War Drums (Sass)/Chapter 1
SHE came in mid-winter, when a cold north east wind might have been blowing across harbour waters grayer than the gray January skies. But Fate had set a trap for Jolie Stanwicke and had baited the trap with beauty. That winter day was as gentle as a May morning. When the Queen Bess, seven weeks out of London, sailed into Charles Town harbour with Jolie Stanwicke her most favoured passenger, a warm, odorous breeze from the south filled the ship's white sails; the waters of the wide, land-locked bay were of that luminous blue which artists try to forget; a silver haze lay like a transparent curtain over the encircling islands; and through this haze the sunlight streamed down, softer, yet somehow more brilliant and more beautiful.
Jolie Stanwicke stood on the forecastle deck, her red-gold hair bare to the sun, and gazed across the blue water at the little low-lying town which seemed afloat upon the surface of the bay. Mr. Richard Barradell of Hampshire and London, slender and elegant in orange velvet and dark green satin, stood beside her, and Mistress Wilkinson of Charles Town, in whose charge she had made the voyage from England, sat close by.
"It is a beautiful New World," Jolie said in a low voice. "It is almost like Paradise. . . . We are going to find Gilbert. We shall not fail."
Yet, even as she spoke the words, her lips quivered and she marvelled at this gay courage of hers, recognizing it as a madcap thing that had no authority in reason or fact. There, beyond the blue waters of the bay, beyond the low roofs of the town, lay the wilderness—the illimitable forest of America, gigantic, formidable, unknown. Into its dim recesses had passed Gilbert Barradell, her lover, never to be heard from again. He had come, some fifteen months ago, to Charles Town in Carolina, a needy and adventurous gentleman in search of fortune; and after a little the wilderness had swallowed him, and none knew whether he was living or dead. And now she had come, a slip of a girl who knew somehow in her heart that Gilbert Barradell was still alive, to challenge the monstrous and mysterious power of that wilderness and win back the lover it had taken away.
Suddenly tears filled her eyes. It was as though steel-gauntleted fingers had tightened round her throat. For a moment Jolie saw in all its unutterable dreariness the failure of her quest. There was none to help her, none except Richard Barradell, Gilbert's brother, who had left reluctantly the frivolities of London—which to her had grown hateful—to accompany her on a voyage that he deemed hopeless from the start. True, her father, Edward Stanwicke, awaited her in Charles Town. But he had not bidden her come, he had not answered the letter in which she told him that she was coming. How would he receive her, this father of whom no faintest recollection lingered in her mind; this father who, soon after her mother's death, when she was still a baby crawling on all-fours, had sent her away to England to live and grow up among her mother's people there?
For a little while fear chilled her—fear of failure, fear of the unknown that loomed ahead. But as the Queen Bess sailed on between the islands, beauty deepened upon the harbour until all that panorama of blue sky and bluer water and hazy encircling woodland became a thing too wonderful to be believed. Little by little its magic warmed her, and in the spell of its beauty fear retreated sullenly and that high, happy courage, which was folly wiser than wisdom, returned. Her eyes shone, her cheeks were richer than pink Indian rose. Richard Barradell, standing beside her, spoke more earnestly than was his habit.
"Smite me!" he exclaimed, his gaze sweeping the placid harbour and the sunlit roofs beyond, "'Tis the sweetest haven this side of Heaven! Saw you ever bluer water or a fairer sky?"
He turned and looked at her in silence for a moment, his delicate jewelled hand stroking his smooth chin.
"Ged, Jolie," he said presently, "I am past paying you compliments, but I perceive that this New World air can even paint the lily. If there are young bloods in Charles Town, their hearts will beat faster when you step on shore."
She seemed not to hear.
"We are going to find him," she murmured, as though she were communing with her own thoughts. "We are going to find Gilbert."
Fate had arranged the prelude whimsically. All who were to play leading parts in the drama saw the Queen Bess come in except Lachlan McDonald. James Almayne, the hunter, gossiping with Jock Pearson and certain other wilderness men in front of a waterfront tavern, watched the ship's slow progress up the bay. Mr. Francis O'Sullivan, tutor and fencing master, was fishing that forenoon near Granville's Bastion and, between infrequent nibbles, saw the Queen Bess glide superbly past to her anchorage amid the shipping in the stream. These two looked on with languid interest, not being able to read the future. But Edward Stanwicke of Stanwicke Hall, at that moment engaged in earnest conversation in the library of his town house beyond the Governor's Bridge, bestirred himself when a negro servant brought word that the Queen Bess was well within the harbour.
The man with whom he had been conversing—a tall, powerful, handsome man, high-coloured and dark-moustached, whose dress and gear were those of a soldier and yet smacked somehow of the sea—seemed annoyed at the interruption. But presently this pair drove down together to the wharves in Edward Stanwicke's coach, and they were there waiting when the Queen Bess's gig set her passengers ashore.
Of the meeting of Jolie Stanwicke of Hampshire and Edward Stanwicke, her father—often called Lord Stanwicke in Carolina—there is little to tell. Nor can much be told concerning the meeting of Jolie Stanwicke and the tall, full-blooded, wide-shouldered man whom her father presented as Captain Lance Falcon. They had never seen each other before. Yet, as their eyes met, something passed between them, something very subtle and strange.
If Jolie Stanwicke was aware even then, she forgot quickly. There was much to be seen as she drove through the streets with her father and Captain Falcon in the Stanwicke coach emblazoned with the Stanwicke arms—Mistress Wilkinson had been carried off by her husband, while a messenger of the Governor of Carolina had met Mr. Richard Barradell at the wharf to present His Excellency's compliments and extend his hospitality. Jolie, gazing out of the coach's narrow windows, saw the life of a new town built between the vast ocean on the one hand and on the other a forest which men believed to be vaster even than the great Atlantic: a new town which was England's strongest outpost against the power of Spain in the New World—that ruthless, implacable power which again and again had stained the shores of Carolina with blood and which still waited wrathfully, in its impregnable fortress of St. Augustine two hundred miles to the south, for the day when Charles Town could be destroyed forever.
Edward Stanwicke spoke to her seldom during that short drive; the stooped gray man, her father, seemed wholly lacking in a father's warmth. But Captain Lance Falcon, sitting opposite in the forward seat, chatted easily in his deep voice, pointing out this and that, with a keen eye for what would be new and strange or pleasantly like England.
Jolie saw, meeting and mingling in Charles Town's streets, the life of the sea and the life of the wilderness; sun-tanned, earringed, bare-armed men of the tall topsail ships that brought merchandise from England and returned laden with pelts and rice; hawk-eyed, lynx-footed men of the forest whose lives were spent for the most part on the wilderness trails. She saw a Cherokee war captain in a black bearskin cloak attended by two tall plumed and painted braves; lean, shaggy wilderness hunters in stained, weather-worn buckskins, and packhorse men in leather jerkins and leggins fantastically beaded and fringed; Sir Robert Mapleton, of Greentree Barony, a Landgrave of Carolina, in town that morning for a conference with the Governor; a squad of sailors from the provincial scout boat that kept watch against the Spaniards of St. Augustine; a butcher's stall where whole deer hung by their hind legs and great wild turkeys were suspended by their necks; taverns and punch houses and many little shops where blankets and beads and steel knives and hatchets were displayed.
The black uniformed driver on the gilded box in front pulled his horses to a halt. Captain Lance Falcon, plumed hat in hand, his fingers barely touching the tips of hers, helped Jolie alight in front of Edward Stanwicke's town house, with its walled garden, two black attendants standing beside the tall cypress door.
Later, when she was alone in her room over-looking that garden where strange things were to happen, she wondered a little at the coldness with which she had thanked him for his courtesy. But her thoughts dwelt only momentarily upon Captain Falcon. There was a queer, hushed, expectant happiness in her because the quest that had brought her to the wild, new land of America was fairly launched at last.