Restive Souls Excerpt: Moriarty's Tale
The Brits take Charleston, but a British captain grieves
This is the final sneak peek into my upcoming novel, Restive Souls, an alternative history novel about an African empire that rises in the Carolina Low Country. This excerpt will be removed in the near future. The story takes place early during the short war during the British attack on Charleston.
We know that war as the Revolutionary War. The people in this timeline know it as the failed Colonial War that triggered the emancipation of the slaves in the late 1700s.
The captain of the victorious British fleet is grieving the loss of a woman he fell in love with shortly after the British victory.
Finneas Jewell is a free African and gifted coppersmith who had previously talked the captain into fitting the hull with copper sheathing to handle the difficult shoals around Charleston’s Sullivan Island.
Cornelius Tye is the leader of the Ethiopian Regiment (a real thing in the British army during the Revolutionary War of our timeline).
Bolo’s Notes are annotations by the novel’s helpful historian, Emmet Bolo.
Trigger warning: No professional edits yet, just me.
There was no solace in Basilia’s death under my helpless hands, but if there had been, it would have been knowing that her own claims against her faith were misplaced. Her last words were proof enough. Perhaps, as she passed into the heavens, she met her maker, who encouraged her, gently laying his hands of truth upon her.
I felt a different hand on my shoulder, but I didn’t look up to see who it was. I didn’t care.
“You will always have her strength with you,” I thought I heard Cornelius’s voice say through the storm of grief clouding my mind. “She has just given that to you, if you will have it.”
I had seen many people die, but I had never been so overcome. Within the strains of battle, even a death bound to one who is dear extends its blasphemy against the heart but for a moment, because the battle must rage on; a nearby enemy, extending grief along the devil’s nefarious web of revenge and intrigue, must be slain, and when the aria of each cherished life is absorbed by the full choir of wailing agony that forms the essence of war, we become numb to the tragic opera’s demands for more.
But not Basilia. Not now. Her essence had been shorn from the fabric of my universe, changing every calculus within. Her hasty exit left me inconsolable. The curtain was drawn, but I was determined to tear it down and curse her God, who had taken her from me like a kidnapper, immutably sovereign from human punition.
It seemed like I knelt over her into the next morning, but of course I did not. I stood up to face Cornelius, my hands and head shaking, each in their own way.
“I don’t know the why of the attack,” he said as if anticipating my question. “I am afraid to report that our Ethiopian regiment isn’t the most appreciated aspect within Henry Clinton’s land army.”
I had barely noticed that the child, Sarah, was now upon Basilia, sobbing enough for the both of us.
Cornelius must have read the expression on my face because I didn’t need to say, “Now what?” as the child looked at us both with her eyes and cheeks drenched in tears.
“We must take her urgently to a parish,” he said. “Saint Phillip’s, I think, would be best. Saint Paul’s would have been an option, but they are in disarray.”
“Saint Phillip’s is gone,” I said. “Some African thing,” was all I could manage, my mind still heavy with the moment.
“Father Tom,” he nodded. “A good man. I’d trust his hands in this. He’ll manage. But the freed slaves want their own church, and Saint Philip’s is what they chose. St. Paul’s will not be safe for her. It could be burning now, as we speak. It has been a refuge for loyalists.”
“The colonials are so hostile to emancipation as that?”
“What did you think this war is really about?” asked Cornelius. “A bit of usurious taxation? Well. Anyway. Saint Philip’s is a haven for freed slaves but is also open to loyalists. It is her best option.”
“What of the other children?” I asked.
“I can’t trust the British as far as I can spit. What would you have me do?”
“Clinton will learn of these saboteurs against the crown. I will see to that.”
“Will you? I want to believe you, good captain. I truly do. But my trust, as I said, is shaken.”
“As is mine, if it is of any help at all for you to know.”
“Tis. Our unit will remain as is. I won’t have it any other way, and I am not afraid to tell General Clinton of my insistence. Sad that we now must look out the corner of our eyes for spies within British ranks, unknowing of the disposition of anyone wearing British colors.”
“Quite forthrightly, I can tell you this,” I said. “I am neither friend nor foe to the slaves of this continent. But the crown has made a promise to you, to them, and it is my duty to enforce it. I am certain Henry Clinton feels the same way.”
“My impressions of Clinton are the same. He has been a most vocal paladin of that promise.”
I was unable to bear another moment near Basilia’s body, so Cornelius and I gathered Sarah Lightwood and took her to the Savage Home to recruit some help. While we took turns carrying the distraught child, we realized that our strategy for finding the slaves who took the child, and probably the others, and for addressing the crime we had just experienced, was the same. We would pay a visit together to General Clinton to help him understand that two seemingly conflicting crimes were related to the same cause of justice.
Surprisingly, General Clinton agreed through no persuasion other than the presentation of the initial set of facts. He seemed nearly angrier at the musket shots intended for Colonel Tye than at the fact of the still missing children. But he was sufficiently disturbed by both events to split a deployment of Hessian fusiliers to each task. One of these would assist Colonel Tye’s Ethiopian Regiment’s attempt to track down the Lightwood children. The other would be to join with the 71st Regiment of Foot and a new battalion of loyalists commanded by a Scot named Patrick Ferguson to round up forces who might have been behind the assault on Cornelius.
Patrick Ferguson developed the Ferguson Rifle that was used by John Honeyman and Guillaume Diderot during the Battle of Trenton. He was deployed to Charleston to command a small battalion of troops to experiment with his new rifle. He knew nothing of Honeyman’s experience with the rifle, a few of which had been smuggled to New Jersey by a cohort of Ferguson’s in Britain and fell into Dylan Shale’s hands, until he met Honeyman years later.
Ferguson played a key role in putting down rebellious colonialists as the Colonial Rebellion drew to a close by working closely with loyalists, whom he recruited into his regiment. The rifle was given credit for much of the regiment’s success and became the weapon of choice among British soldiers and congregational militias.
After his appointment as British Inspector of Militia of Carolina and Georgia in 1780, he provided extensive military and espionage training to congregational militias throughout the Low Country and Georgia.
I thanked Clinton and Cornelius, wondering if the trauma of watching Basilia’s death would allow for any sleep and, if so, how nightmarish the sleep might become. Compounding the brutality of the moment was the fact that I was returning to the place I had met her, a place, too, where I had nearly quartered with her, a place where I very nearly had fallen back into that time of life when I had been a schoolboy smitten by the charms of innocence and the follies of such simple charms as a magical crest of falling hair.
Instead, the exhaustion of the day consumed me, and I was asleep nearly from the moment my head dropped onto my bed’s pillow. I dreamed of Basilia. We were dancing in a garden full of impossibly tall rice until she led me by the hand into a dark room, which became lit by moonlight. The room was full of happy children singing and cheering and laughing. Then the light changed and shone directly on Basilia and me. The children stopped their happy banter, looked at us, and started screaming.
Basilia’s face had decayed into a dark grey, cavity-filled skull, her exposed teeth falling out one by one like dominoes falling out of a sinister cave.
I woke up in sweat. Morning sunlight shot rays through several thin rips in the window shade. Someone was pounding hard on the door. I climbed out of bed, then ran my hands clumsily over a nightstand where I had laid the pistol I had retrieved from the Lightwood estate. But I preferred my own service pistol, which meant that my unwelcome visitor would need to wait. I found it and approached the door. “Who is it?” I asked loudly.
“Most sorry sir,” said the proprietor Hasimou’s muffled voice through the aging sheet of metal-framed wood that acted as a door. “Finneas Jewell is here requesting you, sir. He ain’t tellin’ me why. Sounds important. Be careful sir goin’ out if you do. There’s trouble.”
“Tell him I’ll be down presently.”
“Yes, captain.”
Still in my knickers and a white undershirt, I hurried over to the window, lifting the shade up by its corner to peek out the window. Once again, there was mayhem in the streets. It was as if everyone had decided yesterday to take a coffee break during the riot and agree to reconvene at this hour. I could see several wisps of black smoke from different points as I gazed out the window.
My first thought was of the ships docked in the harbor. They were not far away. The public house in which I had taken lodging was on the same riverfront as the docks, which were but a short walk away.
I pulled on my tan colored breeches, then my long white captain’s naval boots, and tucked my breeches inside them. I didn’t don my blue captain’s overcoat, only the inner jacket, which was the same color as my breeches. Its multitude of large, gold-colored buttons would identify me as a captain to British forces, but wouldn’t make me an immediately obvious target to colonial rebels who weren’t well versed in British military uniform styles.
The pistol was useless in these matters, but, nevertheless, its weight gave me comfort. When I landed downstairs, Jewell was standing at the door, accompanied by three imposing men with hard snarls on their faces and skin as dark as a moonless night.
A slight man emerged through the door, which appeared to be pushed open by what looked like a man-sized finger of white smoke from the fires burning outside.
“No need to check on your ship, Captain, if that is your thinking,” said the man as he entered through the cloud of smoke as if introduced by witchcraft. “She is safe. No harm can come to her.”
“What is this, Jewell?” I asked.
“Guillaume Diderot. At your service.” The man of smoke bowed.
“This is as promised, my friend,” said Jewell. “We have seized the docks. We have seized the ships on the docks. Today, an African Navy is born in Charlestown.”
At that moment, Titus Cornelius entered the public house, following behind Diderot with a small contingent of men.
“My ship? You’ve taken my ship?” I asked incredulously, furiously. I had not noticed until now that two of the men accompanying Jewell had been carrying machetes that looked as long as their arms as they brandished them threateningly.
Cornelius waved them off. “This is a man of honor,” he said to them. “And must be treated as such.”
Then Jewell said to me, “Not your ship, captain. She is now a naval vessel of the Carolina African Navy. But sir, I wish for you to continue to captain her.”
“That’s absurd. I shall do no such thing. She’ll be sunk by the British Navy before she can depart but a foot off the docks.”
“My friend, you have proven that the British cannot easily enter this port. We have secured the fort as well as the port,” said the man calling himself Diderot.
“But how? How in a day’s time? Against such an army?” An impossible story such as his did not warrant the question, but, still, I found it tripping out of my mouth.
“Sit.” Diderot walked to a table and sat in a chair, Jewell’s three bodyguards standing behind him. I obliged.
“In Persia,” said Diderot, “There is a group known as the Asāsiyyūn. In your language, a rough translation would be ‘assassins’. It is, in fact, from that Arabic word that your own word is derived.”
“I fail to understand,” I said, wanting to stand up and run through the gauntlet of two machetes and a large man in between, then careen through the wall made by Cornelius and his men, just so I could plunge my fists into Jewell’s abdomen. I was besotted with enough rage to think I could do it, too.
“They were a Nizari Isma’ili sect,” continued Diderot, “who lived in the mountains of Persia and in Syria in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, whose main tenet, whose main, as the French might say, raison d’etre, was to foster chaos by killing Christian and Muslim leaders, in order to achieve certain objectives. Alas, assassins are in our midst in our fledgling capital. They do not share our sense of decorum.”1
“Understand that the safety of the people of Charlestown is tantamount to our ends, Captain,” said Cornelius, who, along with Jewell, was now standing behind Diderot.
I looked outside. “It does not look so from where I sit,” I replied. “There appears to be much blood on the streets.”
Jewell nodded slowly. “Regretfully, it must be said that there are a few among us who have taken their vengeance upon the city’s most prominent slave owners and colonial generals. I do hope that it ends soon, but we cannot control the fuses lit by European cruelties.”
Jewell sat down next to Diderot.
“I trusted you, Jewell. With everything. My ship. My men.”
“Aye, that you did, Captain,” said Jewell. “I am thankful for that, and this must seem a poor way for me to honor that trust. But you drank to this with me as I drank to it with you.”
“This is not quite what I had in mind.”
“You told me just the other day you cared not about your flag.” Abruptly, Jewell stood up and faced his men, then all four of them made for the door, the three bodyguards doing so on a pirouette.
Jewell turned around to face me from the entrance. “I hope you will consider your options, captain. Our navy will need fine, honorable men such as yourself.” With that, the four men entered the raucous fray outside.
I must not have been paying attention, because Diderot was gone, too. Or perhaps, I wondered, he was a mere figment of my imagination, born of rage and a need for more sleep.
Cornelius and his men remained, making me wonder if my time remaining on this earth had itself officially come to its end as I considered Diderot’s odd story of assassins.
“Henry Clinton, Peter Parker, they are indifferent to this conflict,” Cornelius said. “But I’ll add that the reason for this may be the story you’ve just been told. I am sorry to report to you captain, that the assassins Monsieur Diderot speaks of belong to my unit. The events of yesterday forced our hand. We have had to execute a few British officers in the dark of night.” At this, he and his men turned around and left much the same way as Jewell’s. But then, he, too, quickly turned at the door. “I wish you the best of luck to you, good captain, and don’t forget to wear your armband.” With that, he and his men pushed their way through the door.
I sat seething, wanting to choke the life out of Jewell. I wished at the very least to rush out and shoot him in the backside, no matter the consequences from his machete wielding friends or from Cornelius. I unstrapped my pistol and slammed it against the table. I knew I could not shoot Finneas Jewell in such a way. Even a duel seemed like a foul representation of the relationship I had built with him. But this treachery. How could it go unpunished?
I wondered about these assassins from long ago. Was such a story from the ghostly man named Diderot true? Or simply an invention of a freed slave’s fertile imagination? And how could such a pogrom against colonial leadership and British officers within Charlestown be executed in one day? It seemed to me an impossible tale. Perhaps, I thought, a couple of leaders were killed. Possibly, Parker and Clinton considered themselves targets. This might create a leadership void long enough for an uprising to possibly win the day.
It all seemed so unlikely that I began to doubt their story and suspect that the tale was either the fanciful imagination of newly freed slaves or a ploy to take one lone ship: mine. Pistol in hand, I stood up from the table and made my way toward the exit. But I heard Cornelius’ voice in my head remind me about the armband he had given me, so I went upstairs to retrieve it, stuffed it into my jacket pocket, then ran back downstairs as if I could do something.
As soon as I stepped outside, a burly light skinned man with flowing red hair grabbed my elbow. “Name’s Frind Lucas,” said the red headed man. “You are not safe,” he quickly added without giving me time to react. He was accompanied by three Africans, all armed with bayonet-equipped muskets. “Stay with us.” He wore a ragged bandage with an insignia around his bicep.
Diderot then emerged from between two buildings, again through a blanket of smoke, acting as if ready to lead the way.
Lucas’s red locks of hair escaped from a white turban with the same insignia as his armband. His shirt and pants were the same dark green color and of a style I did not recognize. The pants were loose fitting, with a rope sash around the waist, and the shirt had stone buttons and a short collar cut into a square at the throat.
He looked like an Irishman, but his accent was that of an English gentleman. Neither Diderot nor the three men accompanying Lucas said anything. Lucas smiled as he watched me wrap my bandage, which I finally realized carried the same insignia as Cornelius Tye’s uniform, around my bicep. Glancing over at Lucas, I saw that the insignia on his armband was the same. I nodded as I looked around the mayhem surrounding us. “You are friends with Finneas Jewell?”
“Of the best kind, I hope. He worked for me at a copper mine in East Orange in the New Jersey province a score ago. Took him less than a year before he was very nearly running the place. A man of his talents I have not seen hence.” The six of us were nearly against a wall of the shop next to the public house.
“We must make haste,” said Diderot.
“To where?” I objected, feeling the weight of the gun in my hand. None of the men had tried to relinquish me of it. My urge to use it to put a large hole through Diderot surprised me.
“Your vessel,” Lucas replied.
“Now tis mine again,” I sneered.
“Tis. Finneas says it is yours to do with as you wish.”
I wondered bitterly how I might fare as a privateer off the African coast.
Notes
Cover art:
Ships at sea by Thomas Luny, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; image of woman superimposed over ships licensed from Adobe Stock; image smashup by the author.
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Diderot’s penchant for a random, short historical treatise is well established by this point in the novel.