“That what you wanted?” He whispered the words now, but softly, not to awaken her. The warmth of her body radiated through the bedclothes; she was deep asleep.
If it was what she’d wanted—what, exactly, was it? Was it the brutal nature of his lovemaking that she’d responded to? Or had she sensed the strength of what lay behind it, and acknowledged that—the desperation of his need to keep her safe?
And if it was the roughness … he swallowed, clenching a fist against the thought of Stephen Bonnet. She’d never told him what had passed between them, her and Bonnet—and it was unthinkable that he should ask. More unthinkable that he should suspect anything in that encounter might have shamefully stirred her. And yet she did stir visibly on those rare occasions when something led him to take her abruptly, without his usual gentleness.
He was a long way from praying now.
He felt as he had once before, trapped in a rhododendron hell, with the same maze of damp roots and hanging leaves always before him, no matter in which direction he turned. Dim tunnels seemed to offer hope of escape, and yet led only to further tangles.
For me and my true love will never meet again, on the bonnie banks and braes of Loch Lomond …
He was wound tight again, skin prickling and his legs twitching with restlessness. The mosquito whined by and he slapped at it—too late, of course. Unable to keep still, he slid quietly out of bed, and did a quick series of deep knee-bends to loosen the cramped muscles.
That brought some relief, and he dropped to the floor to do push-ups, counting silently as he dipped toward the floorboards. One. Two. Three. Four. Concentrating only on the increasing burn in chest and arms and shoulders, the soothing monotony of the count. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight …
At last, muscles quivering with temporary exhaustion, he stood up, untacked the hide from the window, and stood naked, letting the damp night air flood in upon him. He might let in more mosquitoes—but the one might go out, too.
The wood was silvered with moonlight, and a faint fire-glow in the darkened heart of it spoke of the militia encamped there. They had been coming in all day, on mules or ragged horses, muskets laid across the bundles of their blankets. He caught the sound of voices and casual laughter, a fragment borne on the breeze. At least he wasn’t the only one wakeful; the notion comforted him.
A brighter light glowed at the side of the big house, at the farther side of the clearing. A lantern; two figures walking close together, one tall, one smaller.
The man said something, an interrogative rumble; he recognized Jamie’s voice, but couldn’t make out the words.
“No,” Claire’s voice answered, lighter, clear as they came closer. He saw her hands flutter, silhouetted in the lantern’s glow. “I’m filthy from the planting. I’m going to wash before I come in. You go up to bed.”
The larger figure hesitated, then handed her the lantern. Roger saw Claire’s face in the light for a moment, turned upward, smiling. Jamie bent and kissed her briefly, then stepped back.
“Hurry, then,” he said, and Roger could hear the answering smile in his voice. “I dinna sleep well without ye beside me, Sassenach.”
“You’re going to sleep right away, are you?” She paused, a bantering note in her voice.
“Not right away, no.” Jamie’s figure had melted into the darkness, but the breeze was toward the cabin, and his voice came out of the shadows, part of the night. “But I canna very well do the other unless ye’re beside me, either, now can I?”
Claire laughed, though softly.
“Start without me,” she said, turning away toward the well. “I’ll catch you up.”
Roger waited by the window until he saw her come back, the lantern swinging with the haste of her step, and go inside. The breeze had turned, and he heard no more of the men in the wood, though their fire still burned.
“You’re early, mate,” he said, and eased a finger toward the firefly, gently nudging. “Think there’s anyone else out there yet?” The insect moved a few inches, then stopped, abdomen stubbornly blinking.
He looked toward the wood, his skin cool now, and gooseflesh rose on his chest. He rubbed absently at it, and felt the tender spot where she had bitten him. It was dark in the moonlight, a faint blotch on his skin; would it still be there come morning? he wondered.
Reaching up to pull the hide back into place, he caught the gleam of moonlight on glass. Brianna’s small collection of personal items lay on the shelf by the window: the pair of tortoiseshell combs Jocasta had given her, her silver bracelet. The small glass jar of tansy oil, two or three discreet slips of sponge beside it. And the larger gleam of the jarful of Dauco seeds. She hadn’t had time for the tansy oil tonight, but he’d bet his life she’d taken the seeds sometime today.
He tacked down the hide, and made his way back to bed, pausing by the cradle to put down a hand and feel the baby’s breath through the mosquito-netting, warm and reassuring on his skin.
Jem had kicked his covers off; Roger lifted the netting and pulled them up by feel, tucking them firmly in. There was something soft … oh, Jemmy’s rag-doll; the baby was clutching it to his chest. Roger stood for a moment, hand on Jemmy’s back, feeling the soothing rise and fall of his breathing.
“Good-night, laddie,” he whispered at last, and touched the soft padded round of the little boy’s bottom. “God bless you and keep you safe.”
58
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU
May 1, 1771
May Union Camp
I woke up just past dawn, roused by an insect of some sort walking up my leg. I twitched my foot and whatever it was scuttled hastily away into the grass, evidently alarmed to discover that I was alive. I wriggled my toes suspiciously, but finding no more intruders in my blanket, drew a deep breath of sap-filled fresh air and relaxed luxuriously.
I could hear faint stirrings nearby, but it was only the stamp and blowing of the officers’ horses, who woke long before the men did. The camp itself was still silent—or as silent as a camp containing several hundred men was likely to be at any hour. The sheet of canvas overhead glowed with soft light and leaf-shadows, but the sun was not yet fully up. I closed my eyes half-way, delighted at the thought that I needn’t get up for some time yet—and when I did, someone else would have made breakfast.
We had come into camp the night before, after a winding journey down from the mountains and across the piedmont, to arrive at the place of rendezvous, at Colonel Bryan’s plantation. We were in good time; Tryon had not yet arrived with his troops from New Bern, nor had the Craven and Carteret County detachments, who were bringing the artillery field pieces and swivel guns. Tryon’s troops were expected sometime today; or so Colonel Bryan had told us over supper the night before.
A grasshopper landed on the canvas above with an audible thump. I eyed it narrowly, but it didn’t seem disposed to come inside, thank goodness. Perhaps I should have accepted Mrs. Bryan’s offer to find me a bed in the house, along with a few other officers’ wives who had accompanied their husbands. Jamie had insisted upon sleeping in the field with his men, though, and I had gone with him, preferring a bed involving Jamie and bugs to one with neither.
I glanced sideways, careful not to move in case he was still asleep. He wasn’t. He was lying quite still, though, utterly relaxed, save for his right hand. He had this raised, and appeared to be examining it closely, turning it to and fro and slowly curling and uncurling his fingers—as well as he could. The fourth finger had a fused joint, and was permanently stiff; the middle finger was slightly twisted, a deep white scar spiraling round the middle joint.
His hand was callused and battered by work, and the tiny stigma of a nail-wound still showed, pale-pink, in the middle of his palm. The skin of his hand was deeply bronzed and weathered, freckled with sun-blots and scattered with bleached gold hairs. I thought it remarkably beautiful.
“Happy Birthday,” I said, softly. “Taking stock?”
He let the hand fall on his ch
est, and turned his head to look at me, smiling.
“Aye, something of the sort. Though I suppose I’ve a few hours left. I was born at half-six; I willna have lived a full half-century until suppertime.”
I laughed and rolled onto my side, kicking the blanket off. The air was still delightfully cool, but it wouldn’t last long.
“Do you expect to disintegrate much further before supper?” I asked, teasing.
“Oh, I dinna suppose anything is likely to fall off by then,” he said, consideringly. “As to the workings … aye, well …” He arched his back, stretching, and sank back with a gratified groan as my hand settled on him.
“It all seems to be in perfect working order,” I assured him. I gave a brief, experimental tug, making him yelp slightly. “Not loose at all.”
“Good,” he said, folding his hand firmly over mine to prevent further unauthorized experiments. “How did ye ken what I was doing? Taking stock, as ye say?”
I let him keep hold of the hand, but shifted to set my chin in the center of his chest, where a small depression seemed made for the purpose.
“I always do that, when I have a birthday—though I generally do it the night before. More looking back, I think, reflecting a bit on the year that’s just gone. But I do check things over; I think perhaps everyone does. Just to see if you’re the same person as the day before.”
“I’m reasonably certain that I am,” he assured me. “Ye dinna see any marked changes, do ye?”
I lifted my chin from its resting place and looked him over carefully. It was in fact rather hard to look at him objectively; I was both so used to his features and so fond of them that I tended to notice tiny, dear things about him—the freckle on his earlobe, the lower incisor pushing eagerly forward, just slightly out of line with its fellows—and to respond to the slightest change of his expression—but not really to look at him as an integrated whole.
He bore my examination tranquilly, eyelids half-lowered against the growing light. His hair had come loose while he slept and feathered over his shoulders, its ruddy waves framing a face strongly marked by both humor and passion—but which possessed a paradoxical and most remarkable capacity for stillness.
“No,” I said at last, and set my chin down again with a contented sigh. “It’s still you.”
He gave a small grunt of amusement, but lay still. I could hear one of the cooks stumbling round nearby, cursing as he tripped over a wagon-tongue. The camp was still in the process of assembling; a few of the companies—those with a high proportion of ex-soldiers among their officers and men—were tidy and organized. A good many were not, and tipsy tents and strewn equipment sprawled across the meadow in a quasi-military hodgepodge.
A drum began to beat, to no apparent effect. The army continued to snooze.
“Do you think the Governor is going to be able to do anything with these troops?” I asked dubiously.
The local avatar of the army appeared to have gone back to sleep as well. At my question, though, the long auburn lashes lifted in lazy response.
“Oh, aye. Tryon’s a soldier. He kens well enough what to do—at least to start. It’s no so verra difficult to make men march in column and dig latrines, ken. To make them fight is another thing.”
“Can he do that?”
The chest under my chin lifted in a deep sigh.
“Maybe so. Maybe no. The question is—will he have to?”
That was the question, all right. Rumors had flown round us like autumn leaves in a gale, all the way from Fraser’s Ridge. The Regulators had ten thousand men, who were marching in a body upon New Bern. General Gage was sailing from New York with a regiment of official troops to subdue the Colony. The Orange County militia had rioted and killed their officers. Half the Wake County men had deserted. Hermon Husband had been arrested and spirited onto a ship, to be taken to London for trial on charges of treason. Hillsborough had been taken by the Regulators, who were preparing to fire the town and put Edmund Fanning and all his associates to the sword. I did hope that one wasn’t true—or if it was, that Hubert Sherston was not one of Fanning’s intimates.
Sorting through the mass of hearsay, supposition, and sheer wild invention, the only fact of which we could be sure appeared to be that Governor Tryon was en route to join the militia. After which, we would just see, I supposed.
Jamie’s free hand rested on my back, his thumb idly stroking the edge of my shoulder blade. With his usual capacity for mental discipline, he appeared to have dismissed the uncertainty of the military prospects completely from his mind, and was thinking of something else entirely.
“Do ye ever think—” he began, and then broke off.
“Think what?” I bent and kissed his chest, arching my back to encourage him to rub it, which he did.
“Well … I’m no so sure I can explain, but it’s struck me that now I have lived longer than my father did—which is not something I expected to happen,” he added, with faint wryness. “It’s only … well, it seems odd, is all. I only wondered, did ye ever think of that, yourself—having lost your mother young, I mean?”
“Yes.” My face was buried in his chest, my voice muffled in the folds of his shirt. “I used to—when I was younger. Like going on a journey without a map.”
His hand on my back paused for a moment.
“Aye, that’s it.” He sounded a little surprised. “I kent more or less what it would be like to be a man of thirty, or of forty—but now what?” His chest moved briefly, with a small noise that might have been a mixture of amusement and puzzlement.
“You invent yourself,” I said softly, to the shadows inside the hair that had fallen over my face. “You look at other women—or men; you try on their lives for size. You take what you can use, and you look inside yourself for what you can’t find elsewhere. And always … always … you wonder if you’re doing it right.”
His hand was warm and heavy on my back. He felt the tears that ran unexpectedly from the corners of my eyes to dampen his shirt, and his other hand came up to touch my head and smooth my hair.
“Aye, that’s it,” he said again, very softly.
The camp was beginning to stir outside, with clangings and thumps, and the hoarse sound of sleep-rough voices. Overhead, the grasshopper began to chirp, the sound like someone scratching a nail on a copper pot.
“This is a morning my father never saw,” Jamie said, still so softly that I heard it as much through the walls of his chest, as with my ears. “The world and each day in it is a gift, mo chridhe—no matter what tomorrow may be.”
I sighed deeply and turned my head, to rest my cheek against his chest. He reached over gently and wiped my nose with a fold of his shirt.
“And as for taking stock,” he added practically, “I’ve all my teeth, none of my parts are missing, and my cock still stands up by itself in the morning. It could be worse.”
59
MILITARY ENGINES
Journal of the Expedition against the Insurgents
Kept by William Tryon, Governor
Thursday, May 2nd
The Craven and Carteret Detachments marched out of New Bern with the two Field Pieces, Six Swivel Guns mounted on Carriages, Sixteen Waggons, & four Carts, loaded with Baggage, Ammunition and as much provisions as would supply the several Detachments that were to join them on their Route to Col. Bryan’s, the place of General Rendezvous.
The Governor left New Bern the 27th of April, and arrived at Col. Bryan’s the 1st of May. Today the Troops from the two Districts joined.
Friday, 3d. of May, Union Camp
The Governor Reviewed at 12 O’Clock the Detachments in the Meadow at Smiths Ferry on the West Side of Neuse River.
Saturday, the 4th of May
The Whole marched to Johnston Court House. Nine Miles.
Sunday, 5th of May
Marched to Major Theophilus Hunter’s in Wake County. Thirteen Miles.
Monday, 6th of May
The Army halted, and the Governor re
viewed the Wake Regiment at a Genl. Muster. Mr. Hinton Colonel of the Regiment acquainted the Governor that he had got but Twenty two Men of the Company he had received Orders to raise, owing to a Disaffection among the Inhabitants of the County.
The Governor observing a General Discontent in the Wake Regiment as he passed along the Front Rank of the Battalion, seeing that not more than one Man in five had Arms, & finding that upon his calling on them to turn out as Volunteers in the Service, they refused to obey, ordered the Army to surround the Battalion; which being effected he directed three of his Colonels to draft out Forty of the most Sightly & Most active Men, which Manouvre caused no small Panic in the Regiment, consisting at the Time of about four Hundred Men.
During the drafting the Officers of the Army were active in persuading the men to enlist, and in less than two Hours completed the Wake Company to Fifty Men. Night coming on the Wake Regiment was dismissed, much ashamed both of their Disgrace, & their own Conduct which occasioned it. The Army returned to Camp.
Wednesday, the 8th of May
Col. Hinton’s Detachment was left behind, with a View to prevent the disaffected in that County from forming into a Body, and joining the Regulators in the adjacent Counties.
This Morning a Detachment marched to the dwelling House of Turner Tomlinson, a Notorious Regulator, and brought him prisoner to Camp, where he was closely confined. He confess’d he was a Regulator, but would make no discoveries.
The Army marched, & incamped near Booth’s, on New Hope Creek.
Friday, the 10th of May
Halted, ordered the Waggons to be refitted, Horses to be shod, and every thing put in Repair. Reviewed in Hillsborough two Companies of the Orange Militia.
The Prisoner Tomlinson made his escape this Evening, from the Quarter Guard. Detachments set after him, but without Success.
Sunday, the 12th of May
Marched, and forded Haw River, and encamped on the West Side of the Banks. It was expected the Regulators would have opposed the passages of the Royalists over this River, as it was their Intent, but not suspecting that the Army would move out of Hillsborough till after Monday, they were by this Sudden Movement of the Army defeated in that part of their plan.
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