Still, he couldn’t skulk in the trees all day. He emerged onto the bank, and made his way downstream toward the point the foragers had indicated, watching the trees carefully for any signs of life. The crossing near the point was better, shallow water and a rocky bottom. Still, if the Regulators were “drawn up” anywhere nearby, they were being damned quiet about it.
A more peaceful scene could scarcely be imagined, and yet his heart was hammering suddenly in his ears. He had again the odd feeling of someone standing near him. He glanced around in all directions, but nothing moved save the rushing water and the trailing willow fronds.
“That you, Dad?” he said softly, under his breath, and at once felt foolish. Still, the feeling of someone near remained strong, though benign.
With a mental shrug, he bent and took off his shoes and stockings. It must be the circumstances, he thought. Not that one could quite compare wading a shallow creek in search of a Quaker rabble-rouser to flying a Spitfire across the night-time Channel on a bombing run to Germany. A mission was a mission, though, he supposed.
He looked round once again, but saw only tadpoles wriggling in the shallows. With a slightly crooked smile, he stepped into the water, sending the tadpoles into frenzied flight.
“Over the top, then,” he said to a wood-duck. The bird ignored him, going on with its foraging among the dark-green rafts of floating cress.
No challenge came from the trees on either side; no sounds at all, bar the cheerful racket of nesting birds. It was as he sat on a sunwarmed rock, drying his feet before putting his shoes and stockings back on, that he finally heard some indication that the far side of the creek was populated by humans.
“So what do you want then, sweeting?”
The voice came from the shrubbery behind him, and he froze, blood thundering in his ears. It was a woman’s voice. Before he could move or think to answer, though, he heard a laugh, deeper in pitch, and with a particular tone to it that made him relax.
Instinct informed him before his reason did that voices with that particular intonation were not a threat.
“Dunno, hinney, what will it cost me?”
“Ooh, hark at him! Not the time to count your pennies, is it?”
“Don’t you worry, ladies, we’ll take up a collection amongst us if we have to.”
“Oh, is that the way of it? Well and good, sir, but be you aware, in this congregation, the collection comes before the singing!”
Listening to this amiable wrangling, Roger deduced that the voices in question belonged to three men and two women, all of whom seemed confident that whatever the financial arrangements, three would go into two quite evenly, with no awkward remainders.
Picking up his shoes, he stole quietly away, leaving the unseen sentries—if that’s what they were—to their sums. Evidently, the army of the Regulation wasn’t quite so organized as the government troops.
Less organized was putting it mildly, he thought, a little later. He had kept to the creek bank for some distance, unsure where the main body of the army might be. He had walked nearly a quarter-mile, with neither sight nor sound of a soul other than the two whores and their customers. Feeling increasingly surreal, he wandered through small pine groves, and across the edges of grassy meadows, with no company save courting birds and small gossamer butterflies in shades of orange and yellow.
“What the hell sort of way is this to run a war?” he muttered, shoving his way through a blackberry bramble. It was like one of those science fiction stories, in which everyone but the hero had suddenly vanished from the face of the earth. He was beginning to be anxious; what if he didn’t manage to find the bloody Quaker—or even the army—before the shooting started?
Then he rounded a bend in the creek, and caught his first glimpse of the Regulators proper; a group of women, washing clothes in the rushing waters by a cluster of boulders.
He ducked back into the brush before they should see him, and turned away from the creek, heartened. If the women were here, the men weren’t far away.
They weren’t. Within a few more yards, he heard the sounds of camp—casual voices, laughter, the clank of spoons and tea-kettles and the clunk of splitting wood. Rounding a clump of hawthorn, he was nearly knocked over by a gang of young men who ran past, hooting and yelling, as they chased one of their number who brandished a fresh-cut racoon’s tail overhead, floating in the breeze as he ran.
They charged past Roger without a second glance, and he went on, a bit less warily. He wasn’t challenged; there were no sentries. In fact, a strange face appeared to be neither a novelty nor a threat. A few men glanced casually at him, but then turned back to their talk, seeing nothing odd in his appearance.
“I’m looking for Hermon Husband,” he said bluntly to a man roasting a squirrel over the pale flames of a fire. The man looked blank for a moment.
“The Quaker?” Roger amplified.
“Oh, aye, him,” the man said, features clearing. “He’s a ways beyond—that way, I think.” He gestured helpfully with his stick, the charred squirrel pointing the way with the stubs of its blackened forelegs.
“A ways beyond” was some way. Roger passed through three more scattered camps before reaching what looked to be the main body of the army—if one could dignify it by such a term. True, there did seem to be an increasing air of seriousness; there was less of the carefree frolicking he had seen near the creek. Still, it wasn’t Strategic Command headquarters, by a long shot.
He began to feel mildly hopeful that violence could still be avoided, even with the armies drawn up face to face and the gun-crews standing by. There had been an air of excited readiness among the militia as he passed through their lines, but no atmosphere of hatred or blood-thirstiness.
Here, the situation was far different than it was among the orderly militia lines, but even less disposed to immediate hostilities. As he pressed on further, though, asking his way at each campfire he passed, he began to feel something different in the air—a sense of increasing urgency, almost of desperation. The horseplay he’d seen in the outer camps had vanished; men clustered talking in close groups, their heads together, or sat by themselves, grimly loading guns and sharpening knives.
As he got closer, the name of Hermon Husband was recognized by everyone, the pointing fingers surer of direction. The name seemed almost a magnet, pulling him farther and farther into the center of a thickening mass of men and boys, all excited—all armed. The noise grew greater all the time, voices beating on his ears like hammers on a forge.
He found Husband at last, standing on a rock like a large gray wolf at bay, surrounded by a knot of some thirty or forty men, all clamoring in angry agitation. Elbows jabbed and feet trampled, without regard to impact on their fellows. Clearly they were demanding an answer, but unable to pause long enough to hear one were it given.
Husband, stripped to his shirtsleeves and red in the face, was shouting at one or two of those closest to him, but Roger could hear nothing of what was said, above the general hub-bub. He pushed through the outer ring of spectators, but was stopped nearer the center by the press of men. At least here, he could pick up a few words.
“We must! You know it, Hermon, there’s no choice!” shouted a lanky man in a battered hat.
“There’s always a choice!” Husband bellowed back. “Now is the time to choose, and God send we do it wisely!”
“Aye, with cannon pointed at us?”
“No, no, forward, we must go forward, or all is lost!”
“Lost? We have lost everything so far! We must—”
“The Governor’s taken choice from us, we must—”
“We must—”
“We must—!”
All single words were lost in a general roar of anger and frustration. Seeing that there was nothing to be gained by waiting for an audience, Roger shoved his way ruthlessly between two farmers and seized Husband by the sleeve of his shirt.
“Mr. Husband—I must speak with you!” he shouted in the Quaker
’s ear.
Husband gave him a glazed sort of look, and made to shake him off, but then stopped, blinking as he recognized him. The square face was flushed with color above the sprouting beard, and Husband’s coarse gray hair, unbound, bristled out from his head like the quills of a porcupine. He shook his head and shut his eyes, then opened them again, staring at Roger like a man seeking to dispel some impossible vision, and failing.
He grabbed Roger’s arm, and with a fierce gesture at the crowd, leaped down from his rock and made off toward the shelter of a ramshackle cabin that leaned drunkenly in the shade of a maple grove. Roger followed, glaring round at those nearest to discourage pursuit.
A few followed, nonetheless, waving arms and expostulating hotly, but Roger slammed the door in their faces, and dropped the bolt, placing his back against the door for good measure. It was cooler inside, though the air was stale and smelt of wood-ash and burnt food.
Husband stood panting in the middle of the floor, then picked up a dipper and drank deeply from a bucket that stood upon the hearth—the only object left in the cabin, Roger saw. Husband’s coat and hat hung neatly on a hook by the door, but bits of rubbish were scattered across the packed-earth floor. Whoever owned the cabin had evidently decamped in haste, carrying their portable belongings.
Calmed by the moment’s respite, Husband straightened his rumpled shirt and made shift to tidy his hair.
“What does thee here, friend MacKenzie?” he asked, with characteristic mildness. “Thee does not come to join the cause of Regulation, surely?”
“Indeed I do not,” Roger assured him. He cast a wary eye at the window, lest the crowd try to gain access that way, but while the rumble of voices outside continued their argument, there was no immediate sound of assault upon the building. “I have come to ask if you will go across the creek with me—under a flag of truce, your safety is assured—to speak with Jamie Fraser.”
Husband glanced at the window, too.
“I fear the time for speaking has long passed,” he said, with a wry twist of the lips. Roger was inclined to think so, too, but pressed on, determined to fulfill his commission.
“Not so far as the Governor is concerned. He has no wish to slaughter his own citizenry; if the mob could be convinced to disperse peaceably—”
“Does it seem to thee a likely prospect?” Husband waved at the window, giving him a cynical glance.
“No,” Roger was forced to admit. “Still, if you would come—if they could see that there was still some possibility of—”
“If there were possibility of reconciliation and redress, it should have been offered long since,” Husband said sharply. “Is this a token of the Governor’s sincerity, to come with troops and cannon, to send a letter that—”
“Not redress,” Roger said bluntly. “I meant the possibility of saving all your lives.”
Husband stood quite still. The ruddy color faded from his cheeks, though he looked still composed.
“Has it come to that?” he asked quietly, his eyes on Roger’s face. Roger took a deep breath and nodded.
“There is not much time. Mr. Fraser bid me tell you—if you could not come to speak with him yourself—there are two companies of artillery arrayed against you, and eight of militia, all well-armed. All lies in readiness—and the Governor will not wait past dawn of tomorrow, at the latest.”
He was aware that it was treason to give such information to the enemy—but it was what Jamie Fraser would have said, could he have come himself.
“There are near two thousand men of the Regulation here,” Husband said, as though to himself. “Two thousand! Would thee not think the sight of it would sway him? That so many would leave home and hearth and come in protest—”
“It is the Governor’s opinion that they come in rebellion, therefore in a state of war,” Roger interrupted. He glanced at the window, where the oiled parchment covering hung in tatters. “And having seen them, I must say that I think he has reasonable grounds for that opinion.”
“It is no rebellion,” Husband said stubbornly. He drew himself up, and pulled a worn black silk ribbon from his pocket, with which to tie back his hair. “But our legitimate complaints have been ignored, disregarded! We have no choice but to come as a physical body, to lay our grievances before Mr. Tryon and thus impress him with the rightness of our objection.”
“I thought I heard you speak of choice a few moments past,” Roger said dryly. “And if now is the time to choose, as you say, it would seem to me that most of the Regulators have chosen violence—judging from such remarks as I heard on my way here.”
“Perhaps,” Husband said reluctantly. “Yet we—they—are not an avenging army, not a mob …” And yet his unwilling glance toward the window suggested his awareness that a mob was indeed what was forming on the banks of the Alamance.
“Do they have a chosen leader, anyone who can speak officially for them?” Roger interrupted again, impatient to deliver his message and be gone. “Yourself, or perhaps Mr. Hunter?”
Husband paused for a long moment, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth as though to expunge some lingering rancid taste. He shook his head.
“They have no real leader,” he said softly. “Jim Hunter is bold enough, but he has no gift of commanding men. I asked him—he said that each man must act for himself.”
“You have the gift. You can lead them.”
Husband looked scandalized, as though Roger had accused him of a talent for card-sharping.
“Not I.”
“You have led them here—”
“They have come here! I asked none to—”
“You are here. They followed you.”
Husband flinched slightly at this, his lips compressed. Seeing that his words had some effect, Roger pressed his case.
“You spoke for them before, and they listened. They came with you, after you. They’ll still listen, surely!”
He could hear the noise outside the cabin growing; the crowd was impatient. If it wasn’t yet a mob, it was damn close. And what would they do if they knew who he was, and what he had come to do? His palms were sweating; he pressed them down across the fabric of his coat, feeling the small lump of his militia badge in the pocket, and wished he had paused to bury it somewhere when he crossed the creek.
Husband looked at him a moment, then reached out and seized him by both hands.
“Pray with me, friend,” he said quietly.
“I—”
“Thee need say nothing,” Husband said. “I know thee is Papist, but it is not our way to pray aloud. If thee would but remain still with me, and ask in your heart that wisdom be granted—not only to me, but to all here …”
Roger bit his tongue to keep from correcting Husband; his own religious affiliation was scarcely important at the moment, though evidently Husband’s was. Instead he nodded, suppressing his impatience, and squeezed the older man’s hands, offering what support he might.
Husband stood quite still, his head slightly lowered. A fist hammered on the flimsy door of the cabin, voices calling out.
“Hermon! You all right in there?”
“Come on, Hermon! There’s no time for this! Caldwell’s come back from the Governor—”
“An hour, Hermon! He’s given us an hour, no more!”
A trickle of sweat ran down Roger’s back between his shoulder blades, but he ignored the tickle, unable to reach it.
He glanced from Husband’s weathered fingers to his face, and found the other man’s eyes seemingly fixed on his own—and yet distant, as though he listened to some far-off voice, disregarding the urgent shouts that came through the walls. Even Husband’s eyes were Quaker gray, Roger thought—like pools of rainwater, shivering into stillness after a storm.
Surely they would break down the door. But no; the blows diminished to an impatient knocking, and then to random thumps. He could feel the beating of his own heart, slowing gradually to a quiet, even throb in his chest, anxiety fading in his blood.
He closed his own eyes, trying to fix his thoughts, to do as Husband asked. He groped in his mind for some suitable prayer, but nothing save confused fragments of the Book of Common Worship came to hand.
Help us, O Lord …
Hear us …
Help us, O Lord, his father’s voice whispered. His other father, the Reverend, speaking somewhere in the back of his mind. Help us, O Lord, to remember how often men do wrong through want of thought, rather than from lack of love; and how cunning are the snares that trip our feet.
Each word flickered briefly in his mind like a burning leaf, rising from a bonfire’s wind, and then disappeared away into ash before he could grasp it. He gave it up then and simply stood, clasping Husband’s hands in his own, listening to the man’s breathing, a low rasping note.
Please, he thought silently, though with no idea what he was asking for. That word too evaporated, leaving nothing in its place.
Nothing happened. The voices still called outside, but they seemed of no more importance now than the calling of birds. The air in the room was still, but cool and lively, as though a draft played somewhere in the corners, not touching them where they stood in the center of the floor. Roger felt his own breath ease, his heart slow its beat still more.
He didn’t remember opening his eyes, and yet they were open. Husband’s soft gray eyes had flecks of blue in them, and tiny splinters of black. His lashes were thick, and there was a small swelling at the base of one, a healing sty. The tiny dome was smooth and red, fading from a ruby dot at the center through such successions of crimson, pink, and rose red as might have graced the dawn sky on the day of Creation.
The face before him was sculpted with lines that drew rough arcs from nose to mouth, that curved above the heavy, grizzled brows whose every hair was long and arched with the grace of a bird’s wing. The lips were broad and smooth, a dusky rose; the white edge of a tooth glistened, strangely hard by contrast with the pliable flesh that sheltered it.
The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle Page 532