Excerpt from Treason Trail

October 1782.

Nessa Shaw stood on the bare bluff, the twilight afterglow warming her shoulders like a memory of sunshine. Across the Ashley River, a bank of storm clouds was slowly massing in the eastern sky, threatening rain.

But she turned her back to the clouds and headed down the tree-lined trail. After the day she’d had, she desperately needed a stolen hour to herself in the peaceful, sweet-scented woods. She had to escape the noise and stench of the camp, and remind herself who she was and what she was doing here.

If all went well, she might even find a handful of late greens or muscadine grapes to give color and nourishment to a dreary supper of army rations, or some herbs to replenish the hospital’s depleted stores. She carried a basket at the crook of her arm and a knife in her pocket just in case.

Leafy branches closed over her head, casting an inky shade on the trail. Live oaks, mostly, thick with the dark-green leaves that they kept year-round, while hickories and sassafras added splashes of yellow and orange. She’d be back to harvest some sassafras in a couple of months, after cold weather made the sap sink to the roots. Sassafras tea was good for strengthening and it reduced inflammation. And once winter hit, there’d be coughs and sore throats aplenty, in addition to all the cases of malaria already filling the General Hospital.

She quickened her pace, trying to drive out the image of men’s bodies, racked with fits of uncontrollable shaking one moment, and soaked with sweat the next, jerked back and forth between fever and ague. The sickness wore them out, wasting their flesh away with terrifying rapidity. Nessa did what she could for them, even if it was no more than keeping them company in their final moments.

You’ll be all better soon. I’m going to look after you. That was what she always said to them. She did look after them, to the very best of her ability, but most of the time they didn’t get better. But what else could she do? Tell them that in all likelihood they would continue to weaken and die a slow and painful death? Nay. Where there was life, there was hope. And Nessa would always, always choose to offer hope.

She must hold on for just a little longer. Then the war would end, and life could finally go back to how it used to be.

But they’d been saying that ever since the first shots were fired far away in Lexington and Concord. The most confident among the Patriots had said that the fighting would soon be over, that the Crown would relent and stop trampling the rights guaranteed to the American colonists under the British Constitution. And yet here they were, seven years later, still waiting, still holding on, still crying out to God for justice. The American victory at Yorktown was supposed to be the end, but it was only the beginning of the end, and maybe not even that. Who could tell what was happening far away across the Atlantic at the peace accords in Paris? The American and British delegates might have reached a settlement at last, or they might be no closer to an agreement than when they’d first gathered there. And in the meantime, Nessa’s countrymen were dying in skirmishes with the British over food and horses, or wasting away from disease in the crowded camps. It was all so pointless. Nessa considered herself a reasonably patient person, but her endurance was strained to the breaking point.

The shadows deepened as she made her way along the familiar trail, trying to pound out her troubles beneath her hurrying feet. While she walked, she continually scanned the foliage for anything edible or medicinal.

And finally, she found something. With a glad cry, she knelt and caressed some dark-green leaves, glossy and heart-shaped, and mottled with silver. Her sister Catalyn could have told the plant’s Latin name, but Nessa knew it only as arrowleaf ginger—good for digestive trouble, colds, and fever, and as a wash or poultice for wounds.

It was too early for harvest. She’d have to wait until the foliage had died back before gently taking some of the rhizomes. But the leggy valerian growing nearby, with its long, pointed, compound leaves, was ready now. Valerian root made a potent sedative—foul in taste, but effective.

Nessa set her basket down beside her. As she reached into her pocket for her knife, her elbow bumped the basket, sending it rolling down a shallow slope to the center of the trail. She crawled over to reach for it—

And froze.

Lying on the packed ground, just visible around a bend in the trail, was a human hand.

A long hand, a shapely hand, almost certainly male, with strong, slender fingers. The square nails were broken and rimmed with crescents of dirt.

Nessa pressed her own hands to her mouth. Her heart raced sickeningly as waves of revulsion and dread washed over her.

Presumably the hand was attached to an arm, and to the rest of a man, though from this angle it was impossible to be sure. Nessa steeled herself, then leaned around the bend to see more.

It was indeed an entire man, lying face down in the track, arms stretched over his head.

Well, she’d seen death before, more times than she could count. No reason to start flinching from it now. Still on her hands and knees, she crept over to the man’s side.

He was dressed in a linen shirt and knee-length drawers, and nothing more. That was hardly unusual. Many of the soldiers of the Continental Army at Ashley Hill were meagerly clothed. But those men weren’t covered in dirt and leaf litter as this man was. They got grimy enough from work details or going too long without a wash, but not like this.

She could see no wound to his back or limbs, but his hair was caked with dried blood. She laid a tentative hand to his neck and was surprised to find the flesh warm and pliant, with a faint pulse.

He was alive.

A curtain of matted hair hid his face. She lifted it to reveal a high cheekbone, a short, straight nose, and a beard of several days’ growth. His skin was tanned a deep golden brown.

Should she move him? Or go for help? She glanced around her, as if some responsible person would suddenly materialize and tell her what to do, and immediately despised herself for it. Wasn’t she always fuming about the lack of skill among some of the surgeons, and telling herself that she knew at least as much as they did? Here was her chance to prove it.

With difficulty, she flipped the man onto his back. He let out a groan, and his eyes opened—blue-grey eyes, startlingly pale in the tanned face. A sharp, lucid gaze met hers, and his lips parted as though he would speak.

Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and the breath went out of him with a sigh.

The front of his shirt was as dirty as the back, but not bloodstained. As far as she could tell, his only injury was to his head. He didn’t look quite like dying yet, but she had to get him out of here.

But where to? The General Hospital was on the other side of camp, and crowded with malarial men. For now, she would concentrate on taking him to the camp itself.

And how was she to do that? He was a tall man, broad through the shoulders and strongly built. Even with her to support him, she doubted he could walk the whole way—assuming she could wake him and get him on his feet.

She laid a hand against his cheek. “Can you hear me?” she asked. “We must get you moved. Can you stand?”

He didn’t reply, but he must have heard and understood, because his legs slowly bent at the knees, and his head and shoulders lifted from the ground in an apparent effort to sit up. Then he collapsed again with a groan.

A growl of thunder sounded to the east, and a shiver of wind passed through the trees.

“Listen to me,” Nessa said in a loud, clear voice. “There’s a storm coming. We have to get you under cover before the rain starts. Just a few feet, and then you can rest while I go for help. Do you understand?”

She had been nursing sick and injured men for months now, many of them sunk into unconsciousness for days at a time, and she had learned that they often did understand more than seemed possible, and remembered what they’d heard after they recovered. This man drew a deep breath, then raised himself to his elbows. Nessa slid her arm beneath his, and together they managed to move him off the trail and under the shelter of a massive live oak tree. The trunk had a groove in it that cradled the man’s back, keeping him in a sitting position, with his long legs stretched out before him. He was panting with effort and pain.

“Very good,” said Nessa, in the soothing tone she always used with the sick. “Now you wait here, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

She cupped his cheek in her hand, willing him to hold on, to keep breathing, to mend.

Then his hand gripped hers with surprising strength, and his eyes opened again.

“Help me,” he said, his voice rough.

“I will,” she replied. “But I can’t move you on my own. I’ve got to get someone to—”

He shook his head impatiently, then winced against the pain. “Nay, not that. There’s something—something I must do.” His eyes clouded, and she could see him struggling to stay conscious. “Help me,” he repeated.

“I will,” she said again. “Whatever you need.”

Her assurance must have satisfied him. His eyes shut, and his hand dropped away from hers.

It felt wrong, horribly wrong, to leave him hurt and alone with darkness falling and a storm on the way. But Nessa was a good strong runner. She fairly flew up the path as the thunder rolled overhead, and reached her brother’s tent in the sutler’s row ahead of the first drops of rain. Her hair was slipping out of its knot, and she was panting like a racehorse, but she’d made excellent time.

Rory was sitting at the small folding table that served him as a desk, lighting a candle. He took in the sight of his sister and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I found a hurt man on a trail in the woods,” she gasped out. “I need you to help me move him.”

Rory was already on his feet. He was tall for fifteen, with a frame that promised great size and strength at maturity, but still lightly muscled. “One of the soldiers from the camp?”

“Maybe. I didn’t recognize him, but ’tisn’t as if I know every one of them personally.”

A tin lantern stood near the tent flap. Nessa picked it up and held it while Rory used his desk candle to light the candle inside the lantern. Then they were off.

The lantern light cast grotesque shadows in the darkening woods. By the time they reached the bend in the trail where Nessa had first found the stranger, fat drops of rain were pelting their shoulders.

For a moment Nessa couldn’t see the injured man. Then lightning flashed—and there he was, propped against the hollow trunk of the old oak, exactly where she’d left him.

His arms hung slack at his sides, and his chin rested on his chest. Nessa knelt beside him, filled with dread. What if he’d died all alone in the dark, not knowing if she would ever return? She held the lantern to his face. His eyelids fluttered as if he was dreaming.

Rory was already crouching at the man’s other side. “What happened to him?” he asked.

“A blow to the head. Do you think the two of us can get him to your tent? The hospital’s too far away.”

Rory took the lantern from her, looped its handle over his arm, and nodded. “We can do it.”

The man opened his eyes and looked blearily at Nessa. One corner of his mouth edged up in a smile. “You came back,” he said.

“Aye,” she said, encouraged by how lucid he sounded. “And I’ve brought help. We’re going to take you to shelter.”

Nessa grabbed his arm and draped it over her shoulders. Rory did the same on his side. The two of them exchanged a quick nod and hoisted the man to his feet. Supporting him between them, they made their way back to the camp along the trail. He wasn’t altogether dead weight, and getting him to Rory’s tent wasn’t as hard as Nessa had feared it would be, but still it was hard enough. Her limbs were shaking by the time they eased him through the flaps at the front end of the tent.

The rain came down in earnest then, slamming into the tightly woven linen canvas overhead, as if it had been waiting for them to reach shelter first.

A yellowish halo surrounded the candle in its brass candlestick, casting a dim light that was reflected by the tent’s pale walls. The scent of smoke and burning tallow filled the small space. Rory carefully set the lantern on the floor.

As usual, Rory’s bed—a straw-tick mattress lying on the ground against one of the slanted walls—was covered with a litter of books and scraps of paper. With one arm, Nessa swept them away and pulled back the blanket. Together, she and Rory laid the man down, the straw fill crackling beneath his weight.

Rory picked up the candle from the desk and brought it over, angling the reflector to shed light on the man’s face. “I don’t recognize him, either. I wonder how he came to be alone in the woods with a broken head. A skirmish with the enemy, perhaps? But he has no weapon on him. Or a brawl with another Patriot soldier?”

“It couldn’t have been much of a brawl,” said Nessa. “There’s no mark on his face, and his knuckles aren’t scraped. Perhaps he was waylaid by some of those bandits from Georgia, robbed and stripped and left for dead. ’Twould explain the lack of clothing.”

“If any explanation is needed,” Rory said drily. “Plenty of soldiers in the camp aren’t as well-clad as this fellow. But that track isn’t exactly a highway for travelers. And how would the bandits get past the sentries on the other side of the forest?”

Nessa thought about that. “He might have been attacked outside the woods, and then managed to get away. But it would be a long way to crawl, and he’d have to get past the sentries himself.”

“He looks as if he may well have crawled on his belly a mile or so, and rolled around in the leaf litter for good measure,” Rory said critically. “He’s filthy.”

Nessa gazed down at the man’s face. It was a good face, with its broad brow and square chin. The light beard edging his jaw was a pale gold, lighter than the tangled hair. His mouth had flattened into a severe line, and the cords of his neck were drawn tight with exertion and pain. He was breathing hard.

“Who are you?” she asked softly. “Where did you come from? What happened to you?”

The man didn’t answer. Gradually the tension eased from his face, and his breath slowed until she knew he was sleeping.

She wished she could open his mind like a book and read his story.

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