WE FLOATED ON THROUGH THE NIGHT, FOREVER PEERING OVER THE bows for the telltale ripples of sandbars and logs. At dawn we poled the boats together and lashed them into one to hold an impromptu council of war. We had four flatboats, all little more than boxes crudely constructed for the one-way journey. It was hard to believe they would even make it that far down river. Tyler pulled out a flagon of whiskey and passed it around. Like the boats, it was crude but sufficient.
‘Our situation doesn’t look so good,’ said Tyler. ‘But I figure it’s not all that bad.’
Blennerhassett and I offered equally disbelieving stares.
‘We’ve near to fifty men, and enough arms and powder to see off anything that comes at us. We’ve also several hours’ start on them. You can’t outrun the river: they could chase us all the way to New Orleans and never catch sight of us.’
‘They can ride overland,’ I pointed out. I did not need a Navigator or a pilot to see that the river’s sinuous course doubled back over itself so many times that a horseman could save many dozens of miles and emerge far below us. ‘What if they bring up cannon? These flatboats can barely stay afloat as it is. One broadside would see us all drowned.’
‘We will trust to luck and travel by night where we may. The Ohio is not the Thames, Lieutenant: they will not be able to meet us at every turn. We’ll outpace them eventually.’
I would have argued the point further, though the river offered little choice, but Blennerhassett spoke up.
‘What of Colonel Burr?’ he asked.
‘What of him?’ said Tyler.
Blennerhassett waved an arm at our makeshift raft, and the unprepossessing crew perched around its sides with their poles. ‘We’ll not conquer Mexico without reinforcements. I’ll be a deal happier when we have the colonel and his men to aid us.’
‘Colonel Burr keeps his ears open. He’ll hear we’re moving, and get word to us, I don’t doubt. If he’s still in Kentucky, he’ll come down to the mouth of the Cumberland or the Wabash. Once he’s with us, then we can start in earnest.’
If, I thought, we survived that long.
With all the hazards of the river we could not keep our boats lashed together long. Tyler apportioned their command, taking one for himself and dividing the rest between Blennerhassett, me, and a subordinate named Smith. We untied the ropes and let the swirling current slowly carry us apart.
In two nights I had slept little and badly. With ten men aboard my command, there were more than enough to navigate and watch for obstacles; I appointed the least unlikely of them my deputy, then retired to the shelter of the cabin. I did not expect agreeable dreams.
As on my journey to Blennerhassett Island, the cabin managed to be both close and cold. A chill rain had started to fall, seeping through the cracks in the ceiling. Steam and smoke mingled in the air by the hissing stove, but they made better companions than the cold at the mouth of the cabin. I dragged a straw mattress as near to the fire as I dared, lay down, and pulled a lice-ridden blanket over myself.
My eyes had not been closed five minutes when I felt a small hand shaking my shoulder. With some reluctance, I forced my eyes open. With so many dangers to contend with, I doubted it could be happy news.
‘Martin. Martin.’
My eyes were suddenly fully open. The blanket slipped off my chest as I sat up in confusion. Beside me, her skin grey and pallid in the half light, and her body almost invisible under a dark cloak, knelt Miss Lyell.
‘Catherine. What in the devil’s name …?’ I wished I had not drunk so liberally of Tyler’s whiskey. ‘You stayed on the island with your father.’
She grinned. ‘You see I did not.’
‘But this is madness. Ten to one we will all be sunk within a week – if we are not hanged first. You should not have come.’
‘Do not be angry with me,’ she chided. ‘The dangers would be no less had I stayed with my father. The authorities will seek him, and it will be a terrible effort to cross those mountains again in December.’ She squeezed my arm. ‘At least now we are together.’
Together only in ruin, I feared, though I could not reward her love by saying so. I reached my arms around her and cradled her close to my chest, then tipped her head back so I could kiss her on the lips. She rose against me, her passion spurred perhaps by our peril.
‘What will your father say?’ I asked, spoiling the moment somewhat.
She shrugged. ‘He will not come paddling after us in a canoe if that is what you fear. He will be too sensible of his own safety for that. No doubt his greatest concern will be that my capture might betray his own part in this affair. But you will protect me from that, will you not, my darling?’
A thud sounded from the foredeck. One of the crew had jumped down from the roof and was peering back into the gloom.
‘Mr Jerrold? Mr Tyler’s called over from the other boat. There’s a comp’ny of militia down at the next point.’
It seemed Miss Lyell’s odyssey might end before it had rightly begun. I scrambled to my feet, crouching to avoid the low cabin roof, and hurried into the open.
The valley had begun to narrow, its shoulders slowly squeezing in on us, but there was still a fair expanse of bottomland beside the river. It was thick with timber, uncleared by any farmer or settler, and the bare trees were threaded by a fine mist. I wiped a finger across my brow and felt it come away wet with the cold rain which had soaked me. It was hardly a propitious circumstance for a battle, though with luck it would damp the enemy’s guns as much as our own.
I turned to the steersman. ‘Where are they?’
He lifted the long pole in his hand so that it pointed to the starboard shore, about quarter of a mile distant, where the river had bent itself around a long promontory. The point cut off a goodly part of the channel, so that we could not but float within fifty yards of it. At its tip, where the trees thinned, I could see an American flag hanging sodden from a sapling.
‘Keep four men on the corners, bow and stern,’ I ordered, for the crew had given up their duties to stare at the coming threat. ‘Get the rest under the lip of the cabin with their weapons – rifles if they have them, muskets if they do not. They may enjoy some hope of keeping their powder dry.’
The steersman nodded.
‘One more thing. You may find a lady in the cabin.’ I was not convinced I had not dreamed it. ‘She is my companion, and is to be treated with the greatest respect.’ I could imagine what a dozen Ohio boatmen might make of her otherwise.
Even aboard the Adventure, watching the Spanish ship bear down on us, I had not felt so helpless. To be on a boat with neither mast nor oars, barely even a rudder, drifting slowly past a well-ensconced troop of militia, was an impossible task. I felt a familiar knot begin to tighten in my stomach, and wondered if I could keep it from squeezing my innards out.
‘Is there a telescope aboard?’ I asked. There would be little profit in seeing the men who were to kill me, but it would be better than the unseen, unknown menace lingering in the trees.
One of the men ducked into the cabin and returned presently with a spyglass. It was a ludicrous instrument, so out of place in those rude and miserable surrounds that I almost laughed. It must have been taken from Blennerhassett’s study, for the brass casing was polished to a mirror, and the inscription of Mr Dollond, London was freshly engraved. It was more suited to staring at the heavens than battle, and damnably heavy, but I managed to steady it on the edge of the cabin roof and stare out at the promontory. Rain drizzled over its lens, while a thick fog began to condense on the eyepiece, and it took several applications of my shirtsleeve to clear a passable view. Through the streaks and swirls on the glass, I scanned the enemy position.
At first I could see only tangled scrub and tree-trunks. Then, as I looked lower, I saw flashes of blue uniform, and the thin skein of smoke where a fire still smouldered. They must have been there much of the night, and it kindled a rare spark of pleasure to think they must feel more wretched even than I. And their powder must be turned to porridge.
I squinted closer. Strangely, none of the soldiers was moving. Nor, so far as I could see, were they in position to unleash a volley of musketry. If fear had not dismissed it as a desperate hope, I would have sworn them to be sleeping – or dead. Had a party of savage Indians swooped down in the night and scalped them all? I could see no blood. It was too much to conceive that they had fallen asleep just as we arrived.
I swept the telescope back and forth, searching for a sign of their intentions. From the cabin below I heard a clatter as someone dropped a musket, and I hissed at the men to keep quiet.
A movement by the campfire caught my eye. I swung my gaze towards it. We were so close now that I barely needed the glass; with its aid, I could plainly see a blue-uniformed militiaman staggering to his feet. Rotting leaves clung to his coat from where he had lain, and he swayed slightly like a corpse in the breeze. I saw him rub his eyes, then reach down and lift a cup to his lips. We were far too far for the smell to carry, yet by the flash of sour disgust which crossed his face, followed by a mellowing smile, I reckoned I could guess the cup’s contents. That would certainly explain why the man and his company were so heedless of their duty.
He was moving again, and my heart tensed. Brushing past the brambles and bracken which obscured him almost to his chest, he staggered out of the woods and down to the shore. There was now nothing between us, nothing to hide our presence from him, yet he did not look up. Instead, he fumbled at the crutch of his trousers and unbuttoned them. A fountain of steam rose into the air as he disgorged the night’s indulgence into the river.
I lowered the glass. Tyler’s boat, in the lead, had already passed him; now we were directly opposite. Surely he must see us.
He did. His bladder emptied, he tucked himself in and looked up. I lowered the glass, and our eyes met across the few yards of water which separated us. His unshaven features were heavy with the lassitude of alcohol, but they creased with bewildered disbelief as he took in the sight of the four flatboats. Too addled for anything else, he raised an arm in greeting, and I found myself involuntarily reciprocating.
Belatedly, he remembered his duty. Struggling with the strap, he lifted the musket which had been slung over his back and raised it to his shoulder. Our eyes met, and a strange moment of futile sympathy passed between us. Then he pulled the trigger.
Whether a night in the damp and rain had neutered the charge, or whether the gun had never been loaded to begin with, I neither knew nor cared. We were close enough that I could hear the snap of the flint as he released it, could see it spark in the pan, but there was nothing further. No explosion to shake the birds from their trees, and no lead ball to fly across the water and kill an English lieutenant far from home.
The militiaman stared pensively at his rifle, then gave a rueful smile. I could still see him watching as, one by one, our boats vanished around the bend and were lost to the drizzle and the mist.
We saw no-one else that day, nor the next, nor even the next. Indeed, we could barely keep sight of our own forlorn flotilla amid the swirling rains and cloud which obscured our course. One afternoon we lost the other boats altogether, and I spent several hours in a simmering panic before we at last caught them up again. Sometimes we would pass low-lying farms, crude shingled houses which one good flood would have swept away, but never was there any evidence of life beyond a thin plume of smoke rising from the chimney. We were fugitives in plain view, had anyone been there to see us; we put ashore only to scavenge firewood, and then only when we were far from habitation. The damp logs smoked terribly, so that by the end of a week we must all have been thoroughly cured, but it was better the choking cabin than the chill and wet outside. We took our turns on watch, and otherwise huddled by the stove.
I had only two consolations in those bleak days: whiskey and Catherine. The former I took in liberal doses from the jug in the cabin, its level sinking with alarming speed; the latter I indulged as often as privacy and fatigue allowed. Sometimes, if all the crew were on deck to navigate a sandbar, Catherine and I would retreat to the rear of the cabin and grapple in hasty silence, rolling around fully clothed on the filthy straw. They were sweet moments of relief, but all too quickly the pleasure was sullied by the need to scramble apart and return to our duties.
I think Catherine had begun to regret her impulsive stowing-away. For the first few days she wandered about the boat all smiles and purpose, even taking her turn on the steering oar when no immediate hazards threatened. Thereafter, as the brim of her bonnet softened and folded in the rain, and her dress became streaked with grime, her spirits cooled. Her lip hardened into a perpetual pout, save if one of the men enquired after her welfare when she would flash the man a weary smile and declare herself perfectly content. For the most part, she confined herself to the cabin, and our rushed encounters became ever less frequent.
On the fifth night out from the island, we passed the town of Cincinnati on the Ohio shore. It was a hair-raising business, for we had heard there would be a shore battery keeping watch for us, but after lying up on a sandbank for most of the day we managed to slip past the town in darkness. The town lights flickered on the water, and I could hear fiddles and singing from the taverns. I felt more isolated at that moment than ever I had in the wilderness, and I was seized by an almost irresistible need to fall down blubbering. A stout grip on the boat’s side and a tot of whiskey kept me upright, as the lights faded behind us.
After Cincinnati, our fortunes improved. The late Mr Harris had described the river well: it was the only high-road across the country, and for all its circuitousness there was no other way for news to outpace us. Whatever charges had been laid against us upstream, whatever foes massed against us, those down river remained ignorant. We were like a bullet in a rifle barrel, propelled forward by an explosive force we could feel but which could not overtake us. Where, I wondered, would we strike?
Two days beyond Cincinnati, I saw the first proof that Tyler and Blennerhassett might not, after all, be fantasists. As we made fast at a small village called Jeffersonville, a short major named Floyd came bounding down the landing stage. A bright orange moustache bristled above his lip, and his buckskin shirt dripped with tassels. Two pistols sat in holsters on his hips.
‘We’ve been expecting you this past week,’ he said, in the drawl characteristic of the Ohio country. ‘Wondered if you’d settled on staying home for Christmas.’
‘Do you have news of the colonel?’ asked Tyler.
‘More news than’s good for us. Did you hear he got himself indicted?’
Tyler went white as a ghost. ‘Indicted?’
Major Floyd gave a crooked smile. ‘Down in Frankfort. Charged him with breaking the Neutrality Act, said he was planning to invade Mexico.’
‘What happened?’
‘You know the colonel.’ Floyd laughed. ‘He slung those government liars from one side of the courtroom to the other, and by the end of it the jury was mighty satisfied there was nothing in it. They sent him on his way with three cheers and a grand ball in his honour.’
Tyler began to recover his colour. ‘He’s a remarkable man, all right. When was that?’
‘Ten days back. We had the news a week ago.’
‘And where is he now?’
‘Went down to Tennessee to raise a few more volunteers. Sent word that we’re to make for Shawneetown, and lay up there until he calls us down.’ Floyd gestured at our ragged flotilla. ‘Is this all you got?’
‘We left in a hurry,’ Tyler admitted. ‘There should be more coming down from Pittsburgh, if they can get past the militia. How about yourself?’
Floyd pointed down the landing, where four keelboats bobbed in the river. They were in every way superior to our own craft: longer and slimmer, with rounded hulls and solid cabins. I could smell the caulking still fresh in their timbers.
‘How many men?’ asked Tyler.
Floyd crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Forty. But there’s more waiting down river. Word of the colonel’s trial in Frankfort got about, and I guess it cooled some of ’em off. They’ll come when they see we mean to go through with it.’
With our fleet doubled we continued down river. Directly below Jeffersonville we spent a churning forty-five minutes in a narrow channel they called a shute, frantically poling past a mass of islets, reefs, rocks and shoals. The water foamed white all around us, and the constricted river bore us along faster than any wind. It was a great relief to be beyond it.
Three days later, at midday, we reached the appointed rendezvous at Shawneetown. It was more a village than a town, being only about thirty houses, but they were well built and prosperous on account of the salt licks which, so I was informed, supplied half the Ohio valley. We made fast at the landing – long enough to accommodate all the salt-traders, though deserted at this time of year – and waited. The solstice came and went: Blennerhassett made some hopeful joke about the days getting brighter again, but I saw no sign of it. We could not exercise our arms for fear of being seen by the local residents, who already regarded us with open suspicion. Rumours of Colonel Burr and his projects seemed to have swept through the country, and we were unwelcome guests. We stayed on our boats for the most part, drinking and gambling and cleaning our guns until the rifling must have been quite rubbed away. And all the time, I tried to ignore the ever more disdainful looks with which Miss Lyell reproached me.
On Christmas Eve, we ventured ashore and gathered in a field behind the church. Tyler had managed to shoot a clutch of turkeys, which we roasted on spits over open fires, and the local landlord broached two casks of beer for us. Blennerhassett, as the best educated, spoke a few words of the service, and Tyler offered prayers for the continued benevolence of the Divinity towards our ambitions. The night was clear and bitterly cold, with a howling wind which seemed to tear through our very flesh itself. Some of the men sang carols, and others accompanied them on flutes and fiddles; there was much back-slapping and many high-spirited toasts, but the strain told on all our faces. One question above all was in our thoughts, though no-one asked it: what had become of Colonel Burr? For my own part, all curiosity towards him had vanished. I barely believed him to exist any longer.
It was past eleven o’clock, and I had decided to return to the boats and the dubious comforts of a leaky cabin, when the messenger arrived. I was seeking Miss Lyell among the throng, hoping I might snatch a few minutes’ intimacy, when I heard the men about me fall silent. Hoof beats were echoing from along the southerly track, and in the steel moonlight we could see a dark rider emerge from the trees beyond. He was galloping his mount at full speed, lashing it with his crop, and it was only as he came into the circle of our fire that he reined in the beast.
Steam rose from horse and rider alike as he swung himself out of the saddle and approached Tyler.
‘I have a message for you,’ he announced, his voice clear and young. ‘You’re to make for the mouth of the Cumberland the day after tomorrow.’
He paused, looking around at his audience.
‘Colonel Burr will meet you there.’