The worst part was cleaning the blood: swishing an arm through the dark, reeking depths of the barrel to collect the threads of fibrin that formed as the blood began to clot. These clung to my arm and could then be pulled out and rinsed away—repeatedly. At that, it was slightly less nasty than the job of washing out the intestines to be used for the sausage casings; Brianna and Lizzie were doing that, down at the creek.
I peered at the latest results; no fibers visible in the clear red liquid that dripped from my fingers. I dunked my arm again in the water cask that stood beside the blood barrel, balanced on boards laid across a pair of trestles under the big chestnut tree. Jamie and Roger and Arch Bug had dragged the pig—not the white sow, but one of her many offspring from a prior year—into the yard, clubbed it between the eyes with a maul, then swung it up into the branches, slit the throat, and let the blood drain into the barrel.
Roger and Arch had then taken the disemboweled carcass away to be scalded and the bristles scraped off; Jamie’s presence was required to deal with Major MacDonald, who had appeared suddenly, puffing and wheezing from the climb up to the Ridge. Between the two, I thought Jamie would much have preferred to deal with the pig.
I finished washing my hands and arms—wasted labor, but necessary to my peace of mind—and dried off with a linen towel. I shoveled double handsful into the barrel from the waiting bowls of barley, oatmeal, and boiled rice, smiling slightly at memory of the Major’s plum-red face, and Ronnie Sinclair’s complaints. Himself had picked his building site on the Ridge with a great deal of forethought—precisely because of the difficulties involved in reaching it.
I ran my fingers through my hair, then took a deep breath and plunged my clean arm back into the barrel. The blood was cooling rapidly. Doused by the cereal, the smell was less immediate now than the metallic reek of fresh, hot blood. The mixture was still warm to the touch, though, and the grains made graceful swirls of white and brown, pale whirlpools drawn down into the blood as I stirred.
Ronnie was right; it hadn’t been necessary to identify me further than “the healer.” There wasn’t another closer than Cross Creek, unless one counted the shamans among the Indians—which most Europeans wouldn’t.
I wondered who had sent the note, and whether the matter was urgent. Probably not—at least it was not likely to be a matter of imminent childbirth or serious accident. Word of such events was likely to arrive in person, carried urgently by a friend or relative. A written message entrusted to a tinker couldn’t be counted on to be delivered with any sort of promptitude; tinkers wandered or stayed, depending on what work they found.
For that matter, tinkers and tramps seldom came so far as the Ridge, though we had seen three within the last month. I didn’t know whether that was the result of our growing population—Fraser’s Ridge boasted nearly sixty families now, though the cabins were scattered over ten miles of forested mountain slopes—or something more sinister.
“It’s one of the signs, Sassenach,” Jamie had told me, frowning after the departing form of the last such temporary guest. “When there is war in the air, men take to the roads.”
I thought he was right; I remembered wanderers on the Highland roads, carrying rumors of the Stuart Rising. It was as though the tremors of unrest jarred loose those who were not firmly attached to a place by love of land or family, and the swirling currents of dissension bore them onward, the first premonitory fragments of a slow-motion explosion that would shatter everything. I shivered, the light breeze touching cold through my shift.
The mass of gruel had reached the necessary consistency, something like a very thick, dark-red cream. I shook clumps of clotted grain from my fingers and reached with my clean left hand for the wooden bowl of minced and sauteed onions, standing ready. The strong smell of the onions overlaid the scent of butchery, pleasantly domestic.
The salt was ground, so was the pepper. All I needed now … as if on cue, Roger appeared around the corner of the house, a large basin in his hands, filled with fine-chopped pork fat.
“Just in time!” I said, and nodded toward the barrel. “No, don’t dump it in, it has to be measured—roughly.” I’d used ten double handsful of oatmeal, ten of rice, ten of barley. Half that total, then—fifteen. I shook back the hair from my eyes again, and carefully scooped up a double handful of the basin’s content, dropping it into the barrel with a splat.
“All right, are you?” I asked. I gestured toward a stool with my chin, beginning to work the fat into the mixture with my fingers. Roger was still a trifle pale and tight around the mouth, but he gave me a wry smile as he sat.
“Fine.”
“You didn’t have to do it, you know.”
“Yes, I did.” The note of wryness in his voice deepened. “I only wish I’d done it better.”
I shrugged, one-shouldered, and reached into the basin he held out for me.
“It takes practice.”
Roger had volunteered to kill the pig. Jamie had simply handed him the maul and stood back. I had seen Jamie kill pigs before; he said a brief prayer, blessed the pig, then crushed the skull with one tremendous blow. It had taken Roger five tries, and the memory of the squealing raised gooseflesh on my shoulders even now. Afterward, he had set down the maul, gone behind a tree, and been violently sick.
I scooped another handful. The mix was thickening, developing a greasy feel.
“He should have shown you how.”
“I shouldn’t think there’s anything technically difficult about it,” Roger said dryly. “Straightforward enough, after all, to bash an animal on the head.”
“Physically, perhaps,” I agreed. I scooped more fat, working with both hands now. “There’s a prayer for it, you know. For slaughtering an animal, I mean. Jamie should have told you.”
He looked faintly startled.
“No, I didn’t know.” He smiled, a little better now. “Last rites for the pig, aye?”
“I don’t think it’s for the pig’s benefit,” I said tartly. We lapsed into silence for a few moments, as I creamed the rest of the fat into the grain mixture, pausing to flick away occasional bits of gristle. I could feel Roger’s eyes on the barrel, watching the curious alchemy of cookery, that process of making the transfer of life from one being to another palatable.
“Highland drovers sometimes drain a cup or two of blood from one of their beasts, and mix it with oatmeal to eat on the road,” I said. “Nutritious, I suppose, but less tasty.”
Roger nodded, abstracted. He had set down the nearly empty basin and was cleaning dried blood from under his nails with the point of his dirk.
“Is it the same as the one for deer?” he asked. “The prayer. I’ve seen Jamie say that one, though I didn’t catch all of the words.”
“The gralloch prayer? I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
Roger worked industriously on a thumbnail, eyes fixed on his hand.
“I wasn’t sure if he thought it right for me to know it. Me not being a Catholic, I mean.”
I looked down into the mixture, hiding a smile.
“I don’t think it would make a difference. That particular prayer is a lot older than the Church of Rome, if I’m not mistaken.”
A flicker of interest lit Roger’s face, the buried scholar coming to the surface.
“I did think the Gaelic was a very old form—even older than what you hear these days—I mean … now.” He flushed a little, realizing what he had said. I nodded, but didn’t say anything.
I remembered what it was like, that feeling that one was living in an elaborate make-believe. The feeling that reality existed in another time, another place. I remembered, and with a small shock, realized that it was now only memory—for me, time had shifted, as though my illness had pushed me through some final barrier.
Now was my time, reality the scrape of wood and slick of grease beneath my fingers, the arc of the sun that set the rhythm of my days, the nearness of Jamie. It was the other world, of cars and ringing telephone
s, of alarm clocks and mortgages, that seemed unreal and remote, the stuff of dreams.
Neither Roger nor Bree had made that transition, though. I could see it in the way they behaved, hear it in the echoes of their private conversations. Likely it was because they had each other; they could keep the other time alive, a small shared world between them. For me, the change was easier. I had lived here before, had come this time on purpose, after all—and I had Jamie. No matter what I told him of the future, he could never see it as other than a fairy tale. Our small shared world was built of different things.
I worried now and then about Bree and Roger, though. It was dangerous to treat the past as they sometimes did—as picturesque or curious, a temporary condition that could be escaped. There was no escape for them—whether it was love or duty, Jemmy held them both, a small redheaded anchor to the present. Better—or safer, at least—if they could wholly accept this time as theirs.
“The Indians have it, too,” I said to Roger. “The gralloch prayer, or something like it. That’s why I said I thought it older than the Church.”
He nodded, interested.
“I think that kind of thing is common to all primitive cultures—anyplace where men kill to eat.”
Primitive cultures. I caught my lower lip between my teeth, forbearing to point out that primitive or not, if his family were to survive, he personally would very likely be obliged to kill for them. But then I caught sight of his hand, idly rubbing at the dried blood between his fingers. He knew that already. “Yes, I did,” he’d said, when I’d told him he need not.
He looked up then, caught my eye, and gave me a faint, tired smile. He understood.
“I think maybe … it’s that killing without ceremony seems like murder,” he said slowly. “If you have the ceremony—some sort of ritual that acknowledges your necessity …”
“Necessity—and also sacrifice.” Jamie’s voice came softly from behind me, startling me. I turned my head sharply. He was standing in the shadow of the big red spruce; I wondered how long he’d been there.
“Didn’t hear you come out,” I said, turning up my face to be kissed as he came to me. “Has the Major gone?”
“No,” he said, and kissed my brow, one of the few clean spots left. “I’ve left him wi’ Sinclair for a bit. He’s exercised about the Committee of Safety, aye?” He grimaced, then turned to Roger.
“Aye, ye’ve the right of it,” he said. “Killing’s never a pleasant business, but it’s needful. If ye must spill blood, though, it’s right to take it wi’ thanks.”
Roger nodded, glancing at the mixture I was working, up to my elbows in spilled blood.
“Ye’ll tell me the proper words for the next time, then?”
“Not too late for this time, is it?” I said. Both men looked slightly startled. I raised an eyebrow at Jamie, then Roger. “I did say it wasn’t for the pig.”
Jamie’s eyes met mine with a glint of humor, but he nodded gravely.
“Well enough.”
At my direction, he took up the heavy jar of spices: the ground mixture of mace and marjoram, sage and pepper, parsley and thyme. Roger held out his hands, cupped, and Jamie poured them full. Then Roger rubbed the herbs slowly between his palms, showering the dusty, greenish crumbs into the barrel, their pungent scent mingling with the smell of the blood, as Jamie spoke the words slowly, in an ancient tongue come down from the days of the Norsemen.
“Say it in English,” I said, seeing from Roger’s face that while he spoke the words, he did not recognize them all.
“O Lord, bless the blood and the flesh of this the creature that You gave me,” Jamie said softly. He scooped a pinch of the herbs himself, and rubbed them between thumb and forefinger, in a rain of fragrant dust.
“Created by Your hand as You created man,
Life given for life.
That me and mine may eat with thanks for the gift,
That me and mine may give thanks for Your own sacrifice of blood and flesh,
Life given for life.”
The last crumbs of green and gray disappeared into the mixture under my hands, and the ritual of the sausage was complete.
“That was good of ye, Sassenach,” Jamie said, drying my clean, wet hands and arms with the towel afterward. He nodded toward the corner of the house, where Roger had disappeared to help with the rest of the butchering, looking somewhat more peaceful. “I did think to tell him before, but I couldna see how to do it.”
I smiled and moved close to him. It was a cold, windy day, and now that I had stopped working, the chill drove me closer to seek his warmth. He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt both the reassuring heat of his embrace, and the soft crackle of paper inside his shirt.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, a bittie letter Sinclair’s brought,” he said, drawing back a bit to reach into his shirt. “I didna want to open it while Donald was there, and didna trust him not to be reading it when I went out.”
“It’s not your letter, anyway,” I said, taking the smudged wad of paper from him. “It’s mine.”
“Oh, is it? Sinclair didna say, just handed it to me.”
“He would!” Not unusually, Ronnie Sinclair viewed me—all women, for that matter—as simply a minor appendage of a husband. I rather pitied the woman he might eventually induce to marry him.
I unfolded the note with some difficulty; it had been worn so long next to sweaty skin that the edges had frayed and stuck together.
The message inside was brief and cryptic, but unsettling. It had been scratched into the paper with something like a sharpened stick, using an ink that looked disturbingly like dried blood, though it was more likely berry juice.
“What does it say, Sassenach?” Seeing me frowning at the paper, Jamie moved to the side to look. I held it out to him.
Far down, in one corner, scratched in faint and tiny letters, as though the sender had hoped by this means to escape notice, was the word “Faydree.” Above, in bolder scratchings, the message read
YU
CUM
“It must be her,” I said, shivering as I drew my shawl closer. It was cold in the surgery, despite the small brazier glowing in the corner, but Ronnie Sinclair and MacDonald were in the kitchen, drinking cider and waiting while the sausages boiled. I spread the note open on my surgery table, its minatory summons dark and peremptory above the timid signature. “Look. Who else could it be?”
“She canna write, surely?” Jamie objected. “Though I suppose it might be that someone wrote it for her,” he amended, frowning.
“No, she could have written this, I think.” Brianna and Roger had come into the surgery, too; Bree reached out and touched the ragged paper, one long finger gently tracing the staggered letters. “I taught her.”
“You did?” Jamie looked surprised. “When?”
“When I stayed at River Run. When you and Mama went to find Roger.” Her wide mouth pressed thin for a moment; it wasn’t an occasion she wished much to remember.
“I taught her the alphabet; I meant to teach her to read and write. We did all the letters—she knew how they sounded, and she could draw them. But then one day she said she couldn’t anymore, and she wouldn’t sit down with me.” She glanced up, a troubled frown between her thick, red brows. “I thought maybe Aunt Jocasta found out, and stopped her.”
“More likely Ulysses. Jocasta would have stopped you, lass.” Jamie’s frown matched hers as he glanced at me. “Ye do think it’s Phaedre, then? My aunt’s body slave?”
I shook my head, and bit one corner of my lip in doubt.
“The slaves at River Run do say her name like that—Faydree. And I certainly don’t know anyone else by that name.”
Jamie had questioned Ronnie Sinclair—casually, to give no occasion for alarm or gossip—but the cooper knew no more than he had told me: the note had been handed to him by a tinker, with the simple direction that it was “for the healer.”
I leaned over the table, lifting a candle high
to look at the note once more. The “F” of the signature had been made with a hesitant, repeated stroke—more than one try before the writer had committed herself to signing it. The more evidence, I thought, of its origin. I didn’t know whether it was against the law in North Carolina to teach a slave to read or write, but it was certainly discouraged. While there were marked exceptions—slaves educated to their owners’ ends, like Ulysses himself—it was on the whole a dangerous skill, and one a slave would go some way to conceal.
“She wouldn’t have risked sending word like this, unless it was a serious matter,” Roger said. He stood behind Bree, one hand on her shoulder, looking down at the note she held flattened on the table. “But what?”
“Have you heard from your aunt lately?” I asked Jamie, but I knew the answer before he shook his head. Any word from River Run that reached the Ridge would have been a matter of public knowledge within hours.
We had not gone to the Gathering at Mt. Helicon this year; there was too much to do on the Ridge and Jamie wished to avoid the heated politics involved. Still, Jocasta and Duncan had meant to be there. Anything wrong would surely have been a matter of general gossip, which would have reached us long since.
“So it is not only serious, but a private matter to the slave, too,” Jamie said. “Otherwise, my aunt would have written, or Duncan sent word.” His two stiff fingers tapped once, softly, against his thigh.
We stood around the table, staring at the note as though it were a small white slab of dynamite. The scent of boiling sausages filled the cold air, warm and comforting.
“Why you?” Roger asked, looking up at me. “Do you think it might be a medical matter? If she were ill, say—or pregnant?”
“Not illness,” I said. “Too urgent.” It was a week’s ride to River Run at least—in good weather, and barring accident. Heaven knew how long it had taken the note to make its way up to Fraser’s Ridge.
“But if she was pregnant? Maybe.” Brianna pursed her lips, still frowning at the paper. “I think she thinks of Mama as a friend. She’d tell you before she’d tell Aunt Jocasta, I think.”
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