A Spectre of Power

A Spectre of Power by Mary Noailles Murfree

A Spectre of Power (1903), by Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree), is a historical romance set in the Cherokee mountain country of East Tennessee in 1762, woven around the real geopolitical struggle between French, British, and Cherokee interests in the aftermath of the Anglo-Cherokee War. The novel opens at Great Tellico with the arrival of a Choctaw-French embassy — the vain, jealous Choctaw chief Mingo Push-koosh and the volatile, ambitious young French officer Lieutenant Jean Marie Édouard Bodin de Laroche — sent to woo the Cherokees away from their British alliance. A young Cherokee widow, Akaluka (called "Eve" for her fateful curiosity), inadvertently draws the possessive attention of Push-koosh after diving into the Tennessee River to retrieve a scarf meant as a diplomatic gift; her innocent, coerced acceptance of the token is read as consent to marry him. When tribal elders, wary of binding the match before the French-Cherokee treaty is secured, try to return the scarf, the humiliated Push-koosh flies into a rage, destroys the gunpowder cargo meant to cement the alliance, and orders the massacre of unarmed Cherokee fishermen before fleeing — abandoning Laroche to face the Cherokees' fury alone. Held captive and expecting torture, Laroche is spared execution only because he falls into a violent, providential attack of malarial fever; his delirious babbling of military engineering terms convinces the shrewd chief Moy Toy that the Frenchman's technical knowledge — fort-building, artillery, even the manufacture of gunpowder from local materials — is too valuable to waste in death. Moy Toy secretly places him in the care of a British trader, Jock Lesly, and his household at Ioco Town, concealing his French identity under the alias "Tam Wilson." As Laroche convalesces amid the Lesly family's homely kindness, he falls in love with Lesly's daughter Lilias, unsettling her existing courtship with Callum MacIlvesty, a dispossessed Highland gentleman serving as a common soldier. Torn between his secret duty to the French crown — including a scheme to help the Cherokees strike at British trade — and his growing, guilt-ridden attachment to the unsuspecting Scottish family who saved his life, Laroche discovers that Moy Toy has extracted a further price for silence: a plot against the very traders sheltering him, forcing the disguised Frenchman toward a reckoning between personal honor and international intrigue. *(Synopsis based on the novel's opening chapters, as that is the material provided; the work continues beyond this point.)

By Mary Noailles Murfree · First published 1903 · Genre: historical fiction, historical romance, colonial literature · 22 chapters · 154,317 words

First lines

IT so chanced that Eve, with all her primeval curiosity, dwelt in the Cherokee town of Great Tellico. Hence came disaster. To the inquisitiveness of the woman it was always imputed, although the undisciplined heart of man, the turbulent impulses of ambition, and the serpentine supersubtlety of a covetous political scheme were potent elements. Little, indeed, such as she might seem concerned with matters of high import. From afar, unindividualized among scores of the other subservient Cherokee women standing on the banks of the glittering Tennessee River, she had watched the approach of the herald of the embassy. A Choctaw Indian he was revealed as he ran holding broadly outstretched in each hand the great white wing of a swan, streaked with symbolic lines of white clay. The headmen of Tellico, the warriors of note, and the "beloved men" swiftly assembled in the "beloved square" to greet the arrival of the ambassador himself, and with no presentiment of personal significance in the event, she beheld the entry of the splendidly bedight Choctaw chief, Mingo Push-koosh.

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American literature · Southern fiction · Appalachian setting · local color · regionalism · historical fiction · rural life · mountain communities · social conflict · political intrigue · mystery · romance

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