The Daily Brief

All righty then – I pounded out a couple of chapters of Deep in the Heart – the book after the next, while in California and undistracted by the internet. The release of Daughter of Texas is coming along nicely, BTW. I have a couple of events coming up in the next few months which will hopfully goose my royalty checks to seriously meaningful levels. Previous chapter of Deep in the Heart is here…

Chapter 4 – The Ranger from Bexar

Around mid-morning on a day in the second week of September, Hetty was just finishing the breakfast dishes, while Margaret was rolling out piecrust; the early apples were ripe for the harvest. Papa and the boys had brought in the first of several baskets, overflowing with them, and the two women were discussing what to do with them once Margaret had made three or four pies pies.

“Apple-butter, I think,” Margaret had just said, and Hetty agreed. “We’ll start today, for there will be more by tomorrow.” There came a pounding upon the door, and Margaret took her hands from the rolling pin, and dusted flour from her hands on her apron. “Oh, why doesn’t whoever just open it and come in – it’s unlatched. Jamie! Peter!” she called, “Can you see who it is at the door?” She cast a glance out of the long window at the end of the kitchen, which looked out upon the farmyard and the apple trees beyond. Her father and the two oldest boys were at work there. There was no sign of her younger sons. Just as the person outside pounded again on the door, Margaret heard Jamie’s voice in the hallway, and the door opening. Within a moment, Jamie appeared in the kitchen, wide-eyed with awe,

“It’s Uncle Carl,” he said and Margaret gasped. So it was indeed – her younger brother, filling up the doorway behind her son; a tall young man with the wheat-pale fair hair that was the mark of the Becker kin; Saxon-square to the bone. His rough work trousers and leather hunting coat were covered in trail-dust, and the lines of weariness in his face made him appear older than his twenty-two years.

“H’lo, M’grete,” he said only. His eyes were the same calm and placid blue that they had been when he was a child; the only feature of him which had remained unchanged.

“Carlchen!” Margaret cried and flew to him, flinging her arms about him in a joyous embrace. “Oh, my – you have gotten so thin! Where have you come from this time – from Bexar? Will you stay at home with us for a bit? At least remain for supper. Hetty and I are making pies from the first of the apples – now fortunate that is your favorite!”

“I can’t, M’grete,” he answered, and the gravity of his expression drew her attention. “Jack sent me. I rode through the night to raise the alarm. I must go, as soon as Ward has raised enough volunteers, and guide them to our camp. The Mexes have invaded again, and their army holds all of Bexar. ”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” Hetty gasped; her face was ashen, the freckles on it standing out as stark as paint-splatters. A tin plate dropped from nerveless fingers and fell with a clatter to the floor. Jamie stared, his eyes as round as a baby owlets’ – part hero-worship of his uncle, part distress at the reaction of the adults to this dreadful news. Margaret stepped back, gasping. “How has this happened?” She demanded, “When – and how did you come to escape? You and your Ranger company, you were garrisoned in Bexar, weren’t you?”

“So we were,” he yawned hugely, and pulled a chair aside from the table, slumping into it as if he were tired to his very bones – which he would be, if he had ridden the eighty or so miles from Bexar. “Might I have something to eat, M’grete? I haven’t eaten for two days.” Hetty was turning the dish-towel into knots, between her hands, the plate still on the floor at her feet where she had dropped it.

“An’ what of them as were there for the court?” she asked, and Margaret’s own memory seemed to leap like a started hare. “Yes, what of the district court in session,” Margaret asked, urgently. “For one of our boarders, Dr. Williamson – he was in Bexar to have a civil suit heard. He left last week.”

“Then he’s still there.” Her brother answered in short sentences, as if he were too exhausted to do any more. “They surrounded the town. Took every white man as a prisoner; judge, district attorney . . . lawyers, witnesses and the lot. Lawyer Maverick – he was caught as well. John-Will Smith – the mayor – he escaped, the only one. His wife’s family helped him. He saw everything from the roof of his father-in-law’s house. It’s an army, right enough. Not bandits and Comancheros. They even brought a band with them. Came straight into town at dawn under cover of thick fog, set up cannon in Military Square, and fired a shot. Woke up the whole town all at once, so John-Will said.” Looking at his eyes, Margaret saw that it was true. Carlchen had never lied to her. Her own anger began to smolder into open flames; anger that Lopez de Santa Anna – that vile, treacherous butcher – would dare send his armies into Texas once again. He would dare send his gold-braided officers and his convict armies into Texas, to pillage and murder, then accept parole and sue for peace . . . and six years later to dare do it again.

“What do they intend? Are they coming here?” Carl shook his head.

“I don’t know, M’grete – and not if Cap’n Jack has anything to say, and General Sam, too.” He yawned again, and Margaret abruptly returned to that matter which she could do something about. She set a plate before him, with a fork and spoon to one side of it, fetched half a loaf of bread from the pie-safe, and began cutting slices from it. There was a quarter-wheel of cheese, some fresh butter from the churning of yesterday’s cream, and of course, plenty of apples. Jamie brought two from the nearest basket, with the air of a page doing service to his sworn liege lord. He lingered at Carl’s elbow, a worshipful expression on his face.

“Hetty – bacon and eggs; the fire is hot enough, surely? Ham . . . Papa has just begun smoking the hams, but I am sure we can find some cured sausage, if you would like.”

“Whatever you have in a hurry. I’m too hungry to be particular.” Her brother was already wolfing bread and cheese. Margaret spared a covert look at him, as she busied herself about the kitchen. No – he was no longer the soft-spoken boy that he had been once; a boy reserved to the point of silence when in the presence of strangers. He had risen to the rank of sergeant more than a year ago; he seemed surer of himself, confident and capable, but still quiet about it. Now he took a small knife from the top of his boot to slice another piece of cheese with – not that wicked-sharp brass-backed hunting knife, which hung from a belt around his waist, along with a brace of long-barreled pistols. With his mouth full, he added, “I turned m’horse out in the paddock with old Bucephalus. The boys promised they’d rub him down, and bring him some corn. He needs a rest more’n I do.” Hetty was busying herself about the stove, where bacon was already sizzling briskly in the pan. Margaret finished crimping the top of the first piecrust, and her brother added, “Can I have some of that, when it’s baked, M’grete?”

“You may have all of it, if you like,” she answered, “If you are staying long enough.” Unbidden, Hetty opened the oven door, so that Margaret could slide in the first pie. Rolling out another round of dough, Margaret continued, “Then tell us – how did you escape the Mexicans, Carlchen?” She waited for the answer: her brother would not willingly submit to being a prisoner of the Mexicans ever again. By a merest chance and the action of their brother Rudi in stepping before the Mexican’s guns, Carl had survived the massacre of Texian prisoners at the Goliad. If Margaret knew anything in the world with more certainty, it was that her brother would not endure captivity or confinement for a second time.

“We didn’t escape from town, if that’s what you mean.” He swallowed a mouthful of cheese and bread. “We had never been caught there to start with. There were rumors. Seemed that there were fewer of them than usual – but everyone who had heard and passed them on . . . they weren’t the usual rumor-passing sort. Jack thought that was strange. He was asked to go on a scout – took me and four of the fellows. Some of us went along the Old Spanish road – half a day’s ride, both directions, the same with the Sabine Road and the Gonzales Road. No sign of anything out of the ordinary, no one we spoke to had seen anything strange, either. But when we returned – there were Mex soldiers at every way into town. They had not come by a known road, M’grete. They made their own, so as to come around from the west without being seen. We have a camp of our own, on Salado Creek, just north of town. Sometimes we don’t want prying eyes to see where we are headed, what we are doing. So we went there and John-Will met us at mid-morning, told us what had happened. The general in charge is a Frenchie soldier of fortune. A hard case, but decent enough. He has two thousand men, John-Will said. Pioneers. Cavalry. And artillery – I don’t know how many pieces. We didn’t stick around long enough to take a count. There weren’t but about fifty of our men in town; they came for court, not for a fight. Some of them put up one at first, but it wasn’t any good. They were outnumbered, and the Mexes could have leveled the place with their cannon anyway. General Woll agreed to treat them as prisoners.”

“Treat them to a Santa Anna quarter, no doubt!” Margaret felt sick at the thought of Dr. Williamson as a prisoner, sick with helpless fury, He was so kind, so gentle and absent-minded; surely they would spare a doctor from execution! “Why are they doing this to us, Carlchen? Why?”

“Because they can,” her brother answered, calmly biting off another mouthful of bread and cheese. His eyes were as blue and unclouded as the skies outside the kitchen window. “And what they can do, they will, sooner or later. It’s like the Comanche. They talk peace when it suits and when it gets them something. I reckon they mean it sincere at the time. And when it suits them and gets what they want by going on the warpath, why, they’ll do that without thinking twice. Don’t mean nothing, what they said last week, or last year.” Carl appeared quite unruffled by this fresh Mexican treachery, of naked war and invasion brought down upon them once again by the vile dictator Santa Anna. That very serenity was bracing to Margaret.

“Of the gods we believe, and of men we know – that what they can do, they will,” Margaret quoted from her husband’s copy of Thucydides. “So, little brother – they have done it now. What happens next?”

Carl smiled, reassuringly. “Don’t worry, M’grete; Jack and General Sam will sort them out, once they get to hear of it. Jack sent us flying in all directions with messages. It’ll be like the Plum Creek fight all over again.”

“Yes, but in the meantime the Comanches sacked Victoria and burned Linnville to the ground even before the ranging companies gathered!” Margaret answered, “And what will happen this time? This is a proper army, not a war party of Comanche!”

“Well, the Penateka haven’t come back, have they?” Carl answered, reasonably. “They learned a hard lesson – and mebbe it’s time to teach Santy Anna another. Or remind him again. Really, M’grete, he’s awful forgetful.”

“No, I think he remembers well enough,” Margaret answered her voice bitter with anger and memory. Lopez de Santa Anna’s last incursion into Texas had cost her a home, the lives of her mother and dear friends, as well as a certain peace of mind. “This time he sent a flunky rather than risk his own precious skin!”

“True enough,” Carl’s good-natured expression dimmed slightly. “I don’t reckon he would be let live, if we captured him in his drawers again. He and the nearest tree and a coil of good rope would meet up – no matter what General Sam might say.” He yawned again, just as Hetty brought a clean plate and the pan of eggs and bacon, still sizzling and popping with fat. Hetty tipped them onto the plate and set it before her brother; Carl caught up a piece of bacon in his fingers, and then dropped it. “That’s hot!”

“Straight from the stove,” Margaret answered, “At my table, most use a fork to eat.” Just at that moment, Papa came in the door, a carrying-yoke over his shoulders and a bushel-basket of apples hanging from each end. Horace and Johnny followed, lugging another basket between them. Margaret’s breath caught in her throat, anticipating a dreadful scene, something like the last time Carl had come home and encountered Papa; but Papa merely dropped the baskets with a groan and a grunt. He glanced at his youngest son and then looked away without a change of expression. It was as if Carl were not there at all. For his own part, Carl took up the fork that lay next to the plate and took a bite of scrambled eggs.

“Papa, the Mexicans have invaded and taken Bexar,” Margaret said, her heart in her very throat. “Carlchen has brought a message from his captain.”

“What’s it to me?” Alois Becker grumbled, in German “They’re all Mexicans in Bexar anyway – let them have the joy of entertaining those fatherless sons of whores. Tell me when they cross Shoal Creek – then maybe I’ll give a damn. Come along, lads. There’s work to be done, not stand around gawking at this wastrel son of mine.” He gestured to the boys to follow him and stumped out of the room; Margaret heard the door fall closed behind them. It cost her some effort to look towards her little brother. Papa’s words still had the ability to hurt, like the slash of a knife. Margaret had long willed herself to move past feeling them, to think of them as nothing more than a human sort of lightening and thunder, a cold blue Norther, or a spring-time flood. His words had no more effect on her, but she was certain that it was Papa’s words and the careless cruelty in them which had first driven Carlchen away – and what had kept him away ever since. She need not have worried. From the untroubled manner in which her brother was still forking up mouthfuls of eggs and bacon, it was clear that he had also moved to that point, sometime in the last six years that he had spent as a ranger. He only smiled, very slightly and answered softly in the same language,

“The old man hasn’t changed a bit, has he, M’grete. Nice to know that some things remain always the same.”

“He is not ‘the old man,’” Margaret insisted. “You should speak of him with respect, Carlchen. He is our father . . . and he is not a bad man.” Her brother chewed thoughtfully, as he shook his head, and swallowed another mouthful before answering.

“No? And a pool of water poisoned with alkali is not good to drink from, although it still looks like water. He got us all – you, me, Rudi – on the body of Mama, but he was no more a real father to you and me than a wild mustang is a real father to the foals he sires on any handy mare.”

“But he is still our father,” Margaret was shocked out of countenance, and glad that this very improper conversation was being carried on in German, that Hetty was uncomprehending, as she gathered up the clean dishes and began putting them away. “We owe him all respect for that.” Carl shrugged indifferently.

“You respect him then, M’grete. To my way of thinking, your husband was more a father to me than the old man. So was Jacob Harrell, who taught Rudi and me how to hunt. Trap Tallmadge – the ranger sergeant in my first company – he took more pains over me than the old man ever did. He’s poison, M’grete, like an alkali spring. If your boys were mine, I’d keep him far from them.”

“You would have no need to worry about Papa’s influence on my sons, if you came home a little oftener, gave up rangering. Perhaps if you took up a trade and settled down . . .” Margaret suggested, stung by his words. She had long believed that the company of her sons might soften Papa a little, bring him to take an interest in a younger generation, and now to have Carlchen suggest that such an influence would do them harm! In all the travails of the past few years, Carl had not been there; he did not have any idea of what she had to face, every day and every hour.

But now he was already shaking his head. “No, M’grete . . . I could not. Rangering what I am best fit for, and I like it . . . out there. It’s not complicated. Other people make things complicated.”

“Ah. I see – get on your horse and ride away into the wilderness, where everything is simple. Leave someone else to raise the children, nurse the sick and dying, bake bread, build houses and look after the wellbeing of families . . . which makes things all so very, very complicated. Well, you have that luxury, little brother, but I do not. I must cope with the complications.” Carl shrugged, apparently little affected by her words.

“And someone must fight the Indians . . . and now the Mexes, while you bake bread and darn Papa’s shirts. May as well be me, M’grete. I’m good at it.” He calmly scraped up the last of the scrambled eggs, but then his voice turned grave with sympathy. “Lawyer Maverick – he told me last year that Race died. Consumption, he said it was. Someone told him. A friend, I guess. He had friends all over, didn’t he? Race, I mean. I’m sorry about that, M’grete. I heard so late, didn’t make any sense to come home, then. Anyway, I’m sorry that you lost him. He was a good man, where it counted.”

“Yes, he was,” Margaret answered. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell her brother about the other matter, of Race’s Boston marriage, and of the settlement from his family. Someone ought to know, she thought – someone of her blood, but immediately she also recalled General Sam’s advice about scandal and of the matter being no ones’ business but hers and Races.’ Instead she said, “Do you want anything more, Carlchen. The pie will not be done for another hour, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll wait,” He still had that sweet half-smile from his childhood, converted into another yawn. “I’m sorry, M’grete. I rode through the night. Is there a place where I might sleep for a few hours, until the volunteers are ready to ride out?”

“In the front parlor,” Margaret answered, “On the day-bed.” He rose from the table, still yawning, and by the time Margaret brought a blanket from her bedroom, he was already fast asleep, sprawled on the daybed without even having taken off his boots, although he had taken off the belt that held his holstered weapons, and hung it close at hand over the back of the day-bed.

“What are we to do then?” Hetty asked, when she returned to the kitchen, and began rolling out pie dough. Margaret deftly turned the rolled-out crust around the rolling pin, and draped it over the next pie-pan. She began cutting the edges with a pastry-knife, before she answered,

“Begin making apple butter, I think. Oh, you mean – what do we do if the Mexicans come? I won’t leave here, Hetty. I expect that we shall have to bury the valuables, and hide the horses. Papa may also take his musket and find a place in the woods to hide, if he does not want to go with the fighting militia. Surely, you are not frightened of them, Hetty?”

“No Marm – I am not,” Hetty answered, sturdily.

“Good,” Margaret piled the piecrust full of peeled apple quarters, and emptied a measure of coarse sugar over it all, with a pinch of cinnamon and a twist of nutmeg. She rolled out another round of crust, before continuing. “They are eighty miles away. Before very much longer, our men will be taking up a place between us and them, among the woods and the hills and behind a river. Two thousand soldiers is not very many.” She draped the top crust over the rolling pin, using that as a wand to carry and lay the tender crust over the mounded-up apples. “Besides,” she added, “I am resolved never to leave my home again, Hetty. I would rather face them down, than take to the roads and live like a beggar in all weather. I do not think they would scruple to harm us – for any insult given will be repaid in blood. I believe Lopez de Santa Anna knows this well, or if he does not, his soldiers will learn.”

The making of apple butter that afternoon was often disrupted, for there was a constant stream of men and women coming to the house. Margaret finally tasked Jamie and Peter with sitting on the front steps and to fetch her from the kitchen whenever they saw someone coming up the hill, rather than have the noise of their knocking on the door waken her sleeping brother. She need not have bothered, for he slept as deeply as one nearly dead for hours, in spite of the footsteps of people coming and going, of hushed voices and Papa tramping back and forth with baskets of apples, who couldn’t be bothered to pay any mind to her admonitions.

Of course, Mrs. Eberly was one of the first – the storm-crow, as Margaret had privately named her; wherever there was trouble brewing, there was Angelina Eberly, flapping her black wings. She came with a basket of fresh-baked hard-tack biscuits over her elbow, puffing as she climbed the hill. Margaret, already rattled because of the news her brother had brought, had showed her into the kitchen and settled her into Hetty’s rocking chair. Kettles of apple and molasses slowly bubbled away on the stove. Fortunately, Mrs. Eberly was amiable about this omission of conventional courtesy. “I’ve heard already,” she announced, “And brought bread for them as are going. I must say, it sounds bad. I had two more boarders leave today, and Mr. Bullock’s place will be near empty in the next week. And it’s not that they are going south to fight the Meskins, either – they are just plumb running scairt, and running back east with their tails between their legs.” She cast an expert eye around the kitchen, warm and redolent of cooking apples and spices, every one of the copper pots polished until it gleamed like gold. “I can tell, Miz Vining, you ain’t one of them. I know you’ve said so, often enough – but the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. Or in the packing of the wagon.”

“I have confidence in the men of our army,” Margaret said, firmly. “Whereas before we were a state in rebellion, and many of our people were in disarray and disagreement – now we are a sovereign nation. And not one to be violated lightly, and in defiance of the laws which rule the conduct of nations – even such a villain as Lopez de Santa Anna must take notice of those laws now and again, lest Mexico become a pariah among nations. For we are united, this time, under brave and determined commanders!” Mrs. Eberly clapped her hands, “Oh, my dear – bravely said! And I am heartened, Miz Vining, truly I am! My family and I, we will remain, as well. There are a few of us, happy and proud to stand fast in this dark time…”

“ ‘That he which hath no stomach to this fight,’” Margaret quoted from that play of Shakespeare’s which her husband had come to love the best of all, “‘Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse; We would not die in that man’s company, That fears his fellowship to die with us . . . ”

“Oh, dear, I hope that it won’t come to that!” Mrs. Eberly’s cheer suddenly turned to apprehension.

“It won’t,” Margaret’s brother said, confidently; he appeared in the kitchen door, walking as silently as a ghost. He had seemingly been refreshed by the brief hours that he had slept. “For Captain Jack leads us, and he is the boldest and canniest of all. Better than that, he will never surrender. And best of all, many of us have these at our side.” He unshipped one of the long pistols from the holster on his belt, a matte-metal thing with a long and slender barrel, but which had an oddly large cylindrical attachment where the trigger and flintlock should have been. Margaret, Hetty and Mrs. Eberly looked at it with puzzled, yet curious expressions, and Carl continued with the slightly exasperated air of a man explaining something to women which he would have assumed did not need explanation. “It’s a Colt repeating pistol – five shots without needing to reload. We fight from horseback. The State bought them for the Navy, but they work very much better for us, you see.” He stowed the long pistol away, and continued his explanation. “Jack – that is, Captain Hays – he trained us to fight as the Comanche do. Like the Mex lancers did, only better. To scout and harry and ambush the enemy, to go a long way without being seen. The Mexes, and the Comanche, they still think this land is theirs. They’re wrong – we own it now, day and night, plain, river and forest. They just need reminding, now and again.”

“Well, I am very glad to hear of that!” Mrs. Eberly exclaimed, and Hetty looked gratified. Margaret’s spirits rose, fractionally. Perhaps there was hope after all, that the prisoners would be freed, and the Mexican troops sent fleeing back over the Nueces.

Carl and the assembled militiamen departed without ceremony, late that afternoon; grim and purposeful men, their saddlebags bulging with food and ammunition, their saddle-holsters bristling with arms. Margaret watched, as her brother moved among them, unhurried and quietly authoritative. They were moving light and fast, with two pack-mules laden with even more supplies; her brother planned that they should be at the Salado camp within three days. Margaret’s heart was wrung – she had seen this so many times before! The only solace she might take in this prospect was that there were no young boys among the riders this time, only men and many of them battle-hardened and wily, veterans of the first fight for Bexar, back in the beginning, of the mad scramble to withdraw from the west, after the fall of the Alamo, veterans of San Jacinto, of Plum Creek and a thousand small skirmishes with Mexicans soldiers and Indians alike. And General Sam – he would not let this insult pass, indeed he would not. And with that, Margaret would have to be content.

It was little more than a week before Margaret and those still remaining in Austin received certain news of what had happened at Bexar. The Mexicans had withdrawn – that was the best of it. The Texian companies from the lower Colorado settlements, to include Captain Hays’ Rangers, had lured a large portion of the Mexican force out of Bexar, lured them into a trap among the sandy creek-beds and thickets of mesquite and scrub oaks north of the town. There they fought a sharp skirmish, and sent the Mexicans reeling back . . . but a company of fifty or so volunteers from La Grange, led by Captain Mosby Dawson, had just arrived, and hearing the distant sounds of the fight had advanced to the aid of their comrades. They were overrun by the Mexican cavalry, before they could join the main Texian companies, safely entrenched along Salado Creek. All but fifteen or so were captured alive, the rest being killed in the fight, or upon surrendering. Within days, the Mexican general Woll and his columns of marching men, of cavalry and the heavy cannons had withdrawn from Bexar, retreating slowly back towards the Rio Grande. But he took hostages with him, those men captured in Bexar, and in the skirmishing along Salado Creek. Nonetheless, this invasion had been stopped, and Margaret and her household rejoiced, until a tear-stained letter from Morag arrived; Daniel Fritchie was one of Dawson’s men captured at Salado, and his brother killed.

Worse yet emerged in the next weeks; those prisoners taken in Bexar, those men who had been at the meeting of the district court were not released on the banks of the Rio Grande, as they had been promised by General Woll. Dr. Williamson’s captivity would be of longer duration than merely a few weeks; Margaret fumed when she read of this new treachery in the newspapers, and Hetty wept when she re-read Morag’s piteous letter.

“Oh, Marm – what will she do, then?” she cried, and Margaret answered, practically. “She writes that she is become ill very often, and she cannot rest . . .”

“She must come home to us, of course. It’s the heat,” Margaret had her own suspicious about what was making Morag ill.

“And I will go to fetch her, o’ course,” Seamus O’Doyle looked immediately more cheerful. He had made some adjustment to Morag’s marriage in the past months; Margaret thought that perhaps Hetty had spoken to him bluntly on the subject.

The final blow, when it fell was not completely unexpected: citing the constant danger of hostile incursions from Mexico and from the Indians, General Sam called the Legislature to meet at Washington-on-the-Brazos . . . not at Austin. Margaret was philosophical, at least more so than Mrs. Eberly, who predictably enough was furious. She stumped up the hill to consult with Margaret – or at least, to complain angrily while Margaret listened.

“Who does General Sam think he is?” the Widow Eberly shouted, “And who to those lily-livered men think they are – afraid to come to this place, to do the business required of the nation…”

“They may rightfully fear such, seeing how the men who attended district court were dragged from Bexar as prisoners,” Margaret began; a temporizing statement which was entirely wasted on Mrs. Eberly.

“Fear of a Meskin sojer jumping out of a bush has gelded every one of them!” Mrs. Eberly stormed on, “That drunken old lecher may as well have taken a knife and done it wholesale – I’ll lay any roads that he has gone around, talking up how dangerous it is to all! This will be the ruination of our business, Miz Vining, the ruination of it all!”

“This was a passing emergency, Mrs. Eberly, a passing emergency,” Margaret said, “They were defeated, and have withdrawn over the Rio Grande…”

“Aye, and thanks to our men, men like your brother – and no thanks to General Sam this time! Leave it to our best to take up a musket and defend our homes – what has it come to, that our own leader will not take up his duty here – where we had established our city!”

“I am sure that the legislature will meet here, next time,” Margaret was about to give up being soothing, as it seemed to have little effect upon Mrs. Eberly.

“They had better so,” Mrs. Eberly replied, “For all the offices are here, and the archives safe-guarded in the land office. How can you conduct the business of the country, without the records of matters? Tell me that, Miz Vining!”

“I am sure they cannot,” Margaret sighed. “Truth to tell, Mrs. Eberly – I am not so disappointed in this matter. Poor Dr. Williamson! We shall miss him so dreadfully. Morag is with child, you see – and Daniel Fritchie is a prisoner also. Mr. O’Doyle has gone to Mina with a wagon, to bring her back to stay with us. We hope every day that Daniel will be freed, but she is so young and alone, and they had not been married all that long.”

“Hard times,” Mrs. Eberly said, with a grim expression, “And even harder, for it is our own leader making it harder for us. Aye well – it’s lads like that brother of yours that stand guard for us; aye, I can sleep at night, knowing it’s he and Captain Jack Hays and Captain Caldwell and all . . . what have we done to deserve that devotion, Mrs. Vining?”

“I do not know,” Margaret confessed, “But I think they feel it to be their duty, whether we be open in our gratitude or not.”

“Well, if and when your brother and any of his comrades come to Austin again,” Mrs. Eberly patted her knee fondly, “And you have not the space for them all, I’ll gladly make room – and not charge a bit. It’s the least we can do for our lads, isn’t it?”

“The very least,” Margaret answered, and left unspoken the question – would Carlchen ever return to the family home, when business or war did not take him?

Morag did return, and with tears of mingled joy and distress, as Seamus O’Doyle came around and handed her carefully down from the wagon seat. It was October; the days were drawing shorter, with grey-clouded skies and a chill wind from the north. She ran lightly to Hetty’s embrace; there was no sign outwardly that she was with child, save for the sudden sharpness of the cheekbones in her face. There is a difference in the face of a woman who is bearing, or has born a child, Margaret thought; something elemental, no matter how young she may be herself. She had observed it in the faces of those friends of her girlhood in Gonzales, seen it in her own features – and now it was in Morag’s face, when she turned from her sister to Margaret.

“Dear little girl,” Margaret whispered – what it might have been to have had a younger sister of her own, or a daughter! “I think you have some news to tell us.”

“You knew!” Morag’s face fell, and then her expression danced into laughter, as she hugged Margaret. “But of course, Marm – you know everything!”

“Know of what?” Hetty looked from one to another, slightly baffled, and Margaret marveled at how she and Morag were now united in a sisterhood, despite the years between the two of them, and her long friendship with Hetty – the bond of sisterhood between the mothers of children.

“That I will have a child to console me!” Morag embraced her sister again, “That Danny will return, an’ I will have his son to show him! He knew, o’ course. That was why he went w’ Captain Dawson! ‘Meggie, he said to me – I must do what I must to keep us safe, now more than ever – for th’ matter is most urgent!’ An’ I kissed him an’ said that he must do what he must . . . an’ oh, Marm – what was I thinkin’? For now I want him worse than I have iver wanted him, t’ be at my side . . . “and she dissolved into tears on Margaret’s shoulder. “Moods,” she said over Morag’s shoulder to the much-puzzled Hetty. “It comes with the country of children. That you will have moods and your children alike, and hope that your kin and friends may forgive you for being considerably out of sorts with the world, whilst you are in the process of bearing them.”

“Oh, me ain darlin’!” Hetty cried, with sudden comprehension grown doubly fond. “Come and lay down within! This is happy news, so ‘tis!” She embraced her sister, and walked to the house with her arm around her waist. Meanwhile, Seamus O’Doyle had lifted down the little trunk, which was all that Morag had brought with her.

“It was a good thought, to have her come home to stay with us,” Margaret said to him, “And thank you for bringing her.”

“Aye well, she’s as dear as kin,” Seamus O’Doyle replied. “And Danny is a foine lad – we’ll just see about getting him back, won’t we, Marm? They say in Mina that there’s news that General Sam is raising a large army, to strike at Mexico in hopes of freeing our boys. Is it true, now?”

“It has been in several newspapers,” Margaret answered, “So I think it must be. But I would have known so, even if I had not read of it. I don’t believe we would tamely submit to such a provocation as the taking of Bexar, and the kidnapping of our own citizens.”

“No, we would not,” Seamus O’Doyle agreed, and he had such a thoughtful expression on his face, that Margaret knew he must have already begun thinking about this. “No, we would not, indade.”

Strange but true – General Lopez de Santa Anna’s invasion of Texas in 1836 was not to be the last time that a Mexican Army crossed the border into Texas in full battle array – artillery, infantry, military band and all. Santa Anna may have been defeated at San Jacinto – but for the Napoleon of the west, that was only a temporary setback. In March of 1842 a brief raid by General Rafael Vasquez and some 400 soldiers made a lightening-fast dash over the Rio Grande, while another 150 soldiers struck at Goliad and Refugio. They met little resistance – and departed at speed before Texan forces could assemble and retaliate. All seemed to have quieted down by late summer, though: Texas had ratified a treaty with England, and the United States requesting that Texas suspend all hostilities with Mexico.

It seemed a good time to get on with urgent civic business, such as the meeting of the District Court in San Antonio. There had not been the opportunity to try civil cases for many years; the town was full of visitors who had come for the court session: officials, lawyers and litigants. Court opened on September 5th – but within days rumors were flying of another Mexican incursion. Such rumors were cheerfully dismissed – not soldiers, just bandits and marauders. Just in case, though, local surveyor John Coffee Hays – who already had a peerless reputation as a ranger and Indian fighter – was sent out to scout with five of his men. They saw nothing, having stayed on the established roads; unknown to them, one of Santa Anna’s favorite generals, a French soldier of fortune named Adrian Woll was approaching through the deserted country to the west of San Antonio, with a column of more than 1,500 soldiers – as well as a considerable assortment of cannon.

Under cover of a dense fog bank on the morning of September 11th, Woll’s army marched into San Antonio, with banners flying and a band playing. Having blocked off all escape routes, the General had a cannon fired to announce his presence. There was some sharp, but futile resistance, before surrender was negotiated. General Woll announced that he would have to take all Anglo-Texian men in San Antonio as prisoners of war; this included the judge, district attorney, assistant district attorney, court clerk, court interpreter, every member of the San Antonio Bar save one, and a handful of litigants and residents, to a total of fifty-five. They were kept prisoner – after five days they were told they must walk all the way to the Rio Grande, but they would then be released. Sometime during this period, the-then Mayor of San Antonio, John William Smith, managed to escape and send word of what had happened to the nearest town, Gonzales.

John Coffee Hays and his scouts had also managed to elude capture upon their return to town. The word went out across Texas for volunteers to assemble; two hundred came quickly from Gonzales and Seguin, led by Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell, and fought a sharp skirmish on Salado Creek. A company of 53 volunteers recruited by Nicolas Mosby Dawson in LaGrange or along the road to join Caldwell’s volunteers along the Salado Creek north of San Antonio, ran into the rear-guard of Woll’s army, a large contingent of cavalry and a single cannon as they were withdrawing to San Antonio. Dawson’s company was surrounded; in the confusion of surrendering, firing broke out again. Only fifteen of Dawson’s company survived, to join with the San Antonio prisoners on their long walk towards the Rio Grande.

Once there the prisoners were informed that they would be taken into Mexico. Some were paroled and permitted to leave as a personal favor to the US Consul in Mexico City. Others escaped, but most of the San Antonio prisoners were kept for two years at hard labor in Perote Prison, in the state of Vera Cruz, until an armistice was signed between Mexico and Texas in March of 1844.

The site of the Dawson Massacre is marked by a granite monument, where the present-day Austin Highway crosses Salado Creek. The first case to be heard at that momentous court session was never settled; Dr. Shields Booker brought suit against the former mayor of San Antonio, Juan Seguin, for a payment of a 50-peso fee. Dr. Booker died in Perote Prison. The lawyer representing him, Samuel Maverick, was paroled after six months in Perote, and returned to Texas.

(This incident will feature in the book currently being written – as the man who will become my heroine’s second husband is one of those taken prisoner to Mexico. “Daughter of Texas”, the story of her first marriage and her various experiences during the Texas War for Independence will be released April 21, 2011 – although I am taking advance orders here, for delivery the week before.) And anyone who orders a set of the Adelsverein Trilogy through the website will have their name put in a drawing for a free copy of “Daughter of Texas.”

All right then – for Proud Veteran and all the rest of my HF fans out there; the first chapter of the book after the next book – which got to be so substantial that I broke it into two parts. This is the first chapter of the book after the next – which will be out … well, about a year from now. No, I do not have a problem with writer’s block. Why do you ask?

Deep In the Heart: Chapter 1 – Widow’s Weeds

Early in the year of 1841, Margaret Becker Vining received condolence visits in the front parlor of the house she had long thought of as her own, since her father, Alois, had long yielded up the management of it to his formidable daughter. The front parlor was a room longer than wide, with tall windows on two sides, which allowed the winter sun to fill the room with the mellow golden light of afternoon. It was a plain room with clean and whitewashed walls, adorned with only the shelves of books that her late husband had prized, and yet set with comfortable chairs and a day-bed piled with pillow-cushions covered with blue and yellow patchwork. Margaret – tall and slender, with hair the color of ripe wheat done in a long braid wrapped coronet-wise around her head – was dressed in unrelieved black, the weeds of a new-made widow. Her first caller was likewise dressed all in somber black, but the color of deep mourning did not flatter her as well as it did Margaret.

“The Doc came to attend on Mr. Eberly in his final illness,” remarked Margaret’s visitor, by way of commencing her call, “And he told us you had received word that your man died in Boston. Sorry to hear of it, Miz Vining. He seemed like a real nice man. I reckon you miss him something turrible. Schoolteacher, was he?”

“Yes, Mrs. Eberly,” Margaret answered. “We had been married more than ten years.”

“I thought I recollect him from San Felipe, when he first started a school there.” Angelina Eberly sighed, reminiscently. She was dumpy, capable and shrewd, some twenty years older than Margaret, who rather liked her even though she was a rival of sorts in the business of keeping a boarding house in the tiny frontier capitol city of Texas. “My first husband and I, we had just started our place, too. Such a dashing feller, altogether too handsome to be teaching school . . . seemed to be a waste, that he didn’t have no ambition a’tall.”

“My husband only wanted to teach school,” Margaret answered, showing no sign of the grief and resentment that still burned deep within her heart, like the coals of a fire left to smolder overnight. “He came to Texas for his health. He had a weak chest and his doctors told him that for his own sake he must live in a warm climate.” Race Vining had also been escaping a loveless marriage. That was not an uncommon thing among those young men who had rushed into Texas in the mid-1820s, seeking adventure, land and their fortunes in those American colonies in Mexican territories, those settlements set up by entrepreneurs like Stephen Austin and Green DeWitt. Unfortunately, Race Vining had omitted to obtain a divorce from his well-born and well-connected Boston wife before engaging Margaret in marriage. Margaret had loved him well and borne him four sons during all adversities – adversities of war, invasion, sickness and separation – before inadvertently discovering the nature of his existing marriage. It was for the purpose of seeking a divorce, which had finally impelled Race Vining to make that arduous return journey to the East – and he had died of his old malady before achieving that end. Margaret had received a settlement from his horrified family back east, and not yet decided what she would do with it. Her husband’s family appeared to have brought forth only daughters – no sons to carry on their name! But the Texas frontier was far removed from Boston, and Margaret was determined to keep the embarrassment of Race Vining’s bigamy a secret from all, even her sons. She assumed that his Boston family was determined to do the same.

Now Mrs. Eberly continued, “Now I had just five years, with Captain Eberly . . . he was my second husband, o’course. I was married to Mr. Peyton for sixteen year a’fore that, but we had known each other all our lives, bein’ that we were cousins. Like to have broke my heart when he died, but still . . .” She sighed, gustily. “I just cain’t see that I’ll marry again, Miz Vining. I’m set in my ways, an’ accustomed to running my establishment as I see fit. When you’re young an’ pretty, it helps to have a man around the place, stand up for ye, remind the boarders an’ customers to keep a civil tongue. It don’ much matter when yer as old as I am, Miz Vining. Then ye can do as yer pleases.”

“I do not think I shall remarry.” Margaret answered – although the old black witch woman who had told Margaret her fortune on her twelfth birthday had promised that she would marry once for love and again for friendship. The utter humiliation of Race’s confession to her and the long silence after he had departed for Boston still hurt Margaret dreadfully. She had done with heartbreak, with lies told for love and for men who did things for convenience.

“A man about the place is handy to have, now and again,” Mrs. Eberly conceded generously, “And you’re young enough still – hain’t lost any of your looks – but as long as your old Pa is around, I don’t think you’d be too much bothered.”

“I do not think I could endure the sorrow of love regained and then the loss of it . . . but I have considered taking up weaving, like Penelope,” Margaret answered; Mrs. Eberly looked blank and Margaret stifled a small sigh. “The wife of Ulysses, plagued by unwanted suitors in his absence; she promised to marry when her weaving was done, but she picked out at night all she had accomplished during the day.” Having had the allusion explained to her, Mrs. Eberly laughed in frank amusement, which gratified Margaret. She was becoming rather tired of being treated as if she were made of spun glass, as if she would dissolve into a welter of tears if anyone so much as cracked a smile.

Now Mrs. Eberly continued, “All that Penelope woman would have needed was to have your Pa sit in the corner and glower at them. I can’t help thinking now that he’s a man who might have done good to marry again! It would have improved his temper, at any rate.”

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Eberly – he took the loss of my mother so very hard,” Margaret replied. “And the death of my brother Rudi with Colonel Fannin at the Goliad . . . Pa has never been the same since. But then he was always a difficult man.” What Margaret would not say was that her father, Alois Becker, had always been proud and hot-tempered. He doted on the older of his two sons while scorning the younger, and quarreled frequently with men who might otherwise have been his friends. Only his wife, Margaret’s mother, had been able to soften his harsh nature into some pretense of amity with his fellows. Her death of the bloody flux during the terrible ‘runaway scrape’ had removed that effective governance on Alois Becker’s ill-temper. Margaret coped by serenely ignoring his occasional bitter outburst, reasoning that Pa was what he was, and paying any mind to him was a fruitless exercise. In any case, she had the house to manage and her sons to bring up properly. Now Mrs. Eberly looked ready to settle in for a good enjoyable gossip.

“Have you many gentleman guests, now? There’s been so much talk now, about Meskin bandits raiding over the Nueces – can you believe they have the nerve – that people are frightened about staying in Austin because of the danger. I’ve lost all my boarders but a handful! I can’t wait until the Legislature comes back to town, and fills up my rooms good and proper. General Sam, he’s staying for a few days, but if it weren’t for him and the missus, I might as well turn over the mattresses and lock the doors.”

“I can’t blame people for being frightened,” Margaret answered. “But I think it would take more than talk to drive me away. I know that it would! We left our home once before, I’d not be leaving again, and I know that my father wouldn’t.”

“Oh, but he was up here when it was still Waterloo, wasn’t he?” Mrs. Eberly fanned herself. “Then he’s accustomed to living out and away from everything. But I tell you straight enough, Miz Vining, we’d be in mortal danger of loosing our livelihood altogether, if General Sam has his way. He never liked having the Legislature meet all the way out here – it was President Lamar who was dead-set upon building a new capitol city, instead of meeting at Columbia or Washington-on-the-Brazos. I have to say that I much preferred Mr. Lamar. He was ever so much a real gent, always polite, never going on a spree!”

“I still have three boarders,” Margaret answered. “Mr. Hattersley the Englishman, Dr. Williamson . . . and Seamus O’Doyle, of course. He is contracted to build the French Legation. And that is still going ahead. I do not think General Sam would be able to move the capitol city away from here, even if he wanted to, now that he has been re-elected.”

“Truth to tell, he’s a canny man,” Mrs. Eberly answered, with an air of dark warning. “Who knows what he really has his mind set on? Myself, I think his wife has something to do with it. She wishes to be settled nearest her kinfolk; she tole me her sister and husband have a big plantation on the Trinity River. Take my word on it – she’s the one who doesn’t wish to be always traveling around, and living all the way out here! Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.”

“General Sam has married?” Margaret was startled. Now that she thought on it, she recalled there had been a bit of gossip floated at her supper-table last year, but as her guests were mostly men, they had very little interest in the marriage of a public figure like Sam Houston – or if they did, their remarks would have been prurient in nature and too unseemly to voice in Margaret’s presence. “I had heard mention of him courting a young lady whose family did not approve, but I thought there was an end to it.”

“No, Mrs. Vining – she defied them, and they went ahead with marrying – last May, it was. Who would have thought it? A little slip of a girl and that drunken old goat, even if he is the hero of San Jacinto, but they seem happy enough.”

“I am very glad for them, then,” Margaret replied with all honesty. “General Sam . . . always appeared to me as one who would be a most devoted husband. I think he is a man who likes the company of women as friends. When we had to leave Gonzales, during the war, General Sam gave orders that the Army wagons should be used to carry away the women . . . especially the widows of those Gonzales men who had gone to the Alamo. At that terrible time, he took the trouble to be kindly. He sat with Sue Dickinson as she told us of what had happened there, holding her hand and weeping openly. I have always had the most generous feelings towards him on that account.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Eberly began drawing her shawl closer around herself, and setting her bonnet at a rakish angle, preparatory to taking her leave, “Well, General Sam can be charming when he wants to be, I’ll give him that. But what he does and says when he has a few drinks – I’d not want to endure being married to him, knowing what I know of life and the didoes he kicked up in Tennessee and among the Cherokee. Well, I’ll be taking my leave now, Mrs. Vining. I just wanted to tell you again, how sorry I was to hear about Mr. Vining and all – leaving you with the boys and all.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Eberly – I appreciate your consideration more than I can say,” Margaret clasped her visitor’s hands briefly, feeling that it really was very kind of Mrs. Eberly to take this time from her unending daily rounds of cooking, cleaning and overseeing the care of her guests.

“That’s all right, my dear,” Mrs. Eberly embraced her fondly, adding, “Now you hear any rumors from your gentlemen about moving the Legislature to anywhere else – you must promise to pass them on to me! A whisper of such doings will affect your business no less than mine, and not for the better.”

She walked with Mrs. Eberly to the front door, once again thinking how very kind everyone had been to her since hearing of Race Vining’s death. She was fortunate to have such friends. Well, that was one of the other things that the witch-woman had promised her; many friends and a large house, aside from the two husbands – but that very few of those friends would truly know her heart. These days, Margaret sometimes felt that she herself didn’t know it, either. She had mourned her husband and her marriage all of last year; now what she was doing was a pretense, a sop to proprieties. Just as she was emerging from the shadow of last year, like a butterfly from a chrysalis – she must make a quiet show of her grief because everyone expected it of her. She had just decided to go change out of her good black dress, and help Morag and Hetty with supper, when Morag put her head around the parlor door saying,

“Oh, Marm – it looks like there’s another visitor for ye; a trap just coming up to th’ door.” Morag was barely sixteen; she and her older sister Hetty worked in Margaret’s house, although Margaret valued them for their companionship almost more than the work that spared her, and gave time to spend with her sons . . . and to sit in the parlor of a winter afternoon and receive visitors. Really, Margaret thought with a pang of regret – Race would have been so proud of her. As she had seen to his needs and nursed him in sickness, he had schooled her in the social graces and in the contents of his books; he was an educated man, and had read widely.

“Is it anyone that you recognize?” Margaret asked, as she resettled the cushions that had been somewhat disarranged by Mrs. Eberly.

“Marm, I think it is General Houston,” Morag breathed, with eyes as wide as saucers. “And there is a lady with him.”

“Oh, my!” Margaret peeped out of one of the parlor’s long windows: yes, there was a trap drawn up on the wagon-way out in front, and her father holding the bridle of the horse that drew it, as General Sam, climbed down from the seat. General Sam exchanged remarks with her father – remarks which sounded casually friendly – or as friendly as anyone could ever be with Alois Becker. It looked as if Alois Becker was about to begin spring plowing, for the team of oxen stood patiently behind him. Then the General turned to hand down a young lady; a young lady in a fashionable dark purple dress and a bonnet whose beribboned brim hid her face. Margaret drew in her breath – at least Papa appeared to be in a good mood, for he was speaking to the General and his lady with a lessening of his usual sour expression.

“It is indeed – well, Mrs. Eberly said that he and his wife were in Austin . . . don’t bother with showing them in, Morag, I’ll meet them at the door.”

“You shall not, Marm,” Hetty popped her head out of the kitchen door as Margaret came from the parlor. “’Tis fitting that you should sit in the parlor an’ receive your guests there, so you should, for you are in mourning for the Young Sir.” Margaret could hear the men’s voices from outside, closer as General Sam approached the steps.

“Very well,” Margaret yielded. Morag was having so much fun, playing the part of a ‘proper maid’ as Hetty had called it, although neither one of the Moylan sisters had any idea of what that actually entailed, other than their long-dead mother’s stories of domestic service in a grand mansion in Ireland some three or four decades since. Margaret sat in the chair that had been her husband’s, her back straight and her hands folded in her lap, although she was aching to take up a piece of mending from the basket at her side.

“General and Mrs. Houston,” Morag announced from the parlor door, and Margaret rose from the chair. Before she had taken more than a few steps, General Sam was within the room, the force of his personality seeming to fill it entirely, at the expense of the woman in the fashionable purple dress clinging timidly to his arm. At once, the General enclosed Margaret’s hands in his, saying,

“Mrs. Vining, we had only just heard of your sad loss! What a tragedy that you would hear of it so late, and be unable to take some small crumbs of comfort in knowing that you ministered to him in his last hours. He must have longed for your loving presence as well.”

“He was with his family,” Margaret answered, suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed with the intensity of General Sam’s concern. He was a tall man, with craggy features and a lion’s mane of hair, and possessed of such personal vitality and energy that people were drawn towards him, like iron-filings to a magnet. His charm was of such a powerful nature that it convinced anyone who held his regard – for that moment – that they were the most important person and fascinating person in the world. “And . . . he had been so often ill, that I was in part prepared for the end.”

“None the less,” General Sam gave her hands a comforting squeeze, and without letting them go, turned to the lady at his side. “I can see that you would have grieved none-the-less, Mrs. Vining. My dear, may I present you to another Margaret? Her late husband, Mr. Vining was long-settled in Texas. He served as a scout all during our retreat to the East, and then in the line in the San Jacinto fight – a brave man and none nobler. I confess that I oft-envied him for the simple wealth of his possessions – his horse, his home and his family,” the General smiled impishly, “and his Margaret, as well – but then I found a very dear Margaret of my own.” He yielded Margaret’s hands and turned to the lady at his side, with a proud and fond expression, and Margaret thought – Oh, General Sam, what have you done? She looks hardly older than Morag and you are more than twice her age! The General’s Margaret was slender and very, very young, with tremulous dark eyes set in pale, regular features and lips that curved in a somber and rather hesitant smile. “May I present my wife, Margaret, to you?”

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Vining.” Margaret Houston’s voice was low and gentle, like a dove – a dove that had been sipping southern honeysuckle, Margaret thought irreverently. “I think it is very sad to do so under the circumstances of a visit of condolence. But then my husband has made so many friends in Texas! I am always pleased to make their acquaintance for myself – but so many of them are men . . .”

“Being in politics and having been the general of an army, he can scarcely avoid that,” Margaret answered, and added the unspoken thought – Besides good friends, he has at least as many enemies and ill-wishers, too – while General Sam chuckled, and remarked, “Never been one for sitting around the drawing room, flirting with the ladies.” “Save now and again,” Margaret Houston added, she and the General exchanged look of wry fondness, as she continued, “But I shall be so very glad to make friends of my own in Texas – but that there are rather more men then women here!”

Margaret thought with some relief; Oh, good. She is not timid at all – merely reserved. Aloud, she said, “So many think of it as the far frontier, Mrs. Houston – a place more suited to men and dogs, than women and horses. I was so pleased to hear of your marriage from Mrs. Eberly. I have always thought that the General was one who well-deserved the reward of a loving marriage and a happy home – as loving and happy as my own with my husband was.”

“Thank you for your good wishes,” General Sam looked inordinately pleased; he and Margaret Houston exchanged another of those fond looks, “I think we’re off to a good start – even if it took a good long time to find my own dear Maggie Lea. A house of our own a-building …”

“I do envy yours,” Margaret Houston confided, as they sat down, “So many books – I had not expected to see so many in one house! Have you read them all, Mrs. Vining?”

Margaret restrained herself from saying snappishly, “Of course I have!” since she had heard this question from practically every visitor that she had Race Vining had entertained from their first days of marriage in Gonzales. Instead, she answered, “I have indeed – my late husband was a schoolteacher. He needed books the way most other men require food and drink. He guided my education himself, even after our marriage.”

“Marvelous,” Now Margaret Houston smiled a smile of genuine pleasure which brought out a pair of dimples. “May I examine your library, Mrs. Vining? I vow I have not seen such a wealth of books since my own schooldays at the Judson Female Institute!”

“Of course,” Margaret answered, and Margaret Lea Houston went to the bookshelves in a rustle of purple silk, just as the door of the parlor opened again.

“I’ve brought the boys to see General Houston, Marm,” Morag said, “For they wouldn’t give us any peace, knowing that he was within the house.”

Margaret’s three older sons stood slightly abashed within the parlor, each of their faces alight with hero-worship: ten year-old Horace, whose likeness and character was his father’s image, Johnny, who was seven and rather timid – and five-year old Jamie who wasn’t. Jamie was fair-haired and big for his age, a true Becker. He was as tall as Johnny and was as bold and brash as the man he had been named for, that James Bowie who had fallen in the Alamo siege, who had also been one of her husband’s good friends.

“Hello boys,” General Sam’s own face lit up, “I see you’ve brought your toy soldiers then,” for Jamie had an armful of his corn-husk toy soldiers. “What sort of game were you playing?”

“We weren’t, sir,” Horace answered with touching dignity, “We were doing chores with Opa, and Miss Hetty said you had come to pay respects on account of Papa.”

“Then I am very pleased to meet you, lad,” General Sam shook hands gravely with all three boys, even Johnny who looked as if he would like to go back to sucking his thumb again, “Your father was a gallant gentleman indeed. He was with us at San Jacinto – I am sure you have heard the story many times.”

“Oh, yes, but not from you, sir!” Jamie spoke up, and Horace answered,

“I saw you then, sir – Johnny and I did. Mama and our friends, we were camped in a wagon close to Harrisburg, and Papa and Opa were gone with Captain Smith. We saw the whole Army march by, and you on a white horse, and Mrs. Kimball and Mrs. Darst told us to look well and remember that we saw the Army of Texas on it’s way to do battle – but we did not see Papa then…”

“He was most likely on a proper scout,” General Sam rumbled, “Or flanking the column at a distance . . . here, let me show you…” In short order, he and the boys were down on the floor – the boys entranced as General Sam demonstrated the proper marching order across the rag-rug, with Jamie’s corn-husk soldiers and Johnny’s toy wooden horses. Margaret and Margaret Lea Houston exchanged amused glances.

“A good general,” Margaret remarked, “And very good with children. He took as good a care of his soldiers as if they were his sons – or so my husband said.”

“I know,” Margaret Lea knelt in a pool of whispering silk, to examine the gilt-lettered backs of the books on the lower shelves. “And I think to myself sometimes, Mrs. Vining, that it is unfair that he will then take such little care of himself, and share his deepest confidence with so very few. Yet he has been my teacher, as much as your husband was yours.”

“He is a great man,” Margaret said honestly, “Perhaps one of the greatest men in Texas. But not entirely without flaws – no man truly is. Even my husband had faults, and I confess that my father has many of them. I have come to think that a wife’s duty is to . . . either ameliorate such faults, or to encourage a husband to rise above them by bettering himself. ”

“I agree with you that the General . . . my husband,” Margaret Lea acknowledged, with earnest determination, “Is a great man – and that my task is to help him become greater still, as he is capable – but to do so humbly. For I do not think he would willingly accept a greater master, unless it was our Lord and Master of all.”

“You have done very well so far,” Margaret observed; really, she did very much like the General’s Margaret. For looking so sweet and shy, she had a spine of steel under that silk, and perhaps they were better matched than appeared so at first. “You have tamed a wily, scarred old tom-cat, the veteran of many battles who has run through at least three or four of his own lives – into being a tame puss who wants nothing more than a bowl of milk and to curl up on a soft cushion before the parlor fire.”

“You think?” Margaret Lea smiled sideways at her, “Oh, he is scarred – some of them dreadful, enough to break your heart to look at and think of the pain it costs him and still does – but he does have plenty of wildness left in him. You have not seen – and I pray you never do – the suit that he first wished to wear to be inaugurated in. All of green velveteen, with a hideous sort of flat Indian turban.”

“All of it?” Margaret asked in disbelief and Margaret Lea nodded. “Oh, what you have spared us, my dear!” and they laughed companionably over the books. Meanwhile, the boys and General Sam were down on their knees on the rag rug; the General demonstrating how the thin line attacked Santa Anna’s Mexican army at San Jacinto – a single rank of corn-husk soldiers, with Johnny’s horses to one side to represent the cavalry, and a pair of thread-spools from Margaret’s mending basket for the two cannon; cast in Cincinnati by a subscription among sympathizers to the cause of Texas freedom and sent at great expense down the river to New Orleans and by sea to Velasco. The afternoon passed with remarkable swiftness, so swift and pleasurable that Margaret was hardly aware of it, until a beaming Morag came into the parlor bearing a tray with a china coffee-pot and cups and plates, and a plate of fresh-baked bread and jam and butter. She brought another plate of it for the boys, who were immediately distracted from their recreation of the great battle by the prospect of something to eat. General Sam dusted off the knees of his trousers and joined his wife and Margaret at the table.

“Fine boys,” he said, with admiration and approval, “This was another reason and cause, my dear, to envy Horace Vining.”

“We shall have our own, in good time,” Margaret Lea answered, with serene confidence, “As they are given to us.”

General Sam took a healthy bite of bread and butter. “And clever, too,” he added. “The youngest – Jamie is it? Now, he is the bold lad; a born soldier, if I ever saw one – and I know the breed well, for I was such a one myself.”

“He is not the youngest,” Margaret said, “That is Peter – but he is only two years old. The saddest thing for me is that Peter was just a baby when my husband went back East. He will not remember his father at all. The other boys – oh, they recall him well and dearly. But Peter will have no recollection of him at all…”

“Save in the hearts of those who thought well of him, and continue to burnish his memory,” General Sam affirmed stoutly, “And will speak of him and his qualities to those who cannot remember at first hand. Dear Mrs. Vining – that is our history, the best and finest of our people – and we must recall them and their noble deeds to those lately born and still unborn! How can we remember what we are, and what we may yet be called to become, if we lack the example and inspiration of our forbearers? Raise your sons with the memory of their noble father and those of his deeds which are most valorous always on your lips.”

And leaving the memory of his most ignoble deed in my heart, Margaret thought. It was the General himself who counseled me in this, saying that scandal will eventually die when gossip has no purchase. He did not ask the reason for my distress, that day when he met me by the riverside, and I was weeping because I had just discovered that Race was married to another woman besides myself. He asked nothing, only listened, and advised that we settle it between ourselves, that it was no one’s business but our own. She met General Sam’s shrewd and sympathetic eye, and knew without a doubt that he also was also recollecting that day.

“Good lads,” General Sam remarked again, “For you, Mrs. Vining, they are an ornament better than any jewels, eh?”

“They are everything to me,” Margaret answered. “My daily care is to see that they are educated well, and take up a profession that their father would have approved. He did not own much property in Texas – only a small town-lot in Gonzales.”

“You should apply for a grant of land in your name, as the widow of a veteran,” The General suggested. Inwardly, Margaret cringed; she would have to file affidavits and statements regarding her status as her husband’s widow. She could not bear the thought of an investigation and what that might reveal.

“I will consider that, when the year is up,” she answered, calmly. “Truly, there is so much land that I fear it is not so much valued. If it were dear, I might value it altogether more. A good town-lot in a prosperous region – that is of more use to me than a thousand acres of wilderness, even if the land is rich and well-watered.”

“You should consider it applying in any case,” General Sam advised. “Even in quantities, land has a value – if not for yourself, then for the boys. It is a pity though – that you must be living so far out at the edge of our settlements, though. Have you never considered moving to a more settled part of Texas, to Galveston or to Harrisburg? Even to Bexar, perhaps.”

“I would not,” Margaret shook her head, “We lived in San Felipe for a time, and then Gonzales with my husband – but this is where we made our home and I have become so fond of it that I would never leave. And after the next Legislative session, I am planning to enlarge the house once again.”

“I fear that it will take a long time for this place to be truly secure,” General Sam answered, and for a moment, Margaret thought that a shadow passed over his face – and that he would say something more, but he did not.

They talked a little while longer, the casual companionable talk of friends, with Margaret realizing with some surprise that General Sam and his Margaret were both well on the way to becoming her friends, friends of the heart. At last, with the afternoon sun dropping low and touching the edges of the trees with gold and silvering the reaches of the distant Colorado, General Sam and his Margaret took their leave. They could not stay to supper, having a previous invitation, and Margaret saw them to the door, thanking them again for their company.

“I think this must be a notable occasion,” she confessed, “A consolation visit – and I have actually been consoled by your presence!”

“It was our profound pleasure,” General Sam answered, with a glint of amusement in his eyes, as he tipped his hat to her, and Margaret Lea’s smile once more revealed her dimples. The trap rolled away, down the long sweep of hillside, between the rows of Alois Becker’s treasured apple trees, with their bare branches holding up the swelling blossom buds to the sky.

Margaret straightened her shoulders, feeling at least a little guilty for having spent the afternoon in the parlor, when there was supper to be prepared. But oh – it had been so pleasant! She had spent the last year under a shadow, and now she felt as if she had come out of it, out into the sunshine again. There was only one small speck of disquiet in her mind – which she could not quite put her finger upon. Something in General Sam’s expression, when she had mentioned expanding the house, after the Legislature next met. He had looked . . . Margaret searched for a word, and could not find it – but his expression was so like Jamie’s, when he had been caught in some mischief and was considering an evasive answer. Yes, that was it; General Sam had some notion in mind, something he knew but did not want to say anything of. He was a man, as her husband had once acknowledged, who played his cards very close to his vest, taking no one into his confidence. And this very day, Mrs. Eberly had said something about rumors of the Legislature meeting elsewhere. Could General Sam – having been reelected as President – now change the capitol city of Texas once again? Just by ordering it? The thought made Margaret most uneasy; General Sam had never liked having the Legislature meet in Austin – too close to the frontier, too vulnerable to Comanche raids, or from Mexico. But she, and Mrs. Eberly, Seamus O’Doyle the carpenter, Mr. Cronican the printer, and so many others – they had invested, built businesses in the expectation of the town of Austin growing and growing well. Margaret frowned. This was something that she should have one of her ‘thinks’ about; one of those matters that she must contemplate quietly and at length.

As she turned to go back into the house, her father came around from the barn and stable-yard at the back of the house, a pair of his oxen clumping obediently after them; he had been at work all afternoon, plowing the first of the two cornfields he still kept in cultivation. He was scowling, as usual – a big man with thinning fair hair and an untidy beard, grubby and burned by the sun after a day working in the open.

“They gone yet?” he growled, in German – the language that Margaret and her brothers had grown up speaking. “If they had stayed much longer, I swear they would have spent the night.”

“Yes, they have just departed,” Margaret answered. Her father grunted – he sounded neither pleased nor unhappy, and Margaret asked, on impulse, “Papa – would you ever consider leaving this place, and taking up a plot of land elsewhere.”

“No, I would not,” he answered, gruffly. “This is where your mother and Rudi lived and were happy; not Mexicans, Indians nor your guests would ever make me leave the hearth that I built for them.”

“That is what I thought, Papa.” Margaret said. She closed the door behind her; Papa might have built the hearth, she thought, but I have made it into our home – and neither of us will ever leave.

(Working title, “Gone to Texas” – final title – “Daughter of Texas”. Will be formally launched, April 21, 2011. Enjoy!)

Margaret slept long in the wagon. When she woke, the wagon was not moving, and speckles of sunlight danced over the outside of the wagon cover, for it was broad daylight: mid-morning, by the look of it slanting through the trees overhead, and the openings at the back and front of the wagon, where the cover had been loosened. Johnny and little Charlie Kimball slept curled next to her, as kittens sleep with their bodies pressed close to the mother cat, seeking comfort and reassurance. It was the noise which had awoken her; the noise of a man’s raised voice, and the irregular tramp of many footsteps attempting a regular rhythm and failing utterly – to the loud and profane exasperation of that voice shouting the cadence at them. The tail of the wagon was taken down, as she could see clearly, when she sat up – carefully, so as not to waken the children. She slid carefully across the tick where they had all lain, groaning faintly to herself at the aches in her legs, arms and shoulders, stepping carefully across the jumbled cargo in the wagon, towards where she could clamber down from the wagon-tail and look around.

They were at the edge of a wide meadow, dotted with majestic oak trees. Beyond the largest of them was the McClure house, one of those large and well-built log houses, surrounded by the outbuildings of a prosperous and well-established plantation – or at least, as well-established as one could have been, out on the far edge of the frontier. But the meadow was full of rough camp-sites, of pieces of canvas or blankets mounted on sticks, or wagons and horse-pickets and hasty campfires. Everywhere were men, men in hunting clothes, in rags of uniforms, patched coats or blankets around their shoulders. Twenty or thirty of them were at conscientious drill, marching back and forth across an open space, and going through the motions of loading and firing their muskets under the tutelage of a drillmaster who sounded ever more exasperated by the moment. Many more men slept in apparent utter exhaustion, sprawled out on the ground, with their heads resting on packs and haversacks. The sky was close-spotted with fair-sized clouds, heavy with rain, by the appearance of gray at their centers, but fair and sparkling white as cleaned cotton drifts around their edges. There were other wagons and carts scattered in rough campsites around the periphery of the main camp; other exhausted women moving listlessly around campfires preparing food, or fetching buckets of water from Peach Creek.

Close to the tail of Papa’s wagon, a small fire sent a sullen thread of smoke into the air; Mama and Pru huddled over it, on the bench taken from the wagon, and a seat made from a small half-empty cask of molasses. Little Horace was curled up in Mama’s comfortable lap, but Maggie Darst and her son were arguing in tense, low voices.

“. . . the Gen’ral is calling for volunteers!” Davy insisted. His face was pale, his voice resolute. His mother looked no less resolute.

“I forbid it!” she answered, her voice on the thin edge between reason and hysteria, “Davy, you are only fourteen! What did your father tell you, before he rode away with the company? You were to obey me, see to our property and lands . . . what are you thinking of, Davy?”

“What is Davy thinking of?” Margaret asked, in her calmest and most reasonable tone of voice, as she climbed down from the wagon-tail and settled her skirts around her.

“He wants to volunteer himself for General Houston’s army!” Cried Maggie – after her resolute calm of the night before, the agony plain in the tone of her voice and expression in her face took Margaret aback. “The General has called for all to join with him, to train and prepare to fight – and Davy will go, whether I permit or not, and I cannot bear it, M’grete – to loose a husband and a child is more than anyone should be called to endure! How dare you ask me to bear this, any of you – not least the General! Aren’t there enough fools in Texas already, must my only child be taken . . . “

“Ma, I’m not a child,” Davy answered, so stung with embarrassment that his face was primrose pink. “Gal and Will King – they weren’t all that older than me, and they went with the company…”

“Gal and Will are dead!” Maggie’s voice rose, “Foolish boy, they are dead, and their bodies burnt with all the others by Santa Anna’s order – think you that you would be somehow exempt from such a fate by the excuse of being merely young! Men die in battle, Davy – they die, no matter how old or how young, how well-favored or no, loved or no! They die, by shot or grape or bayonet – they die by chance and mischance, they die suddenly or after hours of agony, alone or among friends – they die!” Maggie’s near-hysterical voice carried – not a few heads of the volunteers at drill turned towards her in sudden distraction. Davy turned a deeper shade of crimson and Pru began weeping silently.

“Ma! Everyone can hear you!”

“I do not care if they can hear me or not, as long as you are listening to me, David Darst!”

“Ma, I will go to the General this minute and enlist,” Davy answered. His soft young boy-face had suddenly gone hard with completely adult determination, and at that, Maggie began sobbing anew. Davy picked up his coat, and put his hat on his head.

“Where are you going?” Margaret demanded through her tears, and Davy answered,

“To tell General Sam that I will do as my father would have allowed me!” and he set off, threading his way across the crowded meadow towards the McClure house, where a small group of men held purposeful counsel, standing or squatting on the ground under the shelter of that towering oak tree. Margaret recognized General Sam and Erastus Smith among them; so the General was holding conversation with his staff. The expressions on the faces they could yet see were grim and exhausted. The very manner in which they held themselves spoke of weariness and despair, but also something of resolution. Margaret cast a frantic eye around – Mama was simultaneously comforting the weeping Pru and the bewildered little Horace, for who raised voices among adults was an unusual and distressing thing.

“You will do no such thing!” Maggie shrieked, following after her son, and Margaret caught her arm.

“Maggie,” she counseled, even as she felt her heart sink, “Let me come with you – perhaps he will listen to me, or at any roads, we can talk to the General, explain the matter to him . . . he is a reasonable and kindly man…” Maggie made no answer, save for picking up her skirts so that she could walk a little faster. Davy had nearly reached the General and his consort of officers. Oh, dear – he was going to interrupt them, Margaret thought, and inwardly cringed, just as Maggie called her son’s name. General Sam turned, taking off his hat – a dark felt hat which Margaret noticed, had a brim quaintly turned up in three places, styled after the old-fashioned tricorn – as soon as he saw Margaret and Maggie hastening towards them. His face brightened in recognition of her, which Margaret found most gratifying. Davy had already blurted out his reason for approaching the General, and from the expressions on the faces of those around General Sam, they seemed either exasperated or amused. Oh, poor Davy, Margaret thought; he would be so humiliated – again, to be treated like a child. General Sam, though – and bless him for that, seemed inclined to treat it all as a serious matter and Davy worthy of being treated with as an adult.

“I am sorry for troubling you, sir!” Maggie gasped, entirely out of breath.

“It is no trouble,” General Sam answered, most courteously. “This young man has come in answer to an appeal to serve in my army . . . which is most appreciated – even though we usually prefer our soldiers to have a little more . . . er, seasoning to them. In our current straits, however – we aren’t inclined to be that particular. Mrs. Vining…” he nodded towards Margaret. “And Mrs. Darst, is it? Of Gonzales – I thought as much. Your grief is shared, Mrs. Darst, of that you have my assurance. Mrs. Vining was kind enough to tell me a little of the temper of those men who gave their lives in this noble cause. So now, this young man wishes to take up where his father set down his burden…”

“He is only fourteen!” Maggie cried, “I forbid it on that account!” and the General nodded, sympathetically.

“So I can see, ma’am. I can also see that he would not be the only one in my army . . . unseasoned to that degree.”

“He is an only child of a widowed mother,” Margaret pointed out, in a quiet voice, “His mother and I and another of our friends – Mrs. Kimball, also widowed at the Alamo – have only him of an age to be a help with our wagon and the oxen who pull it.”

“I see.” General Sam’s eyes narrowed, thoughtfully. “A moment, gentleman,” he added, in slight reproof of those of his officers who were shifting impatiently at this interruption. “This is a matter worthy of a moment of my attention, at the least. Every recruit gathering to our cause is a gain to me, of sorts…” He seemed lost in thought for a moment, regarding Davy and the two women, before he snapped his fingers. “See here, young Darst – you wish to join our army, serve under my command and the orders of those officers of your company, and to do so freely, upon careful consideration? You may swear openly and honestly to me that no one has made you do this?’

“I do,” Davy answered firmly. “No one has influenced me unduly, only the example of my father, and those men of valor who were his friends!”

“But you are indeed only fourteen years of age?” General Sam asked, and when Davy nodded and Maggie said,

“He will be fifteen in five months, on August the third – and who would know better than his mother?”

“Well then,” General Sam answered, “I shall accept your enlistment, Private David Darst, but on one condition – you shall serve on a special detached service, under the command of Captain Smith, until such time as we cross the Colorado River, or to some other point when I or Captain Smith shall convey other orders to you…”

“Thank you, General Houston, sir!” Davy’s face was alive with worship and gratitude, but Maggie cried out, a sharp keening wail of unbearable distress, and Margaret held her as she seemed about to crumple to the ground.

“Not so fast, Private Darst,” General Sam continued, “Until you hear my orders and conditions. You are yet so very young – and my army is not yet in such deep need as to recruit children from their mothers’ arms and throw them before the enemies’ cannon – indeed, not even well-grown and eager lads of fourteen and fifteen or so. I make an exception for you, in honor of your father, so hear me out,” and General Sam’s voice turned gentle and grave. “The safety and security of all the citizens of Texas is a matter of deep concern to me – why do you think that we burned our tents, dumped our cannons and such of our supplies which we could not carry into the river, so that we might safely evacuate the women and children of Gonzales? We will take as many of them in those wagons as we had to us . . . aye, and there will be more, many more, as the word of our retreat to the Colorado is passed. Darst – you will serve me well in this respect – stay with Mrs. Vining’s wagon as we retreat to the east bank of the Colorado, and make yourself of use to other civilian refugees. I know there will be other civilians fleeing their homes. We must aid to them as we may. You must reassure them, bring to bear your best efforts and rendering aid. Your efforts would bring honor upon the Army of Texas, and my name as commander. Can you do that for me, for the good of Texas?”

“That I can, sir,” Davy replied, somewhat crestfallen, as he realized the full import of Houston’s words.

“Good,” General Sam answered, and as Davy hesitated, he added, “Now, as your duties with the refugee train permit, and assuming that our camp and yours are co-located, you are tasked with attending regular drill with Captain Smith’s company – or whoever else may be practicing the Manual of Arms in my camp. We will be departing from here within the hour, and our next camp will be on the Lavaca River, tonight. You will make your way there, with Mrs. Vining and your mother and any such others as require your assistance. You will take any further orders from Captain Smith. If you do not have a musket or a rifle and the proper gear, you will be issued such, as soon as we refresh our armory. You are dismissed, Private Darst.”

“Sir . . .” Davy sketched a hesitant and wavering salute, at which General Sam nodded, with something of an amused expression on his face. “Thank you, sir.”

“Be fair to him,” Margaret whispered to Maggie, whose face was wet with tears, as they walked away from the tiny huddle of the general and his officers, below the veranda of the McClure house. “For General Sam has done a very wise and proper judgment of Solomon – he has accepted Davy into his army and salved his feelings, and yet has kept him with you, as safe as any of us might be!”

“He is a child!” Maggie whispered, “The veriest child!”

“No,” Margaret shook her head, suddenly feeling terribly wise, “In these times – not a child. My own little brother is only a year or so older, and he is with Colonel Fannin’s company at La Bahia. Our boy-children are not torn from our arms, Maggie – they go willingly, wishing to be counted as men. And to be a man, a gentle perfect knight – oh, Maggie, that is a commendable thing to be, and that is what our sons long to become! How can they not, when there are so many splendid examples around them, to emulate and follow! Allow Davy to drill with the company, let him think that he has had his way in this . . . and think on a way to thank the General.” She put her arm around Maggie then, for comfort. “We must be as good friends as we can, to each other, Maggie – for in this present emergency, the comfort of loyalty of friends is all that we have . . . oh, see – look at that, my dear Maggie, they have managed to find Mary and the children!”

For there was an ancient one-horse Mexican cart, with solid wheels, creaking slowly into the camp, under the escort of a handful of horsemen lead by David Kent, whose face was beaming with triumph and exhaustion. Mary and her children sat in the cart, on the top of a pile of straw and bedding. Margaret and Maggie ran towards them, Margaret exclaiming,

“Oh, my dear! Where were you all this time – Mr. Kent came looking among the wagons for you last night, but we truly did not believe you had been forgotten!”

“Margaret?” Mary’s face lit with her lovely smile. “I am afraid that we were – but it was no one’s fault but our own, for we thought that we should leave the house and hide in the thickets, and everyone thought we were with someone else. Where are we, now?”

“At the McClures, on Peach Creek,” Maggie reached up and embraced Mary, as her older children helped her down to the ground “Thank the Lord that Mr. Kent began to wonder, upon seeing that you were nowhere to be found.”

“Alas, we hid in the woods, taking nothing but a few blankets for the children,” Mary answered, “These men, they were kind enough to find this cart, and round up a horse to pull it . . . I think the horse is one of Kent’s. We are so many and the cart so heavy that we must walk as much as possible to spare the poor thing. Is it true that Santa Anna’s army is just behind us?”

“Perhaps not just behind,” Margaret answered, “We may have a little respite, before we move on. Come – share a little of our breakfast with us. My father had left us his wagon, and so we were able to bring away a little more. But the Army is supposed to march within the hour, so we may not linger over it.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, with gratitude, and her sightless eyes seemed to look out across the camp, with tears welling up in them. “Oh, dear – I wonder where we shall sleep tonight, or next week. How rapidly our lives have changed, between one hour and the next. My husband gone from us, and never even being allowed a proper grave by that hateful man! All of our towns and farms emptied out, falling back to the Colorado, or so said Mr. Kent. Whatever will happen next, I wonder?”

“I shall think no farther on than the next day,” Margaret answered, resolutely lifting her chin and taking Mary’s hand to guide her. “And follow the Army as closely as we can.”

Even as she and Mama hastily cooked more mush, for the Millsap children, the soldiers were forming into companies, kicking their friends awake, and lining up in ragged ranks. Seeing this, a worried and uneasy murmur arose from the women and their children, as they watched this. Unbidden, Davy and the eldest of the Millsap boys began hitching up the oxen to Margaret’s wagon.

“We dare not fall behind,” Maggie began sorting out those few things they had brought from the wagon. There were deep worry-lines scored around her eyes. “We have no protection, otherwise – from Indians or Santa Anna. Is there such a thing as a pistol or a musket among us? Or did all of these things go with our men, leaving us truly defenseless?”

“I believe so,” Margaret answered, with grim honesty. Maggie was strong, brave and practical. Mama still seemed stunned by the suddenness of it all, adrift in a frightening world, without the strong anchor of Papa and the boys. “Although there is a hatchet in Papa’s box of tools. And several sharp knives among the kitchen things.”

“Jacob left his old hunting knife, when he went with the Company,” Maggie said, with an air of something just remembered, “I thought Davy should have it, but maybe I shall ask for it back again for a time – a knife such as Colonel Bowie was famous for. It never kept a sharpened edge for long, though – which is why my husband did not favor it so much.”

“Better than nothing at all,” Margaret said, as Davy brought up the second ox team. She nodded at him, adding to Maggie, “You should compliment him, on being so brisk and prompt with the oxen. General Sam has done very well, reposing such trust in him.”

“Aye, so I should,” Maggie answered, but she still looked terribly worried. So far to go today, after the journey of the night before – and they only had been able to rest three hours or so! Every foot set one before the other took them farther away from Santa Anna’s vengeful army – and closer to safety, over the Colorado. Margaret looked at the clouds beginning to lower overhead, as if it was considering a good heavy rain. Where, she wondered, was Race? He had been sent to Mina two days before – surely he must be on his way back by now, and he must know that the army was falling back, that General Sam had decided to abandon Gonzales and all west of the Colorado. How worried he must be, at this juncture. Margaret considered this, as she and Mama finished re-packing the wagon. Race would have known that the army was going to retreat to the Colorado, so he must also know that the civilians would be going with them. So, he would be looking for her and the boys wherever the army was. Another good reason to follow the army close, Margaret told herself. Oh, she was tired and aching still from last night’s journey – but Race would come looking for them within a day or so, and she would tell him triumphantly that she had saved his precious library, burying it in a tin trunk under Maggie Darst’s red-bud tree. Of course – they would have to return to Gonzales, somehow. Again, Margaret put that thought aside. She could do nothing now, save follow the army doggedly, taking Mama, Maggie, Pru, and Mary and all their children with her. A return to home – or to the place where home had been, was as far away now, as the far side of the moon.

It was a ragged and desperate little train of wagons and carts following the army’s baggage wagons and ammunition limbers out of their stopping place at the McClures.’ A straggle of women and children walked bravely among them, for everyone wished to spare the team animals as much as possible. Hers was nearly the first wagon ready, among the civilians, Davy Darst striding out manfully next to the lead ox-team. The cart which had carried Mary and the Millsap children followed after, although the horse drawing it was in such poor condition that Mary also walked, led by her oldest daughter. Margaret took the younger children into her wagon, with Mama and Pru. At the last minute, place in the cart was given to Sarah Eggleston, who was the much younger sister of Andrew Ponton. She was hugely pregnant with her first child, although barely older than Davy Darst, and grimaced painfully every time the solid wheels went over another bump in the road. Margaret set her face towards the east, inwardly pleading with God not to allow Pru and Sarah to have their children by the side of the road. They must win this war somehow, Margaret told herself – they must find a way to win it, rather than be homeless vagabonds, without homes or a safe place to lay their heads. Maggie found a piece of a canvas tent, abandoned in the trash left by the army; she and Margaret walked on either side of the cart, holding it over Sarah so that she might have a little shade. Even as they walked down the road east, the McClures were packing their own wagon to leave.

And so they marched, falling behind the marching column of Sam Houston’s army, yet stubbornly following as fast as they could force their own faltering feet, and those of their tired and poor-conditioned team animals. Margaret and Maggie walked together, all that long and wearying day. They dared not take time to rest, for then they might fall behind. Now and again, they saw columns of grey and black smoke rising on the horizon – the clear signs of other homes and farmsteads put to the torch – and another straggle of women and children come to join them, with carts and wagons hap-hazardly packed and hitched to winter-thin and scraggly animals. Panic was in the air, the smell of it stronger than that of the trampled grass, or the scent of rain borne on the light wind, a rain that soon pelted down upon them, in ice-cold drops. Their feet sank to the ankles in the churned mud – and yet they had to plod onward, ducking their faces against the driving rain. Think no farther than the next camp, Margaret told herself, think of no other effort than to put one foot in front of the other, for ahead lay safety and behind only peril.

With some difficulty, the civilians’ carts and wagons were brought across Rocky Creek, and then through the ford on the Navadad River, although because of the recent rain, the water ran high in both of them. Margaret and Maggie were soaked to the waist, walking after the wagon, and holding onto the tail to steady themselves against the ice-cold river current as they followed after. The sole of one of Maggie’s shoes began to tear loose, through constant soaking and abrasion against the rocks. With Isaac’s second-best hunting knife, Maggie cut a length of fabric from the top of a half-empty grain-sack and bound it tightly around her foot. As the march continued, it did not seem to help Maggie all that much.

“If it weren’t for the cold, and the roughness of the road, I think I would be better served by going barefoot!” Maggie lamented to Margaret, who added up that one small thing to her store of matters to worry herself about. The Millsap children were without shoes, having tied pieces of blanket around their feet to spare them from the cold. Mama had no proper shoes, only a pair of Indian rawhide moccasins, and Margaret feared that her own shoes might not last very much longer than Maggie’s, under the hard wearing of this trek.

The first elements of that straggling train of refugees reached the camp on the Navadad around sunset. Margaret and her party were among them. Margaret felt as tired as she ever had after giving birth – yet, in this present emergency, she could not just rest, exhausted in the bed and triumphantly admire the new child, before going to sleep. Now she must see to finding a campsite for her wagon, and for the clumsy cart which carried Sarah Eggleston, sort out forage for Papa’s oxen and the spavined horse with drew the cart, see to comforting Maggie, and Sarah and Mama, mop up Pru’s exhausted tears, assure Davy of his manly competence, sooth the Millsap children and reassure their mother. It was all too much – and when would it ever end? And why had it all fallen to her? Margaret raged briefly and inwardly at that unfairness, and then took up her work. For who else would take up the burden what had fallen to her? The progress of a pilgrim, for sure – to do what seemed to be needful, take up the responsibility. In the end, she would be judged, and by more than just her friends. Rebellion against fate would not water the horse, pasture the oxen, feed the children and comfort those of her friends, who labored under their own burden of grief and fear.

They could not rest here for more than one night – in the morning they would be gone again, in the trail of the army, wading through the mud. But for now, as soon as she came from the river-edge with the older children, bearing a few buckets of water, there was a good fire burning, a fire which had burned down to incandescent coals, which could be cooked over – and a pair of ragged young soldiers, bashfully adding to a pile of wood stacked nearby. Margaret set down the buckets – there was the wagon-bench, taken from the wagon, with Mama holding Johnnie in her lap.

“We thought we should perform this kindness for you, ma’am,” said the tallest of them, who spoke with the clipped accent of New England. “Seeing that you ladies are in such need . . . “

“Our sergeant said,” added the other, in a soft Carolina burr, “That some of you were widowed by the action at the Alamo . . . an’ this is the mos’ kindness that we can do, ma’am . . . an’ ma’am . . . an’ ma’am,” he nodded politely at Maggie, at Pru and Mary, “It is no’ so much as we would wish to do . . . but it is as much as we can do.”

“And we are grateful,” Maggie Darst replied gruffly, as if she feared that her voice would break with emotion. “For any consideration, no matter how small – it is substantial to us, in our present reduced circumstances.”

“Aw, no ma’am,” replied the southern soldier, in some distress, “It weren’t no trouble at all – as soon as we reach the Coloradda – we shall turn and fight! You’ll see, ma’am . . . an’ ma’am . . . an’ ma’am! We’ll throw Santy Anna, an’ all of his lot clean out, you jist wait an’ see – we’ll have a right good revenge on ‘em, for what they have done, just you trust Cap’n Pitcher’s boys for that!”

“So we all hope, very much,” Margaret answered, as the two soldiers dropped the last armload of wood and bid the women goodnight. Darkness was falling – she was vividly reminded of that first night in Texas, the evening of her twelfth birthday, watching the sparks fly up into the sky, while she held her little brother in her lap and Mama busied herself, cooking supper over a fire.

“They brought us some fresh beef,” Maggie Darst said, “For they have slaughtered some beeves to feed the army, and say that we shall not go hungry, ourselves. Oh, what I would have given, that we thought to bring along some of our own hogs . . . wandering in the woods they were, and not enough time to round them up.”

“They’ll be there for you when we return,” Margaret answered, “and all the fatter for eating acorns and things in the woods. Tonight, leave a pot of beans to soak in the coals, as the fire burns down . . . “

“Ah, I remember well that old trick,” Maggie laughed a little, lamenting. “Molasses on pone for the children . . . oh, all the things that we would have brought, had we the time!”

“We will be home, in a while,” Margaret insisted, firmly. The other women had been reassured; their hopes revived a little, by the consideration of those two soldiers, the gift of a warm fire and some meat for their supper. She must put on the brave face for them now, Margaret realized. She must never show doubt or fear, even if she felt such, she must not share them. How very lonely that would be, to be always seeming brave and able . . . how had it come about that she seemed to be their leader, to feel the responsibility for them all – for Mama, and Maggie, for Pru and Sarah and their children? How very lonely that was, but this was a burden once taken up, could not be put down! She wondered briefly if General Sam felt that kind of loneliness. She raised her eyes and looking beyond their campfire, saw a party of men on horseback, with three men a little in the lead, riding towards them and towards the army’s main camp, which was a little beyond theirs. It was almost to dark to see them clear, but one of the leaders’ horses looked like Bucephalus . . . and if so . . . Margaret’s heart lifted, almost painfully. She ran towards him, crying out his name – for it was indeed he, and the other two with him were also friends and acquaintances – Erastus Smith, and Juan Seguin. All three men looked tired to death and very weary, but somehow exultant, in spite of it all. Race slid down from Bucephalus’ saddle, and caught her in his arms, a fierce and hard embrace, saying,

“Thank the gods, you are safe . . . I carried the orders to Mina, and the message that General Sam was evacuating Gonzales . . . but I did not know what the message was until I had arrived. I prayed every moment that you and Mother Becker and the boys were safely away, Daisy-mine, I was in torment until this very moment!”

“We are safe enough, my dear love,” Margaret whispered, in answer, seeing that Erastus Smith was looking away from them with somewhat of an embarrassed expression, while Juan observed with frank approval. “With Papa’s wagon, and Mama and Maggie and Davy to help – we had enough time to bring the barest of what we needed, and to offer assistance to Maggie and Pru. I could not bring your books, dearest . . . but they are safely buried,” she added, seeing a fleeting look of anguish in his face, as she said those words, an emotion as quenched as quickly as it had arisen, “I put them in the tin trunk, and Davy helped me bury it under the red-bud tree before Maggie’s house . . . you know, where the boys had hollowed out a den to hide, and play soldiers in?”

“Providential, indeed,” and Race, with a catch in his voice, and embraced her again. “Daisy-mine, you are a woman whose price is above rubies . . . my books are dear to me, but you and the boys are a treasure above any price . . . but still – I am scholar enough to appreciate that you have taken care with them all.”

“You know about the Alamo then . . . and the fate of our friends.” Margaret ventured, with a catch in her throat, and Race nodded. Grief darkened his voice.

“Aye . . . Erastus told me. I wish I could say that it came as a surprise to me, Daisy-mine, but it did not. Esteban and Jim Bowie . . . Isaac and Almaron . . . the boys . . . ‘tis a pagan thing to say, but the smoke of their burning upon a pyre . . . it has lit a fire for all to see, a signal rising up to heaven, of a worthy sacrifice …” Juan Seguin snorted in disgust, hearing this. He dismounted, as easily as a bird swooping from branch to ground, and still holding the reins of his horse in one hand took Margaret’s hand with the other and gallantly kissed it.

“Lopez de Santa Anna – he is a hypocrite and a fraud, as I have said may times to you and to my poor deluded cousin Diego, more times than there are leaves on that tree! For Esteban, for Senor Jaime and the others . . . oh, they will have honor and a proper resting place. I have taken a vow, Senora Vining, a vow on my own blood and honor as a gentleman to see that this is so – but first, we shall cram the mouth of Lopez de Santa Anna with those ashes of those he has cruelly slain and denied proper burial. And then,” he concluded jauntily, but his smile was edged with sharp bitterness, “we shall make a tall mound – a mound built of his head and the heads of those centralistas he has brought with him. My dear friend, you have no idea of how to begin being a pagan! Me, and my men, we shall show you, eh?”

“And this is the man who insists that he is a proper Catholic,” Race laughed, an attempt to seem light, as Erastus Smith also dismounted, somewhat less gracefully than Juan. Erastus also took her hand, briefly and saying,

“Miz Vining – you are also prepared and fitten’ to move on tomorrow? I fear that speed is of the essence, in our current circumstance. The Army, such as it is, must find safety behind one river or another. Colonel Fannin’s garrison would double the amount of soldiers at General Sam’s disposal, as soon as he and they present themselves. Until then, we are not . . .” he looked earnestly, deep into her eyes, “entirely safe and secure from Santy-Anna’s army. Sorry I am to say this to you, Miz Vining – but we are not, and I will not tell you comforting lies to imply that such is not the case.”

“I see,” Margaret straightened her shoulders. She was thought worthy of confidence by these men – so she must now bear herself as a woman of courage and consequence. “I had no other plan in mind, than to follow the Army to east of the Colorado. If there is any other to be considered, then tell me of it now – and I shall tell the other women accordingly.”

“That will do, excellently, ma’am,” Erastus Smith answered – and Margaret thought that he did so with a certain amount of relief.

“So,” she answered, “May you now tell me of what matters you have been about? I cannot tell lies, or make up some cheerful story for the other women . . . how stands our current situation, husband . . . Mr. Smith, Senor Seguin? I must know, so that I might have something honest, to answer to the other women. You cannot know how desperate they are, how devoid of hope we are in our present circumstance – we are turned out of our homes, how many of us are near to starving, widowed, and without any place in the world, shoeless and dependent upon the charity of our fellow refugees and the Army! We must have some kind of hope to cling to, in our present poor condition – how close is the menace of Santa Anna’s army – for that is almost our worst fear!”

“As best we can, ma’am,” Erastus turned the brim of his hat over, and over in his hands, “We are doing the bestest that we can,” while Juan Seguin replied gallantly,

“You should have little fear, Senora Vining – my company of vaqueros and Bejarenos has been set in place as a rear guard – to follow behind and see that none straggles. There is no sign yet of close pursuit from that devil Lopez de Santa Anna, but he has sworn openly to drive all the Americanos from Tejas . . . so,” Juan Seguin shrugged, lifting his hands in a typical Mexican gesture. “We expect that he will bestir himself from contemplating his great victory. You are safe tonight, senora, and perhaps safe for a little tomorrow and the day after, but until we reach the Colorado . . .” he finished with one of those eloquent shrugs, and Erastus Smith finished,

“ . . . and meet up with Fannin’s company, and gather to us more volunteers . . . stay with the army, Miz Vining.”

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Margaret recovered something of her composure. Under cover of their farewells, Race whispered into her ear,

“I am detailed away with the scouts, Daisy-mine, but I am certain that I will be permitted to spend a few hours with my family! I will return in a little while…”

“ ‘ . . . And with a stronger faith embrace a sword, a horse, a shield.” Margaret quoted, and he smiled, the quick wry smile that she so loved to see.

“Devious Daisy, quoting poetry at me . . . I shall treasure every hour of your company, and especially relish it at such times.” Margaret, thinking of Maggie and Isaac and what Maggie had said, of loving words, answered,

“Never forget that I love you always.”
“Nor I,” he said, and wheeling Bucephalus, was gone into the twilight after the others.

(Chapter 11, from the current work, Gone to Texas. The settlers in Gonzales are tensely awaiting word from the Alamo, in the spring of 1836… we know how it all ended, but they don’t …yet. I’m trying to come up with a better title, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, email me, as comments seem to be temporarily frelled)

The hours and days of March, dragged past at a snail’s pace; a week and a half since the Gonzales Ranging Company had ridden down towards the ferry and the road to Bexar. Surely they had achieved a safe passage into that crumbling and shabby fortress – and other reinforcements were on the way? Now and again, Margaret fancied that when it was very still – at dawn, or just after sunset, and the light breeze came from the north – that she could hear a faint continuous rumble, like distant thunder – the sound of cannon-fire. Toward the end of that time, rumors swept Gonzales, each more dreadful than the last: the worst of them had the Alamo fallen and all the defenders put to the sword, but that tale had been brought by a pair of Mexican cattle-drovers, who – as it turned out, not even seen anything of it, but had heard the dreadful tale from another drover. Within days of reading Colonel Travis’ declaration and plea in the Telegraph, soldiers, militia and ranging companies began arriving in Gonzales, singly or in companies. Colonel Neill, who had taken leave of his duties at Bexar, thinking that all would be in order and there would be time enough to finish reinforcing the Alamo began gathering those new recruits to his little army. Race, with his face seeming to be pale skin stretched over the bones of his face, had recovered enough strength to resume his duties as a courier and dispatch rider. Margaret herself went with Race to the sprawling encampment on the Military Plaza, on the pretense of extending the use of part of their house to the General, or whoever of his staff might have need of lodgings. The gathering volunteers had set up there, at some distance from the back of those houses along St. John’s Street. The morning sun sent spreading shadows all across the grass and the tents, grass and canvas alike sodden with morning dew. A line of small campfires sent narrow columns of smoke up into the air. Under the shelter of a spreading oak tree, a handful of rough-dressed men riding winter-shaggy horses were just dismounting and tying their reins to stakes and picket-posts, as if they were awaiting momentary orders sending them on some errand. Race greeted one of them, a rangy man with a long and slightly crooked nose. Thinning hair straggled over a high forehead, and ears which stood out from the sides of his head like the lugs on a sugar-bowl.
“Erastus,” Race said, and then repeated himself, slightly louder. “Erastus, is General Houston within?”
“He is, that,” the man this greeted answered, in a slightly flat voice, which at once sounded as if he spoke a little too loud. “He’s in his tent, but he’s mighty busy at the moment with Colonel Neill. I can bear him a message, though. How you been keepin’ Race? You don’t look so good.” More »