The flames were mildly hypnotic; I could look into the wavering glow and see in memory the great fire of the Gathering, the figures dark around it, and the sound of distant fiddles.…
“Should I go to look for him?” Roger asked suddenly, low-voiced.
I jerked, startled out of sleepy hypnosis. I rubbed a hand over my face and shook my head to clear it.
“No. It’s dangerous to go into strange woods in the dark, and you couldn’t find him anyway. If he isn’t back by the morning—that will be time enough.”
As the moments wore slowly on, I began to think that the dawn might come before Jamie did. I was worried for Jamie—but there was in fact nothing that could be done before the morning. Disquieting thoughts tried to push their way in; did Josiah have a knife? Surely he did. But even if the boy was desperate enough to use it, could he possibly take Jamie by surprise? I pushed aside these anxious speculations, trying to occupy my mind instead with counting the number of coughs from the men around the fire.
Number eight was Roger; a deep, loose cough that shook his shoulders. Was he worried for Bree and Jemmy? I wondered. Or did he wonder whether Bree worried about him? I could have told him that, but it wouldn’t have helped him to know. Men fighting—or preparing to fight—needed the idea of home as a place of utter safety; the conviction that all was well there kept them in good heart and on their feet, marching, enduring. Other things would make them fight, but fighting is such a small part of warfare.…
A damned important part, Sassenach, said Jamie’s voice in the back of my head.
I began at last to nod off, waking repeatedly as my head jerked sharply on my neck. The last time, it was the feel of hands on my shoulders that wakened me, but only briefly. Roger eased me to the ground, wadding half my shawl beneath my head for a pillow, tucking the rest of it snug about my shoulders. I caught a brief glimpse of him in silhouette against the fire, black and bearlike in his cloak, and then I knew no more.
I don’t know how long I slept; I woke quite suddenly, at the sound of an explosive sneeze nearby. Jamie was sitting a few feet away, holding Josiah Beardsley’s wrist in one hand, his dirk in the other. He paused long enough to sneeze twice more, wiped his nose impatiently on his sleeve, then thrust the dirk into the embers of the fire.
I caught the stink of hot metal, and raised myself abruptly on one elbow. Before I could say or do anything, something twitched and moved against me. I looked down in astonishment, then up, then down again, convinced in my muddled state that I was still dreaming.
A young boy lay under my cloak, curled against my body, sound asleep. I saw black hair and a scrawny frame, a pallid skin smeared with grime and grazed with scratches. Then there was a sudden loud hiss from the fire and I jerked my gaze back to see Jamie press Josiah’s thumb against the searing metal of his blackened dirk.
Jamie glimpsed my convulsive movement from the corner of his eye and scowled in my direction, lips pursed in a silent adjuration to stillness. Josiah’s face was contorted, lips drawn back from his teeth in agony—but he made no noise. On the far side of the fire, Kenny Lindsay sat watching, silent as a rock.
Still convinced that I was dreaming—or hoping that I was—I put a hand on the boy curled against me. He moved again, and the feel of solid flesh under my fingers woke me completely. My hand closed on his shoulder, and his eyes sprang open, wide with alarm.
He jerked away, scrambling awkwardly to get to his feet. Then he saw his brother—for plainly Josiah was his brother—and stopped abruptly, glancing wildly around the clearing, at the scattered men, at Jamie, Roger, and myself.
Ignoring what must have been the frightful pain of a burned hand, Josiah rose from his seat and stepped quick and soft to his brother’s side, taking him by the arm.
I got to my feet, moving slowly so as not to frighten them. They watched me, identical looks of wariness on the thin, white faces. Identical. Yes, just the same pinched faces—though the other boy’s hair was worn long. He was dressed in nothing but a ragged shirt, and he was barefoot. I saw Josiah squeeze his brother’s arm in reassurance, and began to suspect just what it was he had stolen. I summoned a smile for the two of them, then stretched out my hand to Josiah.
“Let me see your hand,” I whispered.
He hesitated a moment, then gave me his right hand. It was a nice, neat job; so neat that it made me slightly faint for a moment. The ball of the thumb had been sliced cleanly off, the open wound cauterized with searing metal. A red-black, crusted oval had replaced the incriminating brand.
There was a soft movement behind me; Roger had fetched my medicine box and set it down by my feet.
There wasn’t a great deal to do for the injury, save apply a little gentian ointment and bandage the thumb with a clean, dry cloth. I was conscious of Jamie as I worked; he had sheathed his dirk and risen quietly, to go and rummage among the packs and saddlebags. By the time I had finished my brief job, he was back, with a small bundle of food wrapped in a kerchief, and a spare blanket tied in a roll. Over his arm were my discarded breeches.
He handed these to the new boy, gave the food and blanket to Josiah, then clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and squeezed hard. He touched the other boy gently, turning him toward the wood with a hand on his back. Then he jerked his head toward the trees, and Josiah nodded. He touched his forehead to me, the bandage glinting white on his thumb, and whispered, “Thank’ee, ma’am.”
The two boys disappeared silently into the forest, the twin’s bare feet winking pale below the flapping hem of the breeks as he followed his brother.
Jamie nodded to Kenny, then sat down again by the fire, shoulders slumping in sudden exhaustion. I poured him coffee and he took it, his mouth twitching in an attempted smile of acknowledgment that dissipated in a fit of heavy coughing.
I reached for the cup before it could spill, and caught Roger’s eye over Jamie’s shoulder. He nodded toward the east, and laid a finger across his lips, then shrugged with a grimace of resignation. He wanted as much as I did to know what had just happened—and why. He was right, though; the night was fading. Dawn would be here soon, and the men—all accustomed to wake at first light—would be floating toward the surface of consciousness.
Jamie had stopped coughing, but was making horrible gurgling noises in an attempt to clear his throat—he sounded rather like a pig drowning in mud.
“Here,” I whispered, giving him back the cup. “Drink it, and lie down. You should sleep a little.”
He shook his head and lifted the cup to his lips. He swallowed, grimacing at the bitterness.
“Not worth it,” he croaked. He nodded toward the east, where the tufted pines were now inked black on a graying sky. “And besides, I’ve got to think what the hell to do now.”
27
DEATH COMES CALLING
I could scarcely contain my impatience until the men had roused and eaten, broken camp—in an irritatingly leisurely fashion—and mounted. At last, though, I found myself once more on horseback, riding through a morning so crisp and cold, I thought the air might shatter as I breathed it.
“Right,” I said without preamble, as my mount nosed her way up next to Jamie’s. “Talk.”
He glanced back at me and smiled. His face was creased with tiredness, but the brisk air—and a lot of very strong coffee—had revived him. Despite the troubled night, I felt quick and lively myself, blood coursing near the surface of my skin and blooming in my cheeks.
“Ye dinna mean to wait for wee Roger?”
“I’ll tell him later—or you can.” There was no way of riding three abreast; it was only owing to a washout that had left a fan of gravel down the mountainside that we were able to pick our way side by side for the moment, out of hearing of the others. I nudged my mount closer to Jamie’s, my knees wreathed in steam from the horse’s nostrils.
Jamie rubbed a hand over his face, and shook himself, as though to throw off fatigue.
“Aye, well,” he said. “You’ll have seen t
hey were brothers?”
“I did notice that, yes. Where the hell did the other one come from?”
“From there.” He lifted his chin, pointing toward the west. Thanks to the washout, there was an unimpeded view of a small cove in the hollow below—one of those natural breaks in the wilderness, where the trees gave way to meadow and stream. From the trees at the edge of the cove, a thin plume of smoke rose upward, pointing like a finger in the still, cold air.
Squinting, I could make out what looked like a small farmhouse, with a couple of rickety outbuildings. As I watched, a tiny figure emerged from the house and headed toward one of the sheds.
“They’re just about to discover that he’s gone,” Jamie said, a trifle grimly. “Though with luck, they’ll think he’s only gone to the privy, or to milk the goats.”
I didn’t bother asking how he knew they had goats.
“Is that their home? Josiah and his brother?”
“In a manner of speaking, Sassenach. They were bond servants.”
“Were?” I said skeptically. Somehow I doubted that the brothers’ terms of indenture had just happened to expire the night before.
Jamie lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and wiped a dripping nose on his sleeve.
“Unless someone catches them, aye.”
“You caught Josiah,” I pointed out. “What did he tell you?”
“The truth,” he said, with a slight twist of the mouth. “Or at least I think so.”
He had hunted Josiah through the dark, guided by the sound of the boy’s frantic wheezing, and trapped him at last in a rocky hollow, seizing him in the dark. He had wrapped the freezing boy in his plaid, sat him down, and with judicious application of patience and firmness—augmented with sips of whisky from his flask—had succeeded at last in extracting the story.
“The family were immigrants—father, mother, and six bairns. Only the twins survived the passage; the rest perished of illness at sea. There were no relatives here—or none that met the boat, at any rate—and so the ship’s master sold them. The price wouldna cover the cost of the family’s passage, so the lads were indentured for thirty years, their wages to be put toward the debt.”
His voice in the telling was matter-of-fact; these things happened. I knew they did, but was much less inclined to accept them without comment.
“Thirty years! Why, that’s—how old were they at the time?”
“Two or three,” he said.
I was taken aback at that. Overlooking the basic tragedy, that was some mitigation, I supposed; if the boys’ purchaser had been providing for their welfare as children … but I remembered Josiah’s scrawny ribs, and the bowing of his legs. They hadn’t been all that well provided for. But then, neither were a good many children who came from loving homes.
“Josiah’s no idea who his parents were, where they came from, nor what their names were,” Jamie explained. He coughed briefly, and cleared his throat.
“He kent his own name, and that of his brother—the brother’s name is Keziah—but nothing else. Beardsley is the name o’ the man who took them, but as for the lads, they dinna ken if they’re Scots, English, Irish—with names like that, they likely aren’t German or Polish, but even that’s not impossible.”
“Hmm.” I puffed a cloud of thoughtful steam, temporarily obscuring the farmhouse below. “So Josiah ran away. I imagine that had something to do with the brand on his thumb?”
Jamie nodded, eyes on the ground as his horse picked its way down the slope. The ground to either side of the gravel was soft, and clumps of black dirt showed like creeping fungus through the scree.
“He stole a cheese—he was honest enough about that.” His mouth widened in momentary amusement. “Took it from a dairy shed in Brownsville, but the dairymaid saw him. In fact, the maid said ’twas the other—the brother—who took it, but …” Jamie’s ruddy brows drew together for a moment.
“Perhaps Josiah wasna so honest about it as I thought. At any rate, one of the boys took the cheese; Beardsley caught the two of them with it and summoned the sheriff, and Josiah took the blame—and the punishment.”
The boy had run away from the farm following this incident, which took place two years before. Josiah had—he told Jamie—always intended to return and rescue his brother, so soon as he could contrive a place for them to live. Jamie’s offer had seemed a godsend to him, and he had left the Gathering to make his way back on foot.
“Imagine his surprise to find us perched there on the hillside,” Jamie said, and sneezed. He wiped his nose, eyes watering slightly. “He was lurking close by, trying to make up his mind whether to wait until we’d gone, or find out whether we were headed for the farm—thinking if so, we might make a fine distraction for him to slip in and steal away his brother.”
“So you decided to slip in with him instead, and help with the stealing.” My own nose was dripping from the cold. I groped for my handkerchief with one hand, trusting to the horse, Mrs. Piggy, not to catapult us head over heels down the mountain while I blew my nose. I eyed Jamie over the hanky. He still had the clammy, red-nosed look of illness, but his high cheekbones were flushed with the morning sun and he looked remarkably cheerful for a man who’d been out in a cold wood all night. “Fun, was it?”
“Oh, aye, it was. I’ve not done anything like that in years.” Jamie’s eyes creased into blue triangles with his grin. “It reminded me o’ raiding into the Grants’ lands with Dougal and his men, when I was a lad. Creepin’ through the dark, stealing into the barn without a sound—Christ, I had to stop myself in time before I took the cow. Or I would have, if they’d had one.”
I sniffed, and laughed indulgently.
“You are the most complete bandit, Jamie,” I said.
“Bandit?” he said, mildly affronted. “I’m a verra honest man, Sassenach. Or at least I am when I can afford to be,” he amended, with a quick glance behind, to be sure we were not overheard.
“Oh, you’re entirely honest,” I assured him. “Too honest for your own good, in fact. You’re just not very law-abiding.”
This observation appeared to disconcert him slightly, for he frowned and made a gruff sound in his throat that might have been either a Scottish noise of disagreement or merely an attempt to dislodge phlegm. He coughed, then reined in, and standing up in his stirrups, waved his hat to Roger, who was some distance up the slope. Roger waved back, and turned his horse’s nose in our direction.
I pulled my horse in beside Jamie, and dropped the reins on its neck.
“I’ll have wee Roger take the men on to Brownsville,” Jamie explained, sitting back in his saddle, “while I go and call upon the Beardsleys alone. Will ye come with me, Sassenach, or go on wi’ Roger?”
“Oh, I’ll come with you,” I said, without hesitation. “I want to see what these Beardsleys are like.”
He smiled and brushed back his hair with one hand before replacing his hat. He wore his hair loose to cover his neck and ears against the cold, and it shone like molten copper in the morning sun.
“I thought ye might. Mind your face, though,” he said, in half-mocking warning. “Dinna go gape-jawed or gooseberry, and they mention their missing servant lad.”
“Mind your own face,” I said, rather crossly. “Gooseberry, indeed. Did Josiah say that he and his brother were badly treated?” I wondered whether there had been more to Josiah’s leaving than the cheese incident.
Jamie shook his head.
“I didna ask, and he didna say—but ask yourself, Sassenach: would ye leave a decent home to go and live in the woods alone, to make your bed in cold leaves and eat grubs and crickets ’til ye learned to hunt meat?”
He nudged his horse into motion, and rode up the slope to meet Roger, leaving me pondering that conjecture. He returned a few moments later, and I turned my mount in beside him, another question in my mind.
“But if things were bad enough here as to force him to leave—why didn’t his brother go with him?”
Jamie glan
ced at me, surprised, but then smiled, a little grimly.
“Keziah’s deaf, Sassenach.”
Not born deaf, from what Josiah had told him; his twin had lost his hearing as the result of an injury, occurring at the age of five or so. Keziah could therefore speak, but not hear any but the loudest of noises; and unable to perceive the sound of rustling leaves or shuffling feet, could neither hunt nor avoid pursuit.
“He says Keziah understands him, and doubtless he does. When we crept into the barn, I kept watch below while the lad went up the ladder to the loft. I didna hear a sound, but within a minute, both lads were down on the floor beside me, Keziah rubbing the sleep from his eyes. I hadna realized they were twins; gave me a turn to see the two of them, so like.”
“I wonder why Keziah didn’t bring away his breeches,” I said, touching on one thing that had been puzzling me.
Jamie laughed.
“I asked. Seems he’d taken them off the night before, left them in the hay, and one o’ the barn cats had kittens on them. He didna want to disturb her.”
I laughed too, though with an uneasy memory of pale bare feet, blue-tinged skin showing purple in the firelight.
“Kind lad. And his shoes?”
“He hadn’t any.”
By now we had reached the bottom of the slope. The horses milled for a moment, turning in a slow gyre round Jamie as directions were decided, rendezvous appointed, farewells taken. Then Roger—with only slight evidence of self-consciousness—whistled through his teeth and waved his hat in the air in summons. I watched him ride away, and noticed him half-turn in the saddle, then turn back, looking straight ahead.
“He’s no sure they’ll really follow him,” Jamie said, watching. He shook his head critically, then shrugged, dismissing it. “Aye, well. He’ll manage, or not.”
“He’ll manage,” I said, thinking of the night before.
“I’m glad ye think so, Sassenach. Come on, then.” He clicked his tongue and reined his horse’s head around.
“If you’re not sure Roger can manage, why are you sending him on his own?” I inquired of his back, swaying in the saddle as we turned into the thin copse that lay between us and the now-invisible farm. “Why not keep the men together, and take them into Brownsville yourself?”
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