I heard her swallow, and when I glanced up at her, the freckles stood out on the bridge of her nose. She nodded, and drew a deep breath to speak. Her face changed suddenly, though, switching comically from seriousness to repugnance. She sniffed once, suspiciously, her long nose wrinkling like an ant-eater’s.
I could smell it, too; the stink of fresh feces, coming from the grove directly behind us.
“That’s rather common before a battle,” I said, low-voiced, trying not to laugh at her expression. “They’re caught short, poor things.”
She cleared her throat and didn’t say anything, but I saw her gaze roam round the clearing, resting now on one man, then another. I knew what she was thinking. How was it possible? How could one look at such an orderly, compact bundle as a man, head bent to catch a friend’s words, arm stretched to take a canteen, face moving from smile to frown, eyes lighted and muscles taut—and envision rupture, abrasion, fracture … and death?
It couldn’t be done. It was an act of the imagination that lay beyond the capability of one who hadn’t ever seen that particular obscene transformation.
It could, however, be remembered. I coughed, and leaned forward, hoping to distract us both.
“Whatever did you say to your father?” I asked, out of the side of my mouth. “When you came, when you were speaking Gaelic.”
“Oh, that.” A slight flush of amusement momentarily relieved her paleness. “He was snarling at me, wanting to know what I thought I was playing at—did I mean to leave my child an orphan, he said, risking my life along with Roger’s?” She wiped a strand of red hair away from her mouth, and gave me a small, edgy smile. “So I said to him, if it was so dangerous, where did he get off, risking making me an orphan by having you here, hm?”
I laughed, though keeping that, too, under my breath.
“It’s not dangerous for you, is it?” she asked, surveying the militia encampment. “Back here, I mean?”
I shook my head.
“No. If the fighting comes anywhere close, we’ll move, right away. But I don’t think—”
I was interrupted by the sound of a horse, coming fast, and was on my feet, along with the rest of the camp, by the time the messenger appeared; one of Tryon’s baby-faced aides, pale with bottled-up excitement.
“Stand ready,” he said, hanging out of his saddle, half-breathless.
“And what d’ye think we’ve been doing since dawn?” Jamie demanded, impatient. “What in God’s name is happening, man?”
Very little, apparently, but that little was important enough. A minister from the Regulators’ side had come to parley with the Governor.
“A minister?” Jamie interrupted. “A Quaker, do you mean?”
“I do not know, sir,” said the aide, annoyed at being interrupted. “Quakers have no clergy, anyone knows as much. No, it was a minister named Caldwell, the Reverend David Caldwell.”
Regardless of religious affiliation, Tryon had been unmoved by the ambassador’s appeal. He could not, would not, deal with a mob, and there was an end to it. Let the Regulators disperse, and he would promise to consider any just complaints laid before him in a proper manner. But disperse they must, within an hour.
“Could you, would you, in a box?” I murmured under my breath, half unhinged by the waiting. “Could you, would you, with a fox?” Jamie had taken off his hat, and the sun shone bright on his ruddy hair. Bree gave a strangled giggle, as much shock as amusement.
“He could not, would not, with a mob,” she murmured back. “Could not, would not … do the job?”
“He can, though,” I said, sotto voce. “And I’m very much afraid he will.” For the hundredth time that morning, I glanced toward the scrim of willows through which Roger had disappeared on his errand.
“An hour,” Jamie repeated, in answer to the aide’s message. He glanced in the same direction, toward the creek. “And how much time is left of that?”
“Perhaps half an hour.” The aide looked suddenly much younger even than his years. He swallowed, and put on his hat. “I must go, sir. Listen for the cannon, sir, and luck to you!”
“And with you, sir.” Jamie touched the aide’s arm in farewell, then slapped the horse’s rump with his hat, sending it off.
As though it had been a signal, the camp sprang into a flurry of activity, even before the Governor’s aide had disappeared through the trees. Weapons already primed and loaded were checked and rechecked, buckles unfastened and refastened, badges polished, hats beaten free of dust and cockades affixed, stockings pulled up and tightly gartered, filled canteens shaken for reassurance that their contents had not evaporated in the last quarter-hour.
It was catching. I found myself running my fingers over the rows of glass bottles in the chest yet again, the names murmuring and blurring in my mind like the words of someone telling rosary beads, sense lost in the fervor of petition. Rosemary, atropine, lavender, oil of cloves …
Bree was notable for her stillness among all this bustle. She sat on her rock, with no movement save the stir of a random breeze in her skirts, her eyes fixed on the distant trees. I heard her say something, under her breath, and turned.
“What did you say?”
“It’s not in the books.” She didn’t take her eyes off the trees, and her hands were knotted in her lap, squeezing together as though she could will Roger to appear through the willows. She lifted her chin, gesturing toward the field, the trees, the men around us.
“This,” she said. “It’s not in the history books. I read about the Boston Massacre. I saw it there, in the history books, and I saw it here, in the newspaper. But I never saw this there. I never read a word about Governor Tryon, or North Carolina, or a place called Alamance. So nothing’s going to happen.” She spoke fiercely, willing it. “If there was a big battle here, someone would have written something about it. Nobody did—so nothing’s going to happen. Nothing!”
“I hope you’re right,” I said, and felt a small warming of the chill in the small of my back. Perhaps she was. Surely it couldn’t be a major battle, at least. We were no more than four years from the outbreak of the Revolution; even the minor skirmishes preceding that conflict were well-known.
The Boston Massacre had happened a little more than a year before—a street-fight, a clash between a mob and a platoon of nervous soldiers. Shouted insults, a few stones thrown. An unauthorized shot, a panicked volley, and five men dead. It had been reported, with a good deal of fierce editorializing, in one of the Boston newspapers; I had seen it, in Jocasta’s parlor; one of her friends had sent her a copy.
And two hundred years later, that brief incident was immortalized in children’s textbooks, evidence of the rising disaffection of the Colonists. I glanced at the men who stood around us, preparing to fight. Surely, if there was to be a major battle here, a Royal Governor putting down what was essentially a tax-payer’s rebellion, that would have been worth noting!
Still, that was theory. And I was uneasily aware that neither warfare nor history took much account of what should happen.
Jamie was standing by Gideon, whom he had tethered to a tree. He would go into battle with his men, on foot. He was taking his pistols from the saddlebag, putting away the extra ammunition in the pouch at his belt. His head was bent, absorbed in the details of what he was doing.
I felt a sudden, dreadful urgency. I must touch him, must say something. I tried to tell myself that Bree was right; this was nothing; likely not even a shot would be fired—and yet there were three thousand armed men here on the banks of the Alamance, and the knowledge of bloodshed hummed and buzzed among them.
I left Brianna sitting on her rock, burning eyes fixed on the wood, and hurried to him.
“Jamie,” I said, and put a hand on his arm.
It was like touching a high-voltage wire; power hummed inside the insulation of his flesh, ready to erupt in a burst of crackling light. They say one can’t let go of such a line; a victim of electrocution simply freezes to the wire, helpl
ess to move or save himself, as the current burns through brain and heart.
He put his hand on mine, looking down.
“A nighean donn,” he said, and smiled a little. “Have ye come to wish me luck, then?”
I smiled back as best I could, though the current sizzled through me, stiffening the muscles of my face as it burned.
“I couldn’t let you go without saying … something. I suppose ‘Good luck’ will do.” I hesitated, words jamming in my throat with the sudden urge to say much more than there was time for. In the end, I said only the important things. “Jamie—I love you. Be careful!”
He didn’t remember Culloden, he said. I wondered suddenly whether that loss of memory extended to the hours just before the battle, when he and I had said farewell. Then I looked into his eyes and knew it did not.
“ ‘Good luck’ will do,” he said, and his hand tightened on mine, likewise frozen to the current that surged between us. “ ‘I love ye’ does much better.”
He touched my hand, lifted his own and touched my hair, my face, looking into my eyes as though to capture my image in this moment—just in case it should be his last glimpse of me.
“There may come a day when you and I shall part again,” he said softly, at last, and his fingers brushed my lips, light as the touch of a falling leaf. He smiled faintly. “But it willna be today.”
The notes of a bugle came through the trees, far away, but piercing as a woodpecker’s call. I turned, looking. Brianna sat still as a statue on her rock, looking toward the wood.
64
SIGNAL FOR ACTION
Note, when on the March the discharge of three Pieces of Cannon will be the signal to form the line of Battle, and five the signal for Action.
—Order of Battle, Wm. Tryon
Roger walked slowly away from the Regulators’ camp, willing himself neither to run nor to look back. A few shouted insults and half-meant threats were hurled in his direction, but by the time he was well into the trees, the crowd had lost interest in him, drawn back into its buzzing controversy. It was past noon, and a hot day for May, but he found his shirt sweat-soaked and clinging to him in a manner more befitting July.
He stopped as soon as he was out of sight. He was breathing fast, and felt dizzy, slightly sick with the aftereffects of adrenaline. In the center of that ring of hostile faces, he hadn’t felt a thing—not a thing. Safely away, though, the muscles of his legs were trembling and his fists ached from clenching. He uncurled them, flexed his stiff fingers, and tried to slow his breathing.
Maybe a bit more like the night-time Channel and the anti-aircraft guns than he’d thought, after all.
He’d made it back, though; would be going home to his wife and son. The thought gave him a queer pang; bone-deep relief, and an even deeper grief, quite unexpected, for his father, who hadn’t been so lucky.
A slight breeze played about him, lifting the damp hairs on his neck with a breath of welcome coolness. He’d sweated through shirt and coat together, and his damp stock felt suddenly as though it would strangle him. He shucked his coat and pawed at the neckband, jerking it off with shaking fingers, then stood with his eyes closed and the piece of cloth dangling from his hand, breathing great draughts of air, until the momentary sense of nausea subsided.
He called to mind his last sight of Brianna, framed in the doorway, Jemmy in her arms. He saw her lashes wet with tears and the baby’s round solemn eyes, and felt a deep echo of the feeling he had experienced in the cabin with Husband; a vision of beauty, a conviction of joy that soothed his mind and eased his soul. He would go back to them; that was all that mattered.
After a moment, he opened his eyes, picked up his coat, and set off, beginning to feel more settled in body, if not in mind, as he made his way slowly back toward the creek.
He hadn’t brought back Husband to Jamie, but he had achieved as much as Jamie himself might have. It was possible that the mob—they were no army, whatever Tryon thought of them—would in fact fall apart, disperse now and go home, deprived of even the faint semblance of leadership Husband had provided. He hoped so.
Or they might not. Another man might rise out of that seething mob, one fit to take command. A thought struck him, with a phrase recalled from the confusion near the cabin.
“D’ye come to offer different terms than Caldwell has?” The man with the black beard had asked him that. And earlier, dimly heard through the pounding at the door of the cabin, as he stood in prayer with Husband—“There’s no time for this!” someone had shouted. “Caldwell’s come back from the Governor—” and someone else had added, in tones of desperation, “An hour, Hermon! He’s given us an hour, no more!”
“Shit,” he said, aloud. David Caldwell, the Presbyterian minister who had married him and Bree. It must be. Evidently the man had gone to speak with Tryon on the Regulators’ behalf—and been rebuffed, with a warning.
“An hour, no more.” An hour to disperse, to leave peaceably? Or an hour to reply to some ultimatum?
He glanced up; the sun stood overhead, just a bit past noon. He pulled on his coat and stuffed the discarded stock in his pocket, next to the unused flag of truce. Whatever it meant, that hour’s grace, it was clearly time to be going.
The day was still bright and hot, the smell of grass and tree-leaves pungent with rising sap. Now, though, his sense of urgency and his memory of the Regulators, buzzing like hornets, deprived him of any appreciation of the beauties of nature. Even so, some trace of peace remained deep within him as he made his way quickly toward the creek; a faint echo of what he had felt in the cabin.
That odd sense of awe had stayed with him, hidden but accessible, like a smooth stone in his pocket. He turned it over in his mind as he made his way toward the creek, largely oblivious to clutching brambles and brush in his path.
How peculiar, he thought. Nothing whatever had happened, and in fact the entire experience had felt quite ordinary—nothing otherworldly or supernatural about it. And yet, having seen by that particular clear light, he could not forget it. Could he explain it to Brianna? he wondered.
A trailing branch brushed past his face and he reached to push it aside, feeling even as he did so a faint surprise at the cool green gloss of the leaves, the odd delicacy of their edges, jagged as knives but paper-light. An echo, faint but recognizable, of what he had seen before, that piercing beauty. Did Claire see that? he thought suddenly. Did she see the touch of beauty in the bodies beneath her hands? Was that perhaps how—and why—she was a healer?
Husband had seen it, too, he knew; had shared that perception. And seeing it, had been confirmed in his Quaker principles, and had left the field, unable either to do violence or to countenance it.
And what of his own principles? He supposed they were unchanged; if he hadn’t meant to shoot anyone before, he could mean it still less, now.
The scents of spring still hung in the air, and a small blue butterfly floated past his knee with no apparent sense of care. It was still a fine spring day, but all illusion of tranquillity had vanished. The smell of sweat, of dirt and fear and anger, that seemed to hang in the air of the encampment, was still in his nostrils, mingling with the cleaner scents of trillium and water.
What about Jamie Fraser’s principles? he wondered, turning past the thicket of willow that marked the ford. He often wondered what made Fraser tick, drawn both by a personal liking for the man, and by his colder historian’s curiosity. Roger had made his own decision regarding this conflict—or had it made for him. He couldn’t in conscience intend harm to anyone, though he supposed he could defend his own life, if needful. But Jamie?
He was fairly sure that Jamie’s sympathies, as such, lay with the Regulators. He thought it likely also that his father-in-law had no sense of personal loyalty to the Crown; oath or no oath, surely no man could have lived through Culloden and its aftermath and emerged with any notion that he owed the King of England fealty, let alone anything more substantial. No, not to the Crown, but perhaps to
William Tryon?
No loyalty of a personal nature there, either—but there was definitely an obligation felt. Tryon had summoned Jamie Fraser, and he had come. Given conditions as they stood, he had had little choice about that. Having come, though—would he fight?
How could he not? He must lead his men, and if it came to a battle—Roger glanced over his shoulder, as though the cloud of anger that hung over the Regulators’ army might be now visible, swelling dark above the treetops—yes, he would have to fight, no matter what his private feelings on the matter might be.
Roger tried to envision himself aiming a musket at a man with whom he had no quarrel and pulling the trigger. Or worse, riding down a neighbor, sword in hand. Smashing in Kenny Lindsay’s head, for instance? Imagination failed completely. No wonder that Jamie had sought to enlist Husband’s help in ending the conflict before it began!
Still, Claire had told him once that Jamie had fought in France as a mercenary, as a young man. He had presumably killed men with whom he had no quarrel. How—
He pushed through the willows, and heard their voices before he saw them. A group of women were working on the far side of the stream; camp-followers. Some crouched bare-legged in the shallows, washing, others were carrying wet laundry up the bank, to be hung from trees and bushes. His eye passed casually beyond them, then jerked back, caught by … what? What was it?
There. He couldn’t say why he had spotted her at all—there was nothing even faintly distinctive about her. And yet she stood out among the other women as though she had been outlined, drawn with black ink to stand out against the backdrop of stream and budding foliage.
“Morag,” he whispered, and his heart thumped suddenly with a small shock of joy. She was alive.
He was halfway through the screen of willows before it occurred to him to wonder what he was doing, let alone why he was doing it. It was too late by then, though; he was already out on the bank, walking openly toward them.
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