North and South: The North and South Trilogy Read Online Free Page A

suffering in prison. So did her sweet-little-girl’s smile, and the way she hummed and laughed in response to any serious question. She recognized her husband sometimes, but she thought they were still living in France. Her mind hadn’t survived as successfully as her body.
    The ruin of Jeanne’s mind hadn’t dampened her passion. But their couplings produced no children. That and his own advancing age, kept Charles sleepless many a night. At thirty a man was growing old; at forty he could say he had lived a long life.
    The effort of establishing his little trading station at a ford on the Cooper River above Charles Town had changed him physically, too. He no longer resembled an aristocrat. He was still tall, and slightly stooped because of his height. But poverty, work, and strain had blurred his good looks.
    His smile, once quick and gay, looked false, even cruel, when it appeared, which was seldom. Gone was any trace of a prideful bearing. He slouched on the back of the little marsh pony that labored under his weight. He had become almost a brutish parody of his former self.
    Today, in fact, he hardly resembled a white man. His hair, brown as his eyes, hung to the middle of his back, tied with a scrap of red rag. His skin was as brown as that of any of the eight shackled and half-clothed human beings staggering along in a file behind him. Although the spring morning was intensely hot, Charles wore full-length trousers of deerskin and a jerkin of old, cracked leather. In his beaded belt were two loaded pistols and two knives. A musket rested across his knees. A slaver learned to be cautious and a good shot.
    This was the fourth expedition Charles had made to the Cherokee towns in the foothills of the mountains. Without the occasional sale of some Indians he would have failed as a trader. The little post by the river simply didn’t bring in enough income, even though the Charles Town factors took all the furs he could collect from members of the very same tribes he raided on other occasions.
    The seven men and one woman trudging in chains were all in their twenties. Handsome, brown people with wiry limbs and the most beautiful black hair he had ever seen. The girl was especially attractive, he thought. She had a fine bosom. He had earlier noticed that she stared at him frequently. No doubt her large, placid eyes concealed a desire to cut his throat.
    Charles rode with his back to the captives because he had an assistant, as heavily armed as he, at the rear of the file. His helper was a hulking half-breed apparently sired by some Spaniard who had wandered up from the Floridas. He was a Yamasee Indian from the northern camps of that tribe. He had come to the trading station a year ago, already knowing a bit of French. He claimed to have no ambition other than to make war on the tribes that were his enemies.
    He seemed to like working for Charles. Perhaps that was because there were about thirty different tribes scattered through Carolina, and most of them preyed on all the others; hence for the half-breed, who called himself King Sebastian, vocation and avocation became one.
    King Sebastian had a villainous face, and like many other Indians, he enjoyed going about in white men’s finery. Today he wore filthy breeches that had once been pink silk, a brocaded bottle-green coat that hung open to show his huge chest running with sweat, and a great frowsy turban ornamented with paste jewels.
    King Sebastian relished the work he was doing. Every so often he would jog his pony up beside the captives and jab one or more in the buttocks with his musket. Usually this produced hateful glares, at which times the half-breed liked to chuckle and utter a warning, as he did now: “Careful, little brother, or I will use this fire stick to make you less than a man.”
    “And you be careful,” Charles said in French, having halted his pony to let the column straggle by. The scowls and glares of the captives were unusually ferocious, he