol was the most intelligent sergeant he’d ever met. He was even smart enough to have gotten himself promoted to major without starting to think like an officer.

Captain John’s eyes—the same bright blue as his daughter’s—flicked back and forth from Tiana to Driscol. The half grin never left his face; somehow, he even managed to keep it in place while downing a sip of the whiskey.

“So when’s the wedding, then?” he demanded. He waved the same vigorous hand at his two sons, who lounged only a few feet away. James was leaning against the salon’s dining table, while John was sitting on one of its chairs. “I realize these two heathens won’t have pressed you on the matter, even though such is their brotherly duty. Cherokees and their stupid customs. But—!”

Rogers issued a majestic harrumph. “You and I are civilized Scotsmen, Major Driscol—well, allowing for your bastard Irish brand—and we should conduct ourselves accordingly.”

Driscol glanced at the two brothers. James and John wore that same serene Rogers smile on their faces.

There was a battle won. A campaign, rather, since there’d never been any actual conflict. Somewhere, sometime, somehow, in the months since Sam Houston had assigned James and John Rogers to serve as Driscol’s bodyguards in a battle, these two Cherokee warriors had shifted their clan allegiance to the figure of their new chief.

They were even smart enough to realize that Driscol intended to forge an entirely new kind of clan.

“You rotten bastard!” Captain John exclaimed, still with that same half-grin. “Bad enough that you intend to strip me of my beloved daughter. I can at least console myself with the thought that, sooner or later, somebody would have done so.”

He paused for a moment, and the half grin faded to a quarter grin. “But you! You intend to strip me of my slaves, too, don’t you?”

Driscol just smiled. “How could I hope to do that?” He made a dismissive gesture at the officer’s insignia he wore on his uniform. “I’m really just a sergeant, you know.”

That was nothing but the truth. A very experienced and savvy sergeant, who had no intention of letting a potential opponent know what he was planning.

Another cannonade from the naval guns actually rattled the window. Tiana’s head turned toward it. “Well, I’m glad you’re not out there tonight.”

When her head turned back, the serenity in her smile was infused with a great deal of warmth. “And I’ll be glad when this war is over.”

There was just the slightest emphasis on the word this. That, even more than the warmth in her smile, filled Driscol with love for the girl. The woman, rather. This one would make a wife.

“So will I,” he said quietly.

“What a fucking mess!” exclaimed the Tennessee militiaman angrily. The man was floundering in the cypress swamp not far from where John Ross was doing his best not to fall off the log he was trying to sidle along. That would have been hard under any circumstances, much less in the dark with guns firing everywhere.

John silently agreed with the man’s sentiment. Granted, the British soldiers they were fighting in this chaotic melee were floundering more badly still. American frontiersmen and Cherokees were somewhat accustomed to this sort of terrain, but it was completely foreign to Wellington’s veterans.

Still, the only people who seemed to be enjoying themselves were the twenty or so Choctaws who’d been brought to the fight by Captain Pierre Jugeant. For the Choctaws, this was familiar ground, and a setting in which they were as deadly as alligators. John was glad to have them here, even if relations between Cherokees and Choctaws were usually none too friendly.

A gun flash not far off drew his eyes. Was that friend or foe? It was almost impossible to tell. A large number of the casualties they were incurring were being inflicted upon men by their own side. In the dark, the uniforms worn by some of the British highlanders were hard to distinguish from the hunting shirts worn by most of Coffee’s Tennessee militiamen.

So John froze, trying, as best he could, to balance himself motionlessly on the slippery and unstable log. He could sense the same militiaman who’d issued the curse a moment before doing the same. Only, in this case, the man had both the advantage and disadvantage of standing in pure muck.

A figure moved forward in the darkness. Slowly, stealthily, John raised his pistol.

Suddenly, plaintively, the figure called out: “Are you the Ninety-third?”

Immediately, the Tennessee militiaman replied: “Of course!” Stinking wet or not, angry or not, the man was quick-witted. He even had a passable Scot accent. That wasn’t surprising since, like most American frontiersmen, he was probably only a generation—if that—removed from Scotland or the Scot settlements in Ireland.

Sighing audibly, the figure moved forward.

Within seconds, John could tell that he was one of the enemy highlanders. He was about to fire his pistol when the militiaman surged out of the water like an alligator and pressed his musket against the British soldier’s chest.

“You are my prisoner!” he cried.

John was not surprised at all by the highlander’s response. An even deeper sigh of relief.

“Well enough,” the British soldier muttered, extending his own musket butt first. “Anything to get out of this fucking mess.”

“Damn those guns!” Colonel Thornton snarled.

Another broadside from the Carolina swept a shower of grapeshot across the soldiers of the Eighty-fifth Regiment who were trying to find cover at the levee. Even in the dark, the American gunners were deadly. Thornton couldn’t see it, of course, but he was quite sure that the huge and muddy Mississippi was stained by the blood of his men. The Americans had the only gunship on the river, and the cursed thing had turned the area by the banks into a field of carnage.

He turned to one of his aides. “Find General Keane and tell him I can hold the riverbank from assault, assuming the Americans are stupid enough to launch one. But I can’t do anything to drive off that schooner. They’ve got six-pounders on that ship—two twelves, as well, I think—and all I’ve got are these useless three-pounders. I might as well be throwing rocks against that hull.”

He didn’t bother to add that he no longer dared to fire the three-pounders at all, since the American gunners would instantly target them. Nor did he bother to add that the rockets he did dare to fire at the ship—he’d fired plenty of those—were as useless as the cannons.

“Might as well be throwing rocks,” he growled again, “except the rocks might actually hit the bloody thing.” Gloomily, he watched another Congreve skitter somewhere across the Mississippi. It made a fine hissing sound when it splashed into the water. Many, many, many yards away from the Carolina. Perhaps an American fish had been slain.

The aide scrambled off, keeping as low as he could.

“What a bloody mess,” Thornton snarled.

The marines and artillerymen who’d been moving forward, down the high road alongside the river, recoiled from heavy fire coming from the British lines. Several of them were hit, so the marines began falling back quickly. The artillerymen, encumbered by the awkward weight of their guns, were slower in doing so.

Too slow. A British contingent charged out of the darkness, rushing to capture the guns.

General Jackson and his staff rode forward, through a hail of bullets. “Save the guns, boys!” Jackson shrilled at the marines. “Save the guns!”

The general made for the imperiled guns himself, even dismounting to help haul them away. Rallied by the sight, the marines followed. So did a company of the Seventh Infantry. Between them, they were able to level enough fire to hold off the British long enough for the guns to be extracted.

“What a frightful mess,” Major Reid hissed. Inadvertently, he spoke loudly enough for the general to hear him.

But Jackson took no offense. The general just gave him a savage grin, before ducking to evade another volley of British fire.

“To the contrary, Major!” Jackson cried out when he straightened. “We’re learning to bow properly in high society.”

But once the guns were safe, even Jackson shook his head. “I should probably call it off, I think.” His tone made it clear, however, what he thought of the idea.

Reid agreed wholeheartedly. Jackson’s energy and combativeness were an enormous asset to the United States, but they always carried the risk of overreaching. The major had entertained his doubts from the beginning that Jackson’s complicated battle plan would work—and, sure enough, it had frayed badly and quickly. Still, they’d bloodied the British this night, and Reid suspected that would be enough to cause the enemy to postpone any further advance. At least for the moment.

In the end, that was really all that mattered. Not even Jackson thought that his pieced-together army was capable of defeating British regulars on an open field of battle. He’d been willing to gamble on this attack because he was fighting at night, and still facing only a portion of the enemy’s forces. But the fundamental goal remained what it had always been: create a strong defensive position and force the British to attack the Americans in a frontal assault, where they couldn’t maneuver on the flanks. It was the British who were on the offensive, after all. Jackson had only to hold New Orleans, and he’d win.

“Yes, sir. I’m thinking we’ve gained enough time tonight to turn the Rodriguez Canal into something of a fortress.”

Jackson nodded. “I do believe you’re right. Send word to the men to start withdrawing from the field.”

John Ross had always thought bayonets were a flashy but fundamentally silly weapon. Sticking a skinny foot-and-a-half-long knife on the end of a heavy and clumsy musket seemed a preposterous way to design a spear. Nothing at all like the graceful weapons favored by the Indian tribes.

That night, groping his way through the dark woods of the cypress swamp, he stumbled into another highlander from the Ninety-third Regiment, and the man quickly showed the Cherokee captain the error of his thinking.

John simply hadn’t taken into account the fact that such men would be trained to use a bayonet properly. The musket might be clumsy and heavy, but the butt stroke the highlander delivered to start the fray was all the more powerful because of it. John was sent sprawling in the muck, his left arm badly bruised and paralyzed. A moment later, his right arm just beneath the shoulder was ripped open by the bayonet.

He would have died then, except the swampy muck and the darkness made the highlander miss his next thrust. He speared a half-rotted log instead of John, and then made the mistake of trying to pry the bayonet loose. That gave John the time to scramble back to his feet and fire a shot from his pistol at point-blank range.

The pistol misfired.

John’s dowsing in the swamp had soaked the powder in the flashpan. But at close range a pistol made a decent enough club, especially when wielded by a man who was half terrified and half enraged. Wounded arm or not, he kept clubbing the highlander until the man collapsed—whether dead or simply unconscious, John had no way of knowing.

Under the circumstances, the difference was probably moot. The man’s head slid beneath the water, and by the time John could catch his breath and haul the highlander onto what passed for dry ground in the cypress, the man had probably drowned, even if his skull hadn’t been shattered. There was no way to tell.

Between John’s exhaustion, confusion, and the urgent need to bind up the flesh wound before he lost too much blood, he gave no thought at all to examining his enemy. By the time he finished dressing the wound, his only purpose was to get back to his own lines.

Wherever they were. In the course of the fighting, John had gotten completely lost and separated from the Cherokees and Tennesseans he’d been fighting alongside. So, he just made his best guess and started slogging through the swamp. He was worried that he might accidentally be shot by one of his own, but he was a lot more concerned about the effect of the blood loss. Or perhaps it was simply the cumulative effect of the most terrifying night in John’s life. Either way, he felt as if he might lapse unconscious any moment.

And if he did, in that muck, he would likely drown.

Eventually he heard some noises up ahead. He paused, trying to gauge the sound. Voices, he thought, and moved forward as silently as he could.

After a few yards, he recognized the voices. The words, if not the speakers.

Cherokees. He felt more relieved that he ever had in his life, and managed to croak out a few words in Cherokee himself.

He finally collapsed, then. When he came back to full consciousness, he found himself being levered powerfully forward by a man who had John’s left arm over a thick shoulder, and was carrying at least half of Ross’s weight.

Major Ridge, he realized. He was even stronger than John had imagined.

“Thank you,” he murmured. His badly bruised left arm was hurting a great deal now, from the awkward position more than anything else. But John issued no complaint. Ridge was propelling him out of that wretched cypress swamp as surely and certainly as a buffalo. An aching arm was a small price to pay for that blessing.

John heard Ridge chuckle. “Next time you fight an alligator,” he said, “try to keep your arm out of its maw. We don’t have that many promising young diplomats that we can afford to have them eaten.”

“Was a highlander,” John croaked.

“Scotsman, alligator—what’s the difference?”

“That’s it, then,” Driscol said. The sound of the cannonades had faded away and finally ceased.

“Did we win or lose?” Tiana asked.

“We won. Or it was a draw, more likely, which amounts to the same thing under the circumstances. If we’d lost, you’d still be hearing the sound of fighting. Jackson would muster a delaying action for every mile the British had to cross to get to New Orleans.”

Captain John grunted. “To allow the citizens time to evacuate.”

Driscol shook his head. “No, to allow the men he left behind time to set fires, and burn the whole city. Whatever else, Jackson will not allow the British to take New Orleans. A pile of smoldering ruins, perhaps, but not the city.”

For once, the jeering grin vanished from the face of Tiana’s father. “Good God. Do you really think he’s that cold-blooded?”

Driscol smiled thinly. “Oh, I’m positive. The instructions he gave me were quite precise.”