Less Than a Gentleman Read Free

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    B lackened timbers lay strewn across the ground. The house had been small. Only the stone fireplace remained standing as the sole testament to a family’s former hopes and dreams.
    Matthias tied his horse to the nearest surviving tree, then picked his way across the ruins.
    “There’s nothing left worth stealing.” A young man stepped from the woods, leveling a musket at Matthias.
    “I’m not a thief.” Matthias wiped the soot from his hands, leaving black streaks on his buff-colored breeches. In his new role as partisan leader, he now dressed to blend into the surroundings. “Is this your home?”
    “Aye, what’s left of it.” The man lowered his weapon. His wife emerged from the woods with two young children clinging to her skirt.
    “I’ve been traveling down the Pee Dee,” Matthias explained. “This is the fourth burnt home I’ve found, but you’re the first people I’ve seen. What happened?”
    The man removed his tricorne to wipe sweat from his brow. “The British did it, those accursed devils.”
    “When?” After the rescue at Nelson’s Ferry, Matthias had remained in the swamp for a week, taking care of his men. Last night, he and his cousin had traveled to the upper Pee Dee to visit Richard’s parents. Then today, he had ventured downriver in search of the major’s daughters.
    “The redcoats were here yesterday,” the man answered. “They started on the coast in Georgetown and worked their way up the Pee Dee, burning everything in sight.”
    Matthias grimaced. This place had to be nearly seventy miles from Georgetown. Seventy miles of burnt homes.
    The man sighed. “They said we deserved it for helping the partisans free some prisoners at Nelson’s Ferry, but I had no part in it.”
    Matthias flinched as if he’d been hit with the blunt end of an axe. It was his rescue that had caused this? His heart squeezed at the sight of the children, wide-eyed and silent, their faces smudged with soot. On their cheeks, little trails of cleaner skin had been left behind by their tears.
    He reached into his shoulder bag and removed the loaf of bread his aunt had given him. “ ’Tis not much, but it is all I have with me.”
    “Thank you, good sir.” The wife accepted the loaf.
    “No thanks are necessary, I assure you.” Matthias swallowed a knot of guilt. “If you travel upstream another twenty miles, you’ll reach my uncle, the Reverend Nathaniel Thomas. He’ll be able to assist you better than I.”
    The man nodded. “Thank you.”
    “I’m searching for two women who live along this river. Perhaps you know them? Virginia Stanton and Caroline Munro?”
    “Aye.” The man accepted a piece of bread from his wife. “But we haven’t seen them since the redcoats came through.”
    The woman passed out pieces of bread to her children. “Poor Virginia is expecting in about a month. ’Twould be her third.”
    They have children? Matthias loosened his neck cloth. The major had neglected to tell him that small detail. “Their father, Major Munro, asked me to locate them.”
    “They live about five miles south of here.” The woman’s eyes filled with tears. “That is, they did.” She turned away as if to escape the bleak possibility that remained unspoken.
    The two women and their children could be dead.

 
    C HAPTER T WO
    Monday, September 4, 1780
    T he drum of horse hooves drew closer.
    Caroline exchanged a worried look with her older sister. Virginia touched her swollen belly with a protective gesture and eased to her knees behind the tall thicket of sweet pepperbush.
    They were a pitiful bunch, Caroline thought, glancing from Ginny, who was beginning her ninth month of pregnancy, to her young nephew and even younger niece. Their few belongings filled the sacks that straddled an old brown horse.
    The thundering noise grew closer. In their hiding place, four-year-old Charlotte huddled beside her mother. Edward sidled closer with a defiant look, as if daring anyone to say he was