The Kent Family Chronicles Volumes Four Through Six by John Jakes

Author:John Jakes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504057561
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

THEY HAD A SPECIAL meeting place on the canal towpath, at the foot of Gamble’s Hill. The spot was equidistant from the Tredegar Works to the west and the sprawling, long-idle state armory on the east.

Gideon was late.

Margaret paced, stepping aside from time to time and smiling automatically as other couples passed, whispering, laughing, holding hands. Her eyes kept returning to the Tredegar across the canal.

Even at this late hour of the day, workmen swarmed in the yard. They were transferring scrap iron from wagons to barrows and trundling it into the great, sooty buildings. To be melted down to make new iron. Iron for the instruments of war—

Both the Tredegar and the armory stood on a narrow strip of land separating the river from the James River and Kanawha Canal. The river purled, glittering in the gold light of the sinking sun. Further along the path in the canal basin, one of the four-mile-an-hour packets from Lynchburg was tying up.

Somewhere on the wooded slope behind her, she heard loud, lusty singing. “Lorena.” One of his favorites—

She spun around, her heartbeat faster. There he was! Running recklessly downhill among the trees.

He waved, so vigorously the white plume bobbed on his visored leather shako. She waved in return, her emotions all jumbled together. There was excitement; apprehension; even a little amusement. Captain Lester Macomb had outfitted his Hussars in what he thought was the European mode. To a girl brought up around an apparel shop, the captain’s taste was highly questionable.

Margaret and her aunt knew the yard goods merchant, of course. Purchased bolts of cloth from him on occasion. La Mode Shoppe hadn’t been hired to sew for Macomb’s Hussars, however. Had the reverse been true, Gideon would have looked less garish—or Aunt Eliza would have been discharged from the job for her protests.

Gideon’s uniform consisted of new and beautifully polished high boots, tight-fitting sky-blue trousers and a matching coat The coat had a choker collar and an excess of gaudy braid across the front. At a distance, the outfit possessed a certain showy splendor. Up close, its shortcomings were more apparent.

The leather cavalryman’s belt and the sabretache attached to it by straps had been crudely cut and laced by someone with no respect for leather or workmanship. And Gideon lacked the final touch—the saber itself. All he’d brought from Lexington were four gifts from his mother’s father:

The new boots; a 30-gauge revolving-cylinder percussion shotgun from Colt’s of Paterson; a round-tree English saddle; and the absolutely indispensible requirement—his horse Dancer, a handsome and spirited gray stallion.

Most of the seventy-eight men of Macomb’s Hussars were no better equipped, save for Gideon’s friend Rodney Arbuckle. Rodney hailed from a Peninsula tobacco estate on the Pamunkey River near White House. Rodney had money—though not nearly as much as the dandies in the celebrated Goochland Troop. Not only did the boys from Goochland County dress more splendidly, but the majority had two horses and a black body servant.

Still, Gideon Kent was outrageously proud of his troop and his uniform—including an absolutely ghastly left-shoulder dolman.

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