After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(106)
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Excerpt: The Pursuit of…
The Pursuit Of… is the story of Adrian’s great-great-uncles John, and Henry…
What do a Black American soldier, invalided out at Yorktown, and a white British officer who deserted his post have in common? Quite a bit, actually.
? They attempted to kill each other the first time they met.
? They're liable to try again at some point in the five-hundred mile journey that they're inexplicably sharing.
? They are not falling in love with each other.
? They are not falling in love with each other.
? They are… Oh, no.
The Pursuit Of… is about a love affair between two men and the Declaration of Independence. It’s a novella of around 38,000 words.
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Yorktown, 1781
In the heat of battle, Corporal John Hunter could never differentiate between silence and absolute noise. Years had passed since his first engagement, but every time, the sheer discord of sound blended together. The cry of bugles sounding orders, the clash of bayonets, the rat-tat-tat of firearms somewhere in the distance, the hollow concussion of the cannons—each one of those things heralded someone’s doom. To take heed to any of it was to fall into fear. To fear was to make mistakes; to err was to die. No matter the odds, the sounds of battle were so overwhelming that they were no different than silence.
Yorktown was just like any other engagement.
Oh, the strategists might have begged to differ. There were more clouds, more night. Less frost than some of the battles he’d taken part in. Someone had talked prettily at them about how the freedom of this nascent nation was at stake and some other things John had listened to with his hands curling into fists. The colonies didn’t care about John’s freedom, so he returned the favor by not caring about theirs.
In the end, all battles were smoke and shit and death, and John’s only goal was to see the other side of this war without being forcibly acquainted with the Grim Reaper. Fight. Survive. Go home to his family. The most basic of needs.
The night was dark around him and his fellow infantrymen. The spiked branches of the abatis had left scratches on his arm; the charge up the scarp had John’s heart pounding.
They’d crept through the ditch and were approaching the final defenses of Redoubt Ten—a wall of sharp stakes, somewhat battered. A group of fools ahead of him was negotiating how best to storm the parapet. John held back. Apparently, the idiot in command of this maneuver wanted to lead the charge. Sutton, one of the other black men assigned to storm the redoubt, was hoisting him up.
Nothing to do but join them and hope for the best. Nothing to do but survive, fight, and return to his family before anything ill happened to them. Fight, survive— John stilled, the chant in his head dying down.
There was a reason he let the background noise of battle fade to nothingness in his mind. It left room for wariness and suspicion. There. Behind them, back toward the abatis—there was a shadow.
It moved, man-shaped.
The person behind them was large and almost invisible, and he lay in wait. John’s comrades hadn’t noticed him. In their haste to get in, they’d all left themselves vulnerable.
All of them but him.
Damn it all to hell.
Silence and noise mingled in John’s head. Perhaps the gunfire from the feint on Fusiliers Redoubt a ways off was loud; perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps the man he saw screamed in defiance as John turned toward him; perhaps he was silent.
Fight. Survive… Damn it.
There was no hope for it. John couldn’t wait to see what would happen. He lowered his weapon, said a prayer for his sister, should his soul become irreparably detached from his body, and sprinted back toward the shadowed branches of the abatis.
The man’s head tilted. John braced himself, waiting for the man to fire a weapon or raise a blade, but instead the fellow just waited in silence. One second. Two.
John crashed into him at full speed, driving his shoulder into the man’s chest. God, the other man was huge. The impact traveled bruisingly through his body. Still, John wasn’t exactly tiny himself. They fell together, hitting the ground. It took one moment to get his bayonet into position, another to drive it forward, blade seeking the other man’s belly.
It didn’t make contact. Instead, the fellow hit John on the head with the butt of his musket. John’s head rang; he shook it, pushed the echoing pain aside, and rolled out of the way of the next bayonet strike.
There was no time to think, no time to come up with any plan except to survive the next instant, then the next. No room for fine blade work, either; John swung his musket like a staff.
The other man blocked the strike, and the force of gun barrel meeting gun barrel traveled up John’s arm. The battle had all but disappeared into a pinprick, into this moment between two men.
“God,” the other fellow said. “You’re strong.”
John refused to hear his words.
John had neither energy nor emotion to waste on conversation. Fight. Survive the war. Go back to Lizzie and Noah and his mother. He’d promised them he would—stupid promise, that—but he’d break the entire British Army before he broke that promise. Men who let their attention slip perished, and he had no intention of perishing. He gritted his teeth and tried to smash the other man’s head.