Free King's Mountain by Sharyn McCrumb Page A

like the commander’s way of speaking, with odd, rolling r’s and sounds that came from the back of his throat and seemed to struggle to come out of his mouth at all. I wondered if she and the commander came from the same place. I made up my mind to ask her about it, if she ever thawed out enough to be civil to me.
    After another minute or two of silence, she said, “Well, you came to work, and there’s washing to be done. Pick up that basket. I’ll show you where the creek is.”
    I followed her out of the tent, carrying the basket of soiled linen shirts, and I tried to keep up with her, though the washing was heavy, and I had to watch my step on the uneven ground. Finally, though, I managed to call out to her to slow her pace, and, with a scornful glance in my direction, she did so, leaning up against a tall pine and watching me stumble down the slope to reach her. I managed not to spill any clothes out of the basket, though I had caught my leg on a branch of briars, and the cuts stung as they seeped blood about my ankle.
    I spied the creek at the bottom of the hill, a shallow little stream that was as much rocks as water, though that wasn’t a bad thing if you were aiming to wash clothes in it, for you needed to beat the garments against the stones to get the dirt out. I set the basket down alongside the creek, and took a shirt out of the pile and held it under the water until my hands tingled.
    Virginia Paul came up beside me, and picked through the pile until she found a cloth with red stains on it. I knew it for blood, so I said, “Did he cut himself shaving?”
    She gave me another scornful glance. “He doesn’t shave himself,” she said, pushing the towel down into the clear stream between the rocks, and rubbing at the stain until the cloth turned loose of the blood. “We do the washing for the regiment’s doctor as well. This is his.”
    â€œHave you been with the commander long?’ I asked her, thinking that this was as good a time as any to get acquainted.
    â€œA few weeks,” she said, without looking up from her scrubbing.
    â€œSo you haven’t know him for very long, either.”
    She smiled at that. “I’ve known Patrick Ferguson a deal longer than he thinks I have.”
    I wondered what she meant by that, but when I asked, she only shook her head and went right on beating cloth against the creek rock.
    I settled into the routine of the regiment soon enough, and I got better acquainted with the others, though the men didn’t take much notice of a servant girl, but Virginia Paul kept to herself, as much of a stranger to me as she had been on the first day. But our work was mostly the same, and so we spent time together, and, though I never found out much about her own life, she seemed to know a lot about the commander.
    â€œHe’s the son of a lord,” she told me once, when I wondered aloud about him. “Back in Scotland. He talks about it sometimes of a night. His father is an earl, the chief of the Fergusons of Pitfour, though he is a lawyer as well.”
    â€œAre you kin to them?” I asked, for she seemed to know so much about the family.
    â€œThe Fergusons of Pitfour are my clan, though I am no blood of his.” She nodded in the direction of the commander’s tent. “Just as well, since we share a bed now and again.”
    Well, I knew that, though I never thought to hear her say it out loud. I couldn’t see that there was any love lost between them on either side. It was just something they did to pass the time, perhaps, or to snatch a bit of comfort out of the hardships of army life. Virginia Paul was pretty enough to look at, but it was a cold beauty, like a winter tree silvered in ice.
    I thought it best for the time being to keep away from the question of her and the commander, so to get on safer ground, I said, “Fergusons of Pitfour? What’s Pitfour? A castle?”
    She