McLaughlin Family Novel--Excerpt

GOD’S MOUNTAIN, MCLAUGHLIN’S VALLEY
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COPYRIGHT © 2005 JOAN M. KAY



PROLOGUE

Virginia Coast
September 6, 1743


Five men, on foot and dripping seawater, scrambled through an unkempt autumn garden, an acre or two away from a small bayside plantation. A familiar port town, quiet in the still night, spread out to the north.

Before their escape from the Navy’s H.M.S. Cruizer, in the groaning below-decks, the men had solemnly agreed on stealth and silence. But now a few couldn’t hold back anxious laughter as they carelessly crushed tender orange mums under their bare feet and dipped muddy hands in a carved stone fountain.

Only one dared a look back to the inlet, trickling in over a sandbar from the ocean-sized Chesapeake Bay. Hugh McLaughlin, son of James, a tobacco planter from Bull Run in Virginia, had been snatched by the Navy’s press gang a year earlier while at the wharf shipping hogsheads of his father’s tobacco. He now balanced his weight on a low brick wall and patiently scanned the water. The other four men crossed the bricks and climbed a terraced hill, leading to a dark stand of trees.

All was quiet between them and the shore, where waves slowly lapped.

But beyond the shoreline, under a misty rising moon, a sloop rocked gently in the murky water, just far enough away that the swaying could not be heard over their own exertions.

Once dragged from riverside taverns, crowded wharfs, and merchant vessels to serve the king, there were stolen men among their number, eagerly joined in the running by the disillusioned, the beaten, the scurvied. His Majesty’s Sloop the Cruizer had held them tenuously, desperate to deliver a life of adventure and honor, but instead merely giving sustenance to the essence within the men that demanded all that God provided but earthly lords drained away. And the men ran to grasp God’s gifts. Of the soil, of the sea, of their spirit. They sought no less than their own liberty and security.

But the captain would want them back. Not even a pirate vessel, her belly pregnant with a king’s ransom, would be closer guarded than a deck full of seasoned and cynical sailors with the fever of liberty. Experienced seamen, they were as valuable cargo to the Navy as the great guns pointed outward from the colonies’ coasts, guarding into the night against French invasion. And still, they made good their escape.

For Hugh, this run was born of their last orders. The Cruizer’s anchors would soon be retrieved and her sails would snap in the wind, to blow them eastward to Spithead, England, after escorting one last ship into the Virginia capes.

Leaving. Back across the choppy, frigid Atlantic to England.

No, Captain.

Hugh thought of hot, loud, colorful Barbados where he had sailed to this summer, and then of the warm, salty breezes of the Chesapeake. No. He would not leave America, would not cross the unforgiving Atlantic. And so Hugh threw in his lot with George Anderson, Richard Welch, John Bond, and John Mayou—all running and in this escape together.

He turned and followed the rest of the men, leaving his home in Tidewater behind.

Soon he crossed Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to settle in the howling wilderness beyond, in search of liberty and security, far out of the Navy’s long reach.