Fire Along the Sky

Robert Moss

Description

Fire Along the Sky is an epic tale of adventure and bawdy intrigue among whites and Indians, a stirring evocation of the wild American frontier in the eighteenth century. Through the eyes of its irreverent narrator, Shane Hardacre, a young Irishman with a passion for women and adventure, we are caught up in the world of Pontiac, the great Ottawa warchief who rallied the Indian nations to a war of resistance, and of Sir William Johnson, the man of two worlds who made peace between peoples divided by race and religion. This edition includes the love letters of Lady Valerie D'Arcy, Shane's soulmate, a sensual, worldly, and intuitive lover who delivers a wry commentary on his amorous escapades.

"Splendidly researched and wildy amusing historical adventure ... Tom Jones as The Deerslayer." — Kirkus Reviews

"Robert Moss gives us a novel whose depth is close to that one tends to find in nonfiction. This is a splendid work which will bring pleasure to all readers." — New England Review of Books

"This splendid piece of storytelling offers the added delight of a likely sequel." — Publishers Weekly

"One of the more venturesome and compelling authors in the field." — Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"Mr. Moss is a suave writer who knows how to create believable characters and take the reader along with them." — The New York Times Book Review

"Robert Moss is an accomplished storyteller who knows how to lay down a firm foundation of fact." — Raleigh News and Observer

"The author of several excellent modern-day thrillers has turned to pre–Revolutionary War America and the results are wonderful." — Rocky Mountain News

"Well researched, well crafted, a splendid read." — Morris L. West
1. The Wager

2. The Hell-Fire Club

3. Manhattan Island

4. A Tavern Fight

5. Johnson Country

6. Apples and Flints

7. Passage to Detroit

8. The Pompadour of New France

9. The Untamed

10. The Mohawk Scare

11. The Change in Davers

12. The Quest for the Prophet

13. Eating Fire

14. Pontiac’s Daughter

15. Bloody Bridge

16. Amherst’s War

17. Black George

18. The Lost Kingdom

19. Escape to New Orleans

20. The Wax Sybil

Author Note

Sujets

• Adventure fiction
• Region
• Historical fiction
• Regional

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438431611
• Langue: English

Extrait

BOOKS BY ROBERT MOSS
The Cycle of the Iroquois Fire Along the Sky The Firekeeper The Interpreter
Dreaming and Imaginal Realms
Conscious Dreaming
Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death
Dreaming True
Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul
The Dreamer's Book of the Dead
The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination
The Secret History of Dreaming

Robert Moss
FIRE ALONG THE SKY
BEING THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN SHANE HARDACRE IN THE NEW WORLD
Revised and Expanded Edition containing the love letters of Valerie D'Arcy, complete and unexpurgated

Cover, Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900) Twilight in the Wilderness , 1860. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 162.6 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund 1965.233
This is a work of historical fiction. Any resemblance to living persons or contemporary events is coincidental.
© 1990; 1995 by Robert Moss
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
All rights reserved
First published by St. Martin's Press, 1992
First paperback edition: Forge, 1995
First Excelsior Editions paperback printing: 2010
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli Williams
Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moss, Robert, 1946–
    Fire along the sky : being the adventures of Captain Shane Hardacre in the New World / Robert Moss.
       p.       cm.
Originally published: New York : Tom Doherty Associates, 1995.
    ISBN 978-1-4384-3160-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
    1. United States–History–French and Indian War, 1755-1763–Fiction. 2. Johnson, William, Sir, 1715-1774–Fiction. 3. Indians of North America–Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.O83F5   2009
823'.914–dc22
2009036464
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my beloved wife and daughters, Our magical friend Wanda, The memory of my father, a soldier for peace, And of my mother, who shared in the dreaming.

79 Eaton Square
London
1st June, 1804
Colonel V.H.S. Hardacre
c/o The British Legation
Lisbon, Portugal
Dearest Shane,
I dream you as the leopard. Last night you came to me in his skin. You frightened me, pressing against my face. I would have cried out, but for fear of waking Sir Henry, who is a brute when he is denied his eight-hour kip.
I knew you by the eyes.
I sat bolt upright, my heart in my throat. You put your paws on the edge of the bed. I held them to my lips and kissed them. They were soft as a baby's hands.
This night vision was entirely real. As I write this, I feel the places in my body you praised and fed.
I cannot undress in front of Sir Henry tonight, even if he begs me to do it, because I have bite marks around the tips of my breasts I cannot explain, and a spectacular bruise, ovoid and empurpled as an eggplant, blooms on my inner thigh.
Do you remember all this?
Do you come to me by night and toy with me fully sensate, as you were on our last day at Cap Ferrat?
Can you cause a leopard, Shane?
I know the answer because I have been reading your book. There is much you have tried to conceal. You write that you lived with native sorcerers in the forests of North America, and witnessed their rituals. But you grow coy when it comes to sharing their secrets, which is not the case when you choose to indulge a memory of the bedroom. You say the soul of Indians is more independent of their bodies than ours is, and that their magicians go abroad by night in the shapes of birds and animals. Then you hasten to deny any knowledge of specifics.
I am not deceived.
Who else among your ladies knows you as a shape-shifter?
Did you howl at the moon with your wolf-woman of the Mohawk?
Did you romp like a red setter with Peg Walsingham? (I fancy Peg would have shown the door to any creature more exotic, God love her.)
Do you do this to torment me, or to console me for your absence?
The smell lingers still, rank and feral, about the bedclothes. Sir Henry wished to know if one of our Siamese cats had got in and disgraced himself.
I believe the leopard is truly your familiar. He is quick and sensual and utterly insatiable, a predator who takes more than he can devour.
Write soon. Tell me your dreams.
Ever your
Valerie

I go to my home in the heart of women.
—Iosa, in Fiona Macleod's The Last Supper
*
The heart of woman is deeper than the deepest sea in the world.
—Breton proverb
1 The Wager

HAZARD RULES OUR LIVES, or so it has seemed to me. Does the philosopher, sulky and parched from demanding whys and wherefores from Plato and Plotinus, command more of destiny than a common gamester who rides carelessly on a die-roll into the unknown? Are the virtuous, the provident, the industrious, better rewarded than a bold young rake with a well-turned leg who rushes fortune like a dairymaid in a hayloft? Does any plan of life compare with the accident of birth? Is any quality more enviable than luck? When I was rising to manhood, when I bucked like a wild colt among the ladies of Dublin and London, I thought the only men worth knowing were gamesters at heart. I was ready to lay a bet on anything—on the fate of a battle in Germany or the ricochet of a billiard ball, on a cockfight or the color of the vicar's urine, on the longevity of a virgin's maidenhead or the progress of two flies crawling up a windowpane in the smoky games room at White's. In short, I shared the general distemper of my age. Gaming was the ruling passion in our society, and the greatest leveler. The rattle of a dice-box or the flutter of a deck of cards was a wonderful solvent for snobbery. I have seen a duke sit down to loo with his footman, and a marchioness to picquet with a two-guinea doxy from Moll King's bawdy-house. The card table—and a gathering reputation for staying power that I labored manfully to earn—assisted my entry into the beds of more ladies of fashion than it would be prudent to recall by name. I am generally pretty lucky, even at long odds. But fortune turned against me with a vengeance soon after the accession of our new King George, the third of our German dumplings, and on a dank, drizzly day in London in the spring of 1761, I was misfortunate enough to accept a wager that brought all the Furies beating on my head. The nature of this bet was extraordinary, even among a set that was voracious for novelty. I laid money on whether a man would take his own life.
As a result of this wager, I was soon obliged to abandon all my hopes of an easy life in England and of glory on the London stage. My fortunes became inextricably entwined with those of the madman who was the subject of my bet. Sir Robert Davers had flashes of pure genius, but he was dangerous to know. He carried an abyss inside him; his most brilliant insights sucked away reason, as through a funnel into the Void. Yet, in the sudden wreckage of my prospects in England, I was mad enough to accept his proposal to cross the seas in a tub like a floating coffin, to try my luck in the American colonies. I was plunged into the nightmare of an Indian revolt. I survived to see things I had never hoped to see in this lifetime. I saw living men vivisected, flayed and roasted. I was invited to sup the broth of white men's bones. I would have joined them in the native cooking-pots, save for my luck with the ladies. That has seldom failed me.
As a captive among the Indians and later as an agent for the Indian Department, I came to know the general of the native revolt as well, I believe, as any white man. His name once loosened bowels in all our American settlements, and was dinned in street ballads at Covent Garden. He shook the British Empire worse than any rebel until George Washington and the Bostonians got up their mutiny. He made a fair bid to drive the white colonists into the sea and damn-near cost us the whole of America west of the Alleghenies. Yet who, outside a few frontiersmen in greasy buckskins, not given to quill-driving, knows anything of Pontiac the man? I knew Pontiac in various guises—as a sadistic butcher; as a dream-hunter at home with the unseen; as a military strategist, cool as any marshal of France; as a betrayed, dispossessed wanderer, crazed and wretched as Lear. I wrote a play about him in an effort to show the public his true colors. But they would not touch my script at Drury Lane, or even at Smock Alley. Garrick told me my depiction was “muddy” and “insufficiently noble.” According to that great ham, playgoers will only tolerate a principal who is all hero or all villain—as if there is anyone outside a stage who fits such a bill. I told Garrick he might keep his opinions and his ignorance of men.
I am now resol