Long Knife Read online

  George stood for a moment enjoying the incredulous expressions on the faces of the young officers, gentlemen, and ladies, then said to Sanders:

  “Tell ’em they may continue their dancing, but to remember that they now dance under the flag of Virginia, not England.” While Sanders announced this in his clumsy French, George sent a few of the half-clad, mud-smeared frontiersmen through the room to collect swords and pistols, then turned to go out. But a handsome dark-eyed man, who had been standing in the company of two beautiful women, suddenly left them and came forward.

  “Sir,” he said in correct but strained English, “several of us here are Spanish citizens from St. Louis, and we are merely guests here of the French. Are we to be detained?”

  George looked at the elegant little man, then said: “If you’ll be patient, I’ll attend to your situation. For the moment I must advise you and all the others not to stir from this house, for your safety.”

  George watched, over the man’s shoulder, the younger of the two women who were with him, and felt a bittersweet pang in his breast. She was dark-eyed, oval-faced, transfixed by terror, but beautiful. …

  By James Alexander Thom

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  PANTHER IN THE SKY

  LONG KNIFE

  FOLLOW THE RIVER

  FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA

  STAYING OUT OF HELL

  THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MAN

  THE RED HEART

  SIGN-TALKER

  WARRIOR WOMAN (with Dark Rain Thom)

  SAINT PATRICK’S BATTALION

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: 1809

  Chapter 1 • Clark’s Point, Indiana Territory—1809

  PART TWO: 1777–1780

  Chapter 2 • Caroline County, Virginia—November 1777

  Chapter 3 • Williamsburg, Virginia—December 1777

  Chapter 4 • Williamsburg, Virginia—January 1778

  Chapter 5 • On the Mississippi River—May 1778

  Chapter 6 • Pittsburgh—May 1778

  Chapter 7 • On the Ohio River—May 1778

  Chapter 8 • On the Falls of the Ohio River—June 1778

  Chapter 9 • Detroit—June 1778

  Chapter 10 • Corn Island—June 1778

  Chapter 11 • Into the Illinois Country—June 1778

  Chapter 12 • Kaskaskia, Illinois Country—July 4, 1778

  Chapter 13 • Kaskaskia, Illinois Country—July 4, 1778

  Chapter 14 • Kaskaskia, Illinois Country—July 8, 1778

  Chapter 15 • St. Louis, Upper Louisiana Territory— August 1778

  Chapter 16 • Cahokia, Illinois Country—August 1778

  Chapter 17 • St. Louis, Upper Louisiana Territory— August 1778

  Chapter 18 • Detroit—August 1778

  Chapter 19 • Cahokia, Illinois Country—August 1778

  Chapter 20 • St. Louis, Upper Louisiana Territory— September 1778

  Chapter 21 • Detroit—October 7, 1778

  Chapter 22 • Vincennes, Wabash Valley— December 17, 1778

  Chapter 23 • Kaskaskia, Illinois Country— January 15, 1779

  Chapter 24 • Kaskaskia, Illinois Country— February 3, 1779

  Chapter 25 • Vincennes, Wabash Valley— February 23, 1779

  Chapter 26 • Vincennes, Wabash Valley— February 26, 1779

  Chapter 27 • Kaskaskia, Illinois Country—April 1779

  Chapter 28 • Kaskaskia, Illinois Country—May 1779

  Chapter 29 • St. Louis, Upper Louisiana Territory— September 5, 1779

  Chapter 30 • Louisville, Kentucky—September 1779

  Chapter 31 • St. Louis, Upper Louisiana Territory— May 25, 1780

  Chapter 32 • Cahokia, Illinois Country—May 29, 1780

  Chapter 33 • Ohio Valley—June 14, 1780

  Chapter 34 • Ohio Valley—July 25, 1780

  Chapter 35 • Miami River Valley—August 2, 1780

  Chapter 36 • St. Louis, Upper Louisiana Territory— September 20, 1780

  PART THREE: 1812–1818

  Chapter 37 • Locust Grove, Kentucky—1812

  Chapter 38 • Locust Grove, Kentucky— February 13, 1818

  EPILOGUE I: Malaga, Spain—1821

  EPILOGUE II: Richmond, Virginia—1913491

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  PART ONE

  1809

  1

  CLARK’S POINT, INDIANA TERRITORY

  1809

  THE OLD GENERAL FELT IT COMING AT SUNSET ON THAT FINE COOL evening, while he sat on the porch of his log house on the bluff overlooking the Ohio: a greater melancholy than any he had faced in the thirty years of his decline.

  He set his jaw and drew himself up straight in his hickory chair. This awesome, poignant mood had tried to overpower him on many such evenings of late, and he feared it, and wished he knew how to brace his spirit against it. It wasn’t death he feared; he had been impatient for that for years. No, it was this eternity of days passing by, each one finding him more helpless to set things right.

  The wild beauty of this place seemed to make it worse than it had been when he lived at Mulberry Hill across the river. Now melancholy seemed to come up the hill through the sighing treetops on the breeze from the broad river. It was in the rippling grass in the clearing and in the deep rushing of the Falls of the Ohio far below. It was in the sight of the sun going down at the end of another summer. Still another summer gone by, with all those injustices still unresolved.

  The sunlight blazed directly into his eyes and flashed up at him from the surface of the river, but he did not shield his eyes or turn away. Here on this high place, it had become his habit to stare down the evening sun.

  On the brassy glare of the river, above the falls, alongside the Kentucky bank, lay the dark oblong silhouette of Corn Island. There, he thought. Right there on that island it all started, in 1778. A conquest like none the world ever saw. Half a million square miles of domain, taken by a hundred and seventy starving woodsmen, who had the audacity to deem ourselves an army. The memory made him sit straighter; his eyes grew moist and a proud smile played on his mouth. But then, as always, followed the bitterness, and with the bitterness that old undeniable craving. Indeed, he thought. I have not touched any this long afternoon. It’s time.

  With his cane he whacked three times on the wall. A Negro appeared in the doorway, lean, grizzled, clad in dingy white cotton. “You call for me, General?”

  “Aye, Cupid. First, fetch me a jug of rum out here. Then, if you’d be so kind, sir, lay up by the hearth enough wood for the night. Make it the walnut. I like the smell o’ that. I feel in my bones, Cupid, this is going to be our first real chilling night of the season.”

  “I do believe it is, sir.”

  The general shivered. It seemed he had never once been warm enough since that winter campaign in ’79. “Then, if you’ll kindly poke the fire up good for me, and light a lamp on the table adjacent, then I should say you’d set me up well enough for a tolerable night.”

  The old black man smiled. “You going to read, then?” Illiterate, he was perennially fascinated by the sight of the general looking at one thing, a book, for hours at a time.

  “Maybe. But I have correspondence needs doing. If the rum doesn’t take me first …” I shouldn’t have said that, he thought; it isn’t seemly. But, by my eyes, if only they was somebody to whom you could say whatever was in your thoughts … some kinds of things you can say to a nephew, some to a niece, and some to an Indian, and some to your old comrades when they come around, but if you have no mate, there’s some things as just have to go unsaid …

  The ser
vant was poised with his weight on one leg, not sure whether he was dismissed; the general seemed primed to say more. His dark blue eyes were squinting through the sun and his mouth was open, as if he had not finished out his remarks.

  I wonder if old Cupid could understand my discontent anyhow, the general was thinking. How would a slave take it to be told that his lot is happier than his master’s? But no. You don’t complain to people. Least of all to a servant. He had always believed it was the obligation of a gentleman never to complain, always to encourage, no matter how bleak the prospects might be. “If you’d bring me that rum?” he said instead.

  The brick sun now sat on a purple horizon. Beyond the village of Louisville on the river’s far shore, the fields and forests of Kentucky had deepened to lilac, the westerly contours flushed red-gold. That a world which looked so like a paradise could be so full of injustices was a major cause of his melancholy.

  Before the stroke it had not been so bad. In those days when he could still move around, still mount a horse, still go hunting and fowling with his nephews, the Croghan boys, still dig for answers in the mysterious Indian mounds; in those days when John Audubon would come and stay and ask particulars about this bird or that bird in the region; in short, until his body had betrayed him and made him a prisoner of his house and porch, it had been possible to put that wretched business out of his mind for days at a time. In the woods, on the trails, on the river, with hearty companions at his side and gun on his arm, the neglect and stupidity of an ungrateful country didn’t matter. But when he could only hobble about on a cane and hurt in every bone socket and sit wrapped in a cloak of retrospection, then the past had a way of growing bigger than the present and he could think only of the way things should have been.

  On the river below, a convoy of four flatboats was making for the channel of navigable rapids past the falls, seeking apparently to make a run for it in the remaining light. The calls of the sweepmen rose up faintly from the valley, the words unintelligible but their anxiety audible in the turned-up ends of their calls.

  Westward they go, day after day, the old general thought. To all that land out there.

  All that land out there. That we the Clarks have given them.

  William and me.

  He thought, as he did so often these days, of his famed youngest brother, William. Now there is a man for you! Got the glory he deserves, he did. And has been as good to me as all the fates has been bad. We ought to have been the two richest men west of the Alleghenies, him and me. But any dollar I make already belongs to the creditors, and those bloodsuckers do take it. And then William, he makes it up on my behalf. Selling off land to pay debts and suits … Riding about making endorsements and promises … Petitioning for me in Richmond and at Congress …

  The thought of his brother’s devotion gave the general a bittersweet pain in his breast, and brought the melancholy a little closer. It was better to think of William in terms of his great triumph than in terms of that eternal dreary business of the debts.

  The servant brought a tray with an uncorked jug of rum, two drinking glasses, and a carafe of spring water on it. He placed it on a bench along the hewn-log wall, and poured the amber rum three fourths of the way to the top of one glass, as the general liked it. As had become their custom, he then poured a shot for his own evening indulgence into the second glass.

  “Here’s to William,” said the general, raising the glass to the level of the setting sun. “I took the frontier to the Mississippi and then he carried it on to the blue Pacific. Here’s to William, I say.” With a breathy slurp he drained the contents.

  “To William, sir,” said the Negro, to whom this toast was by now familiar. Swallowing the rum with a shudder, he turned and went wobbly-legged down off the porch toward the woodpile which lay neatly corded between two tree stumps in the clearing. The general watched him and chuckled. Old Cupid couldn’t handle more than one shot.

  The four flatboats were slipping fast in a single file down through the channel now in a glory of sun-reddened water, and General Clark watched them go and smacked his lips and sighed and felt the beloved comfort of the liquor rise to his head and pursue the rheumatic ache outward through all his limbs. He pulled the old deerskin lap robe closer around his waist and began to feel quite cozy. Perhaps this might be a tolerable evening after all. Wincing from a painful shoulder, he tipped another measure of rum from the heavy jug into the glass and then held the glass on his lap and watched the boats. He remembered his own little convoy of boats setting out down the same main channel under the ominous eclipse of the sun, in ’78, full of heroes-to-be, going against the forts at Cahokia and Kaskaskia and Vincennes and, he had hoped, north to the British stronghold at Detroit. Detroit, he thought, The one conquest I wanted more than anything.

  He remembered, too, the boat of the Lewis and Clark expedition setting out down that same waterway, just six years ago, in 1803. And he remembered William returning from the Pacific in 1806. He could see him as clear as yesterday: leathery, serene, the look of infinity in his eyes, full of such descriptions of spaces and mountains as would make your heart race.

  This is indeed a place of brave beginnings, the general thought, sipping more slowly now.

  But of endings, too.

  The Negro staggered up the porch steps and went into the house with his arms crooked under a load of logs. Then he emerged and descended into the yard again to go for more.

  The general watched his thin form in its faded homespun move like a ghost on a backdrop of dusky trees.

  The topmost arc of that brick-colored sun now slid from view into the western forest and the woods nearby opened up with the quizzical peeps of countless tree frogs. Somewhere nearby a screech owl called once and then was still. Wingbeats and twitters rushed past the end of the cabin behind General Clark as a flock of martins sailed through the clearing and down toward the river.

  The western sky now retained a tinge of rose. An errant draft of evening air whirled a whiff of wood smoke to the general from his own chimney. The servant, crooning low to himself, clumped heavy-laden across the porch and into the house once more, came out to see if his master needed anything, said his goodbye, and went singing down the hill to his shack. His voice faded into the far drumming of the Falls and now General Clark was alone on Clark’s Point, commanding the twilight.

  He sat there drinking until stars appeared in the southeast over Kentucky, sat imbibing slowly and steadily in solitary decorum, reviewing his campaigns, calculating his debts, mulling over the slanders and abuse he had suffered by his opposition to the land syndicates and their bogus claims; he sat framing phrases for the petitions and letters that he must continue writing to Thomas Jefferson, to the national Congress, to the legislature of Virginia; he sat daydreaming of the snowy mountains, high plains and evergreen forests his brother had seen in the Far West, envisioning them as clearly as if he had beheld them with his own eyes. He looked at the distant lamplights of Louisville across the river, the Louisville he had founded in 1784 when the Revolution was finally concluded. He pondered on his endless weary efforts to administer for his veterans the tracts of land that had been given them by Virginia as rewards for their gallantry in the campaign. But always his thoughts returned to the indifference and ingratitude shown him by the government he had served so well. I won their war in the West for them, he thought, and ever since I’ve been paying the bills for it as well.

  Fifteen thousand dollars in receipts and vouchers I sent them in ’79, he thought. And they lost ’em and say they can’t reimburse me without ’em.

  What a damnable muddle it all is, he thought. It is simply impossible to do anything straightforward and swift, once civilization sets in. You can count on men as men. But from their government you can count on nothing but hollow praise and empty promises. Set your head to do a thing direct and right, and then by God you may expect to flounder with it while your government makes debate and intrigue over it, cavils over its costs, and subverts it
motives.

  By Heaven, he thought, my misfortune is to have lived too long.

  His mind quit its other meanderings then and began to play upon that single notion, while crickets shrilled in the valley and a wolf howled in the darkness somewhere north of the river. The general sighed into his glass and sipped and considered when he should have died.

  Of all the musketballs and shot, all the tomahawks and arrows that whistled through the air I breathed before I was thirty, not a one touched me. My life had a charm on it, those days. Not a single missile of war touched me then, when it should have, when I was winning. That must be the time to die: When you think you’ve got everything to live for. A hell on earth it is, he thought, to triumph too early and be thwarted ever after. Spoils a life, it does.

  There must have been some ideal time to have taken a lethal blade or bullet. Lord Dunmore’s War? No, that was too early. So too was the defense of Harrodsburg. The assault on Fort Sackville? No, it would not have succeeded had he fallen. Against the Shawnees at Piqua? Perhaps that would have been the time, or when he had fought Benedict Arnold in Virginia in ’81.

  But no. None of those. The ideal occasion would have been in taking Fort Detroit. That had been his main ambition in the war, but the fates never cooperated. And as long as I had been still desiring it, I reckon I should have been most unhappy to get shot down.

  “Hah!” He clambered to his feet with a suddenness that hurt his joints and set his head swimming. “By God, sir,” he muttered, laughing, swaying on his feet. “Shame on you! Toying with that morbid idea!” He groped down for the slipping deerskin lap robe, and in doing so knocked the tray off the bench. He heard the glass break, and the stoneware jug rolled with a small hollow thunder, its contents glugging out onto the porch floor. Alarmed to hear precious liquor spilling, the General lurched hastily about in the dark trying to locate the jug. Then a bolt of shame went through him and he drew himself up to his full height. He stood there composing himself, trying to erase from his mind the spectacle he knew he must have presented. Scrambling so desperately after a fallen jug! He turned and hobbled on his cane into the house, stooping to go under the lintel.