A/N: This picks up from canon as of the 7-8th episode of season 2. It deviates quite sharply from there as it is set on the premise of what might have happened if Abe went along with Caleb's short sighted plan to spring him from the big house. I was honestly surprised in that episode when Abe made such an intelligent and selfless decision, very out of norm for him considering his usual incompetence. So let's keep him in character here, and see what could have happened to his poor side lady and indefatigable rival.
(Also, this fic alludes to the deleted scene where Simcoe mentions his upbringing in India. You can find the clip on Youtube.)
She does not feel, she does not know, that she is preparing a poison which will destroy us both; and I drink deeply of the draught which is to prove my destruction. — The Sorrows of Young Werther
OOOO
The Colonel sits his horse in a clearing and glasses along the coast. His arms and legs covered in a green cloak and his hat tucked into a bag on the cantle. Thick green wool scarfing covering all but his eyes. A new proofed Brown Bess hangs from the saddle scabbard and knocks against his heel from the strong wind off the sea. A pistol in the front holster and one under his coat tucked into his waistband. The sun up less than an hour and the clouds of an approaching storm and the cathedral of the forest encompassing everything in a grey twilight. No shadows to be seen. And somewhere upon that land, the invisible shadow of Colonel John Graves Simcoe himself.
High rock bluffs drop sheer to beachhead below, no way to get down here. He lowers his spy glass and surveys the land. The edge of the forest flush plum above the rocky coast. A gently flooded outlet forging a chine joins the land along the coast ahead with a small beach around the edge of a granite outcropping. To the east lays Horseneck through thick pine and oak scrub and then Huntingdon and then beyond to the end of the New World. To the west the same endless pinewood into Oyster Bay. The bluffs would have been no obstacle approaching from the west out of there. He raises his glass again and centers in on the dying slip of smoke from a night fire he had been following as it dissipates into the nothing from the sheer drop below. As sure as he thought, she is sticking to the coastline.
Ten men behind him. All cavalry. They're draped in dark cloaks over their usual white pants, their hats replaced with the same wool scarfing the Colonel is wearing to protect them from the biting frost. They're upon good horses that have their own long faces sheathed in white cloaks. The men have pistols in their belt holders and muskets slung by buckled leather harnesses off the saddle. He takes a small two man detachment with him east and sends the rest under the direction of Captain Ross who will rejoin the Colonel and circle back after sending out two patrols west.
They navigate through the chary dawn up the bench of land that forms the parallel of the bay. The dead space between the trees drift in dead pine needles and slush ice. Cold and getting colder. The wind brutal and relentlessly cutting between the sheltering trees.
When they come to a clearing at the crest of the ridge he finally smells what the horse had been smelling. The stench of putrefaction wafting up on a rising vector of the morning salt breeze. He sits the horse and turns in the saddle and tries to find the source of the scent but loses it. He turns the horse and sits back facing the chine and then puts the horse forward down the narrow sandy slope. The horse soft steps its way, its velvet ears pricking up when a group of birds burst into the sky from the sharp sea scrub around them. The Colonel pats its neck and urges it on down.
About thirty feet or so down on the steep downslope he smells it again and he halts the horse and it stands waiting for him.
"What do you think, girl."
He tests the air again, but still nothing. He moves the horse on and they ride down the entirety of the steep slope. He halts the horse and looks down and sees a small tidal river rushing out of the chine and towards the sea and likewise the sea counter surging up into the outlet where two planks of wood had been laid across in a makeshift footbridge.
He moves the horse on and they ride down the entire of the steep gravel, onto grainy sand of the backshore. Something catches his eye and he halts the horse and looks down towards the broad flood basin of the outlet. He dismounts and walks to the impermanent shore and looks down at the source of the smell he'd been following. A flyblown corpse that had been dragged out into the open beachhead. A deep relief when he notices it is a young Negro boy. Upon closer inspection he recognizes him. The boy from the tavern. Dead not long. He walks over to a mound of disturbed gravely earth where the body had been apparently stolen from a shallow sepulcher. He shields his eyes from the glare with the back of his hand and looks around to the grey sea and back towards the forest. Drag marks are still somewhat visible on the opposite side of the flow-through. Dog paw tracks in the sand. Viscera scattered about. He places his hand on the hilt of his pistol and scans for any scavengers still lingering.
He goes back and picks up the reigns and mounts and rides out across the outlet, it not more than a foot or two deep and ten across. The sheet-ice crushes under the horse's hooves as it walks quickly over the painfully freezing water. Two dragoons follow, the rest wait upon the slope of the chine having a good vantage of the country above and below. All keeping their distance as he instructed them to. He would have preferred to come alone the entire way but that is suicidal in this area and he has no intentions of becoming some pirate's or rebel's prize.
It takes him some twenty minutes to ride to the end of the beach until he hits a rock slide absconding his path. Crumbled white and brown monolithic quarry spilling into the sea and another sure sign he was on the right path: an abandoned makeshift shelter at its base sits closest to the vertical cliff, made of drift wood and beach scavenge so shabbily that he almost missed it. A pair of long branches arranged in what seems an unnatural and odd placement the only thing calling attention to it. All of it too high for the horse to pass. He has the dragoons wait and he dismounts and ties the horse to a nearby bleached drift log.
He climbs up and sits in the rocks and pulls out his spy glass and scans ahead. A long curve of snowy beach. The cliff lined with birch trees that stand bone pale against the dark of the evergreens beyond. The shoreline a disarray of twisted stumps, gray and weathered, the beaching of trees adrift from a hurricane years past. A singular figure, walking ahead maybe a few hundred feet away. A woman dressed in men's clothing, oversized and cumbersome on her small frame. Looking like a filthy mad street dweller that wanders and begs for coin. Walking slowly and with great effort. A large bag clutched under her left arm. A gray wool blanket covers her head, but keeps getting caught in the relentless wind and blowing off, revealing country ravaged apple red frosted skin, black hair, long streaming wind tussled and loose. A slight pain creeps behind his breastbone in the exact spot she had wept against him, laying her crown of those wind frayed silks level with his heart, and he knows he's exactly where he's supposed to be.
He watches her for a while. Considers the logistics from there. Short sighted fool he is, he had not made any real plan of what he would do upon finding her, if he could find her even, and had sent himself out like a mindless hunting dog being given the encourage to chase by nothing other than his own unhinged desire. Acting under the pressure of an obligation that some demon had imposed on him for what seems to be for eternity. Should he take her by force? By rational plea? Upon bended knee and beg? He sees her moving further up the beach towards the drift woods and tumble rocks of the landslip and all of it blocking her sight for his approach. He scans the area before he moves up the beach, she not even looking behind her, perhaps naively confident she's hidden. That she's manage to elude all that would harm her. So reckless is his dearest.
The Colonel waits until she goes to sit upon some large boulder to make his move. He approaches her from behind, making long strong strides across the rocky sand, silently and quickly grasps one hand over her mouth and the other around her waist and yanks her thin body against his, dragging out her feet from under her in one harsh yank. His other hand grabs her hand and he pulls it swiftly across her waist to pin her to him. Her free hand shoots up and latches fingernails into to the forearm holding a suffocating hand to her mouth. Bloodcurdling screams from behind his glove. He holds her tightly, nearly breaking her delicate wrist he pulls upon as she struggles and twists herself this way and that trying to break herself free at an opportune moment. He says against her ear to shush, to calm down, that he's not going to hurt her. To stop it. Not to call attention. Or we'll both be at risk, understand? He squeezes on her tender wrist to emphasize his words. She stiffens with recognition at the voice and her eyes flash white as she tries to see her captor. She shakes her head in agreement.
He takes his hand off her mouth and she springs forth from his arms falling forwards, gasping and coughing, crying out, tripping onto the sand pushing herself up to her knees while looking back up at him. He reaches out to help her regain her footing but she jerks her body out of his reach.
He pulls the scarfing from around his mouth down to catch his breath. "Surprised to see me?"
It doesn't register what he says and she simply stares at him in disbelief with terrified eyes.
"Are you alright? Are you hurt?"
She looks back to the rock slide and then up at him. Breathless and choking on her own words she yells, "Why–what the hell is the matter with you?"
"Calm down, Mrs. Strong."
"I won't go back."
He takes a few strides forward and crouches down resting on his heels and offers her a hand. "Back?"
Her face is very red. Still on the ground, she coughs and tries to catch her breath. She tells him not to touch her, her body shivering whether it was from the cold or from fear he can't quite tell. He rescinds his hand.
"You mean to Setauket? Heaven's no, unless you wish to be hanged?"
"–what?"
"I think we need to have a little talk."
"I don't want to hear anything you have to say, Captain."
"It's Colonel now. And I think you'll most definitely want to hear what I have to say."
"The words of a liar mean nothing to me."
"Even if it has to do with your precious farmer?"
She spits a vicious insult at him that instead of offending him, he finds rather amusing at her even knowing such a vulgar epithet. Being in close contact with soldiers has its effects.
He smiles. "Come now, Mrs. Strong. As someone who has been lying to everyone around them, myself included; truth and yourself seem quite unfamiliar with each other, would you not agree?"
She looks back to the rock slide.
"Nothing to say?"
As he somewhat expected her to, she hastily gathers her blankets, bag and oversized pantaloons in quick jerk and runs like a gypsy child on the make. Scrambles over the rock slide he spotted her from and climbed over earlier. The sand and wind slow her while the snow unsteadies her, and she has to pick herself up twice already. He calls her name but she doesn't turn to see if he's pursuing her or not for they both know as long as they both live he always will be.
Four dragoons sit on the beach on the opposite side of the slide, waiting for their commander. All looking at her. She stops in her tracks. Looks back to the Colonel and then again to the dragoons and every which way around them, a suffocating enclave of sea or rock or soldiers. Trapped like an animal, she drops to her hands and knees and a scream of unendurable despair rips through his poor dear's throat.
He quickly runs and slides on his knees behind her and puts his hand over her mouth and holds her like a an exorcist holding a possessed mad woman until she exhausts herself and runs out of breath and falls slack against him. He slowly lowers his hand from her mouth and she begins gasping harshly but to his pleasant surprise she does not recoil from him but stays slumped in his grasp, limp. Sobbing uncontrollably.
He holds her in the midst of her sad scene, malleable and soft, clutching his broken love to his chest. Slush ice soaks into his pants at the knees while he gently rocks her and he takes stolen moments of the invisible gestures permitted from her proximity as he pulls her cradled head to his chest, her hot cheek brushing his, her hair bristling his lips as he rests his head against hers. He listens to her small white teeth chatter in between her weeping and squeezes her shivering body tightly.
"Would you like to get off this beach, Anna?"
She nods and he picks her up like a sleepy child and carries her towards his horse and helps her step up into the saddle. He pulls the leather strappings of his saddlebags and unstraps his powder bags and begins moving everything to the front. He looks up at her. She is looking out at nothing, staring blankly. Lost. Her tear stained face dirty and red and hauntingly vacant. He takes his riding blanket and wraps it around her and says, "Tell me what happened to the boy."
He immediately regrets it as she starts to shakes her head then breaks down and begins to cry. He fell, she tells him. Fell and hit his head, can you believe it? She almost starts laughing through her tears. It was over in a second. A blink. Gone. There one minute talking happily and he trips and then dead and gone like he never existed at all. The obscene mundaneness of death. She tells him he wanted to come with her and being the fool she was she let him.
He thinks for a minute and asks, "You were going to Philadelphia? To his mother?"
Wiping her eyes with the back of her hands she says, "No, I wasn't going anywhere."
"You weren't going anywhere."
"Just away."
"Just away," he says walking to the other side of the horse and pulling a powder pouch strap through the brass ring on the front side of the saddle. "If I believed a word you said, I would have to say that's a very poorly thought out plan."
"It's the truth."
"Well, it's a good thing I found you then, isn't it? You would be dead in a few days of the wilderness. If one of your rebel compatriots that constant these shores didn't have a bit of rape with you first."
He hitches the last belt on and says, "I must confess, I am most anxious for you to tell me, what did Hewlett say to justify sending a woman to die in the wilderness? Something about his sacred duty to law and order?"
She doesn't answer.
The Colonel smiles. "That's alright, perhaps some other time."
"What are you going to do with me, John."
He pulls out his canteen and takes off the cap and hands it to her and tells her to drink. He watches her do so. She lowers the canteen and catches her breath. He tells her to drink more and she does. He takes it from her when he's satisfied and takes two large sips and then screws the cap back on and straps it back to the saddle. He looks at her and says, "Protect you, of course."
He takes the reigns and walks the horse with her upon it over to meet up with the dragoons, seven are now down onto the beach standing and waiting, staring. He sits the horse about twenty feet away and then continues over to the men. He tells them carefully that she has critical information about the enemy and is to be held under their protection. The details of which he could not proffer. They all look at her at once and then back to the Colonel. He inverts the truth into an almost identical lie with no effort at all. He tells one to pick up her bag and secure it. Keep an eye on her. Not to let anyone he doesn't approve of interact with her. They understand.
They trudge on through the entire morning and into the day without stopping. His prisoner silent the entire way. Dark clouds bank in a high wall to the north and thin and soundless wires of lightning flash there and quiver and vanish again. The only sounds those of the march and the relentless wind against their clothes.
He had sat her in his saddle and had himself riding from behind the cantle padded with a folded blanket he took from another man's ruck. His leg and his back aching and he could not care less. His arms around both sides of her on the reigns with a wool blanket wrapped around both of them. Lithe slip of his shivering darling cradled against him. Her head resting against his chest. He breathes her in. Silence between them the entire way. Everything at once as it should be if only in that moment.
Later in the day she begs him to stop and they find a place to encamp for the night despite his desire to ride through. He tells her they can't start any fires and she says that's fine. She can't ride any longer. He wonders if it's a sham to attempt a run for it but he notices the sickly look to her, even worse than when he found her on the beach. The tips of her ears a blazing, cheeks rash red, sunken dark eyes. He takes off a glove and places the back of his fingers to her indignant neck. Hot to the touch.
They stop and make a temporary camp in a small clearing. He rigs a makeshift bed for her out of a couple of blankets while she spends the entire time heaving her already empty stomach out at the base of a nearby tree. He helps her into the little cocoon he made and she slowly turns onto her side and before he can grab a canteen and open it for her she is already passed out. He studies her for a moment. Gently smoothes her hair back from her burning face and tucks in the open gaps of the blanket.
He summons a nearby man and orders him to keep watch over her, "don't take your eyes off her for a second," while he tries to get a few hours of sleep. He lays a few feet away from where she is, wrapping himself in a blanket and placing his pistol in his hand. He curls into a tight ball and rests his head on his rucksack and closes his eyes.
He already knows sleep will be a long time coming. The ground hopelessly and unavoidably wet and the darkness had made the temperature drop even lower. He can't stop shivering. The knees of his pants still wet. He can hear wild dogs or wolves running far below them in the distance. Their cries trail off down the side of the sea bluffs and granite crops and sound again more faintly and then fade away where they course out along some rocky draw in the wooded dark.
He attempts to will himself to sleep but he finds his mind preoccupied and racked by the events of that morning when he had found her upon the beach, which is now surging still more poignantly within his heart, as now, only a few feet away from his icy grasp lies his ever elusive Lesbia. His. After everything, it is hardly believable and he dare not utter or even think of forming the words of the claim or making a declaration of victory as not to bring this fortune to Fate's vengeful attention. To make that arrogant mistake and have it realize what it has done and pull her cruelly out of his grip and life yet again. For he knows better than most that the very things one desires more than anything else are often stolen from us while those things we would to erase altogether seem often by that very wish to become graced with powers of immortality.
But sleep and rational caution refuses to overpower the anxiety, excitement and mad desire racing through him. He opens his eyes and a dark sea-wave swells under his heart when he looks over to her. An arm's length away she is in flesh and form. In his possession, under guard, gun and God and for the foreseeable future she is in fact for all intents and purposes: his.
He closes his eyes again and random thoughts of those that attack upon an insomniac who is purposefully trying to avoid a thought and thus courts it endlessly: letters he needs to answer, drills to go over, his socks need to be replaced, his back aches and perhaps he should have paid for that treatment in New York, until finally they run quieter and full circle and fanciful visions of what is to come sneak past his mental caution and he allows a slight indulgence in the incredible feeling of release upon that silent claim that exists in cosmic suggestion only, as if a chain that had been wrapped far too tightly around his heart and neck had been shattered free and slowly he falls into a cold dreamless sleep.
When he wakes there is a light snow falling on the leaves of the forest. The cold moves him to pull his blankets tighter and he sits up feeling as if he had been sleeping upon an ice flow. He checks the time. Almost one. He looks at his slumbering prisoner who appears has not moved an inch. He orders the man who had watched as they slept to get some sleep himself and stretching his legs and spine he slowly stands up and finds his lantern and lights the candle inside. He brings it with him to check on her. He places his hand under his armpit to warm it up a little before removing a glove and lightly placing the back of his hand to her warm but not urgently hot cheek. He quickly withdraws it when it causes her to stir and mutter something about bread in her sleep. She bunches the blanket under her chin and flips onto her side facing him. He fixes her nest of wool, gently smoothes her hair back and walks over to his horse and unbuckles a saddlebag and brings it back to the blanket and sits down.
He leans against a tree trunk with his leg outstretched with his rolled rucksack under his knee. On the blanket between them lies a short stack of papers and two bound books he had taken out of the saddlebag. The small box of his ink and nib. He opens his yellow bound journal in which he has the names and information of every single person under his command and employ from officers to refugees to laundry washers. Written in his obsessively compact script in a shorthand only he understands; where they are from, where they have lived, what languages they speak, everything. Also, and most importantly for his current task at hand, when and where they joined. That yellow book had been worth its weight in the precious metal it bore the color of on more than one occasion. The Colonel is proud of his system, in talking to Colonel Tarleton one day about its usefulness he was so impressed about it that he started one of his own.
At least a small handful of his men know who Anna Strong is, and this fact weighs most heavily upon his mind, more than anything else. The men he brought with him along to find her are ones he knows for certain had never seen her before, men from out of the area or who had joined after his last visit to Setauket. Before embarking upon this noble endeavor he hadn't really thought about the long term logistics and complicated delicate ethical quandaries that are now becoming apparent. The confidence and drive of passion found in young men and the insane combined with his Salome's enchantment making sure that his thinking is at all times funneled away from his rational mind and violently forced through the passion dye wools of a certain sharp tongued American girl with coal lashed eyes who happens to be lying unconscious two feet away.
He takes out a blank sheet and starts writing the names he knows for sure know her, followed by those he can make a rough guess on. Then he cross references in his yellow book. And repeats. If he can at least neutralize that aspect of possible threat, then a major stumbling block can be removed. But there's still no way to identify them all. It had become impossible, for the Queen's Rangers had gone from less than a hundred in those first days into a healthy and growing two hundred and sixty soldiers along with fifty ancillaries with more to come during the wintering.
Plus, there's always the one person whom no one ever accounts for when making a tricky plot, but the Clever Colonel planned on being so overly deviously detailed that no stone of depravity or deceit would be unturned. No mistakes could be made.
Often times, the one no one accounts for, is always that one simple unassuming idiot who, perhaps while on a trip of some kind, or while visiting some distant relation just so happens to see and be able a hundred years later to identify the stranger to whatever authority prods them for such information or when the miracle of guineas and pounds revives their memory to its crystalline quality, suddenly, a shady head scratch and look of empty senses roars back to life and then it's: oh yes I know so-and-so, I assure you, my reward can be paid in gold please?
A hundred pound reward was nothing to scoff at. He would give little doubt some of his men would do it for eight pence or less.
From the unmoving pile of blankets a soft cracked voice says, "What are you doing?"
"Catching up on some things."
"What things."
He looks up from his writing and at her. "Accounting, if you must know."
Silence. Then she flatly presses, "Why."
"It's my responsibility as the commander of this corps."
She slowly and weakly sits up and curls the blanket up over her head. He hands her a canteen and watches her drink. "Feeling better?"
She glares at him over the silver bottle edge and lightly shrugs.
"Understandable."
She screws the cap back on the canteen and places it down. She watches him for a long time not saying anything. He continues working on his list not looking at her.
After a while, a cloying voice says, "Colonel Simcoe."
"Yes?"
"What you said earlier," she says and then stops and looks around before crawling upon her knees and sitting closer to him. Leaning a little too close to his ear so that her breath bristles along his neck she says, "—please, tell me what's going on."
He closes his list in the book and places it down on his lap. He sits up and adjusts himself away from her whisper and lips. Grabbing the upper hand back he says, "Let's start with you telling me some things first, shall we?"
She sits back upon her heels and sinks down. "Like what."
"Start with the basics."
"Such as?"
In mock indignation he asks her: "Are you a rebel spy, Mrs. Strong?"
She slits her sarcastic eyes and shakes her head. "No, most certainly not."
"No?"
"I just told you, no."
He leans forward and grabs a handful of papers. He shuffles through until he finds the one he's looking for and hands it to her. "So what's this then?"
He points to the ad in the newspaper, the very one he read just the day before:
100₤ REWARD
ESCAPED from the guards the January 12th last, one Anna Strong, a woman of Setauket, who was prov'd to be a notorious spy and was confined therefore.
Whoever will seize said Strong, and return her to the commanding officer at Jamaica, shall be entitled to the above reward.
Every loyal servant of the Crown is hereby requested to take her dead or alive.
She tentatively looks and then takes the folded newspaper into her hand and looks at him and he nods his head and raises his eyebrows in encouragement. Her eyes glance down and across the page and he watches the reactions, the micro-expressions of her delicate features as she reads the ad. From what he sees this is the first she has seen. Her pallor grays slightly and shaking her head, she daintily refolds the newspaper and hands it back to him.
"Why would the commander of Jamaica have an arrest out for you, of all people?"
"I don't—don't know," she says holding a hand to her forehead. Closing her eyes while in thought she then comes to a nodded conclusion and says, "It's his father. Has to be."
"Sorry?"
"Justice Richard Woodhull? You remember him surely."
"Ah. You mean Hewlett's soul mate."
"Yes, that's right, you were around them all the time, then you'll understand." She tells him her captivating Shakespearean tale of a prince's death, the king's grief and his brotherly love with his general gone afoul due to a siren of a wench. A late night post had come in for the Justice informing him of the execution of his son and quite a scene soon broke out. Mad with grief and rage, he began screaming at the Major, demanding to know why he didn't do more. As it escalated, her name started to become the focus and the Justice was accusing her of being a spy and he wasn't going to let the Major protect her any longer. This offended the Major and set off a series of events and words exchanged that led to soldiers coming indoors at the sound of the commotion to remove the Justice from his own home.
He presses her to explain how the Major was protecting her and she explains that the only reason she was living at Whitehall was because of the Major and this caused a sharp rift in their friendship. The beginning fracture of the complete split of their sickening comradery.
"So he knew you were spying?"
"No—I was never spying."
"So, protecting you from what exactly, then?"
"Well," she says looking down and then continues quite matter-of-factly, "To be perfectly honest, from you."
"Me?"
"You're honestly surprised?"
He's more surprised at the fact Hewlett would do something so underhanded and cad like but nonetheless, hearing it from her in her cold business-like manner only makes his jealousy, a jealousy that had been fierce enough to make him foolishly tell himself he had renounced his love the last time he had seen them in the tavern, burn and sour in his spiteful chest and threaten to ruin everything. "It's only ever been my desire to see you safe from harm, whether it be from those around you or yourself. You need not use some imaginary threat from me as moral justification to live with a lover, Mrs. Strong."
She rolls her eyes and pensively shakes her head and looks away.
"Continue on, please."
And like he'd said nothing, she picks up where she left off and tells him that the Justice did not like her one bit, didn't he know? He did not but he pretended like he did and she goes on. Well, shortly after that distasteful scene the Major ran up the stairs to her and her story becomes a little short on detail conveniently but he patiently allows her to finish. According to Mrs. Strong, the Major had her pack a bag and leave quickly as he did not know what was going to happen but knew it was no longer safe for her there. And that was her story.
The Colonel takes what she said in silence. He thinks for a moment. He asks her, "Did he ask you if the accusations were true?"
"No."
"No? Why wouldn't he?"
"I don't know, he didn't believe it because he knows I'm not."
"Oh now that is interesting," he softly laughs. He can only imagine Hewlett's reservedly crushed countenance upon discovering he was chasing the skirt of a disobedient little rebel that he was bound to end up sending to the gallows. And if she is telling the truth, it turns out he could not even bring himself to ask her if her betrayal was true. Tragic tale indeed. A single stoic tear surely flowed from the Major that day.
The Colonel's day so far, on the other hand, continues on to throb with the ecstatic joy of docking fully at the shores of Eden.
"So that's why he sent you out into the wild to die, so he didn't have to kill you himself. How truly touching of our dear Major."
"Not at all," she snaps and pulls her blanket tighter around her shoulders.
He raises a hand. "My apologies. In any case, whatever his intentions, you're alive and safe now. Thanks partially to him, I suppose."
"He saved me."
The Colonel cocks his head. "How."
"He let me go."
"He just let you go."
"Yes."
He slits his eyes and pulls his mouth flat and nods. "Alright," he says, not pushing it any further.
After a long pause she says, "He is dead, isn't he."
"Hewlett?" He surely could not be that blessed. Only if this were the happiest day of life a man could ever be permitted on the terrestrial earth.
"Abe Woodhull."
"Ah." He pauses in disappointment, letting the automatic ire that uncontrollably combusts in his very soul upon the sound of that name flare brightly and then sputter out. "You're interested in what I have to say now then I take it?"
She nods.
"I made some inquiries and from what I have found out, it seems Mr. Woodhull's rebel friends came to break him out of a sugar house. Naturally, he did not get very far."
He goes on to explain that it would have been better for all involved, saving countless amounts of paperwork and time, if he would have just confessed to begin with. Having the enemy as your savior does not tend to look favorably upon one's claims of innocence.
She rests her face in her hands. Her voice cracks as she asks, "How do I know you're not lying to me."
"Is it so hard to believe? Or simply you don't want to?"
"I don't understand. How did this happen? Why would they do something so reckless?"
"As I can tell you from personal experience, the Continental Army has not one shred of professionalism or humanity to it. Not hard to believe they led their own to slaughter, just as they abandoned you to the same fate."
She looks at him with hurt eyes and then back between the lantern and then to the woods. Perhaps she had not until that point realized the strange irony that if it were not for the maddening, damning love she conjured in two enemy officers she would have no one to protect her from the enemy itself.
"No one abandoned me."
"No, of course not."
Avoiding her unnerving gaze he tells her to get ready they were soon to leave and he reopens his book and finishes writing the names he could remember and then closes the book and places it on top of the others. He folds up the list and places it in his coat pocket. He also makes a mental note to actually attend to the financial papers his regimental agent sent to him for his approval weeks ago as his lie had just reminded him of it. He stands up and he groans at the stiffness in his leg and spine and begins to pack up their temporary rest stop. The other men follow his lead.
She takes a deep breath and sighs. She looks up to him and their eyes touch. "What are you going to do with me, tell me, please."
Rolling a blanket he says, "I already told you. I will protect you."
"That's not what I asked."
"Then what are you asking."
She sighs. "Am I your prisoner? Or—"
He had not really thought of what label this arrangement would be named. But he knows that the delicate balance of this venture depends on her full participation in the deceit by being kept in utter terror and submission at the consequences of disobeying him. She will have to be both prisoner and fugitive, as he will have to be some coordinated mixture of captor and well-meaning traitor.
What could be perceived as possible treason on the outside was anything but, and surely when all settles, vindication will be made through his honorable treachery. Since the days of the great Empires, a victorious commander and his men, after surviving through insurmountable odds and through indescribable horrors, would take his enemy's cities with steel and flame, the people made slaves, the gold and riches plundered, and then the blood fueled battalions forced and thrusted their way through their feminine captives. This was considered righteous warfare from the spear tipped glory of Rome to the population erasing Mongols. An earned reward, this unleashed hedonistic indulgence and cruel show of power had been. The Mohammedans even have it written in their holy war book, divine commands that give measure and rule of how the warriors are to split their share of plunder. Even details on how to take pleasure in one's conquest of women, girls and tender bodied boys, so thoughtful was their god.
So in such a hemisphere of civilization and era of gentlemanly war, surely the use of one's authority over the safety of one woman, held not like a captive for the rape queue but like a princess caught in an usurper's scam and being hidden from all those who seek to defile and subjugate her shivering pale body before their lecherous conspirators, be seen as being a noble use of office? How could any sane man argue for the ill-use and destruction of a delicate lady, whose only crime was to be abused by so many, tricked into wicked men's deceits and plots which they thus then abandoned her for? To risk one's own position and life to defend the life and honor of a maiden was the noblest of deeds dating back to his fine ancestors' chivalrous and virtue burdened knights of yore. The self-sacrificial role of defying the rules of man to defend the virtues of woman.
Virtue debases in justifying itself, even to oneself justifying his own.
"Yes."
"You'll hide me? From your own side?"
"Who better to do so?"
She thinks for a moment. "So, you don't care that I am your enemy? You, who burns and murders rebels as sport?"
"Sport? Don't be so dramatic. And I thought you weren't a rebel?"
"You don't believe me when I tell you I'm not."
"Of course not."
"So then? You truly do not care?"
He stops and looks straight out and studies the shapeless darkness. Needing not more than a fraction of any amount of time, a second, a nanosecond, a miniscule register on any scale, to know with the utmost certainty that even if he awoke to her straddled across his chest and with her entire strength thrusting a steel blade down into his heart, he would look upon her with mirthless adoration and spend his last breaths knowing it (love, his love, his desire, his need, all of it) was always hopeless, but still not help but notice the way her delicate lips tremble with despair and anger and the charming way her small hands squeeze the grip as she uses her weight to sink it deeper into his ventricles. (Hard and quick, my love.)
"No," he says. He turns around and looks down at her. "Does that surprise you?"
"But, wait," she says not answering, her features working over what to say, "won't you get in trouble?"
"I'm committing quite a damning crime of treason, aren't I," he says softly laughing while shoving his books and papers messily into the leather saddlebag and snapping it shut. "I may join you in the gallows, my dearest madam, if this does not pan out."
"Why are you doing this."
He faintly smiles and shakes his head. Under his breath he sighs, "Do you truly not know."