“Bree,” [Roger] said gently. “Jamie’s an honorable man, and he loves your mother deeply.”
“Well, see, that’s the thing,” she said softly. “I would have sworn Daddy was, too. And did.”
Roger’s own faith in Jamie is unshakable, but as a good minister, he must have care for his flock and, with that in mind, goes to talk to Malva Christie. He shows her sympathy and a willing ear, and she may just be about to confide in him when their conversation is interrupted by her brother, Allan, who drives Roger away with abuse, leaving him wondering whether he’s made matters even worse.
Even the infant lodge is affected, so, far from bringing the men of the community together, it’s now a ground for fights between Jamie’s supporters and those eager to believe the worst.
CLAIRE IS WEEDING in her garden, trying to forget about the storm of troubles presently grumbling overhead, when Ian comes to talk to her. He’s upset about Malva’s accusation of Jamie.
His long, homely face was twisted with unhappiness, and it suddenly occurred to me that he might be having his own doubts about the matter.
“Ian,” I said, with as much firmness as I could muster, “Malva’s child could not possibly be Jamie’s. You do believe that, don’t you?”
He nodded, very slowly, but wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“I do,” he said softly, and then swallowed hard. “But, Auntie…it could be mine.”
In the course of the subsequent discussion, Ian reveals that the baby might well be Bobby Higgins’s, too—evidently, Malva has not been niggardly with her favors. Ian is willing to marry Malva if there’s a good chance the child is his—for the child’s sake, not his own. Claire tells him not to do anything hasty; there’s still time.
Jamie and Roger ride to Mecklenburg, as much to escape the atmosphere on the Ridge as for political purposes. Politics there are, though, in abundance.
The one thing Roger had not envisioned about the making of history was the sheer amount of alcohol involved. He should have, he thought; if there was anything a career in academia had taught him, it was that almost all worthwhile business was conducted in the pub.
The public houses, taverns, ordinaries, and pothouses in Charlotte were doing a roaring business, as delegates, spectators, and hangers-on seethed through them, men of Loyalist sentiments collecting in the King’s Arms, those of rabidly opposing views in the Blue Boar, with shifting currents of the unallied and undecided eddying to and fro, purling through the Goose and Oyster, Thomas’s ordinary, the Groats, Simon’s, Buchanan’s, Mueller’s, and two or three nameless places that barely qualified as shebeens.
Jamie visited all of them. And drank in all of them, sharing beer, ale, rum punch, shandy, cordial, porter, stout, cider, brandywine, persimmon beer, rhubarb wine, blackberry wine, cherry bounce, perry, merry brew, and scrumpy. Not all of them were alcoholic, but the great majority were.
In the course of the day, Roger also meets Davy Caldwell, the Presbyterian minister who married Roger and Bree. Caldwell tells him that there is to be a Presbytery Session soon—at which Roger may be ordained.
BACK ON THE Ridge, Claire discovers that someone has left the gate of her garden ajar, and a bear has evidently gotten in to raid her beehives—several are tipped over, and the air is full of angry bees. Whoever the intruder was, though, it wasn’t a bear. Venturing into the garden, she discovers Malva Christie lying in a pool of blood, with her throat cut. Panicked but still possessed of her medical instincts, Claire hastily performs an emergency C-section with her garden knife and succeeds in delivering the child—a boy—alive, but it’s too soon, and the premature infant dies in her hands.
“Don’t go,” I said, “don’t go, don’t go, please don’t go.” But the vibrancy faded, a small blue glow that seemed to light the palms of my hands for an instant, then dwindle like a candle flame, to the coal of a smoldering wick, to the faintest trace of brightness—then everything was dark.
I was still sitting in the brilliant sun, crying and blood-soaked, the body of the little boy in my lap, the butchered corpse of my Malva beside me, when they found me.
MALVA’S DEATH NATURALLY makes matters on the Ridge even worse. Suspicion shifts back and forth between Claire and Jamie, with occasional excursions in the direction of Ian or Bobby Higgins. After a week of shock, rumor, suspicion, speculation, and more rumor, Jamie has had enough.
“I have reached the mortal limit of endurance,” he informed me. “One moment more of this, and I shall run mad. I must do something, and I will.” Without waiting for any response to this statement, he strode to the office door, flung it open, and bellowed, “Joseph!” into the hall.
Mr. Wemyss appeared out of the kitchen, where he had been sweeping the chimney at Mrs. Bug’s direction, looking startled, pale, soot-smudged, and generally unkempt.
Jamie ignored the black footprints on the study floor—he had burned the rug—and fixed Mr. Wemyss with a commanding gaze.
“D’ye want that woman?” he demanded.
“Woman?” Mr. Wemyss was understandably bewildered. “What—oh. Are you—might you be referring to Fraulein Berrisch?”
“Who else? D’ye want her?” Jamie repeated.
It had plainly been a long time since anyone had asked Mr. Wemyss what he wanted, and it took him some time to gather his wits from the shock of it.
Brutal prodding by Jamie forced him past deprecating murmurs about the Fraulein’s friends no doubt being the best judge of her happiness, his own unsuitability, poverty, and general unworthiness as a husband, and into—at long last—a reckless admission that, well, if the Fraulein should not be terribly averse to the prospect, perhaps…well…in a word…
“Aye, sir,” he said, looking terrified at his own boldness. “I do. Very much!” he blurted.
“Good.” Jamie nodded, pleased. “We’ll go and get her, then.”
His notion of blowing off steam is to take Roger, Ian, and Mr. Wemyss and ride to find Fraulein Berrisch.
The departure of the men eases tension on the Ridge but does nothing to lessen the speculation. Claire, Brianna, Mrs. Bug, Lizzie, and Mrs. McCallum are engaged in just that when who should arrive, out of the blue, but Fraulein Berrisch, who has also reached the limit of endurance and left her sister-in-law’s house in Halifax, walking to Fraser’s Ridge to find Joseph. Her eye lights on little Rodney, Lizzie’s baby, and Claire sees that there might just be a way in which Mr. Wemyss can be reconciled with his wayward daughter.
Roger and Bree pack to go to the Presbytery Session. She feels that she should stay to defend her parents from public opinion, but Roger is firm about her accompanying him; he wants her and little Jem safely away from the Ridge.
Roger has sound instincts; the Big House is in a state of moral siege. Jamie has sent Ian to the Cherokee villages, to keep him out of fights, and he and Claire are restless, helpless to resolve the external situation.
The situation becomes more exigent with the arrival of (who else?) Richard Brown, at the head of a party of men. Brown announces gloatingly that they’ve come to arrest Claire for Malva’s murder. Armed confrontation ends with Claire shooting one of the men—not fatally—and Jamie barricading himself and Claire in the house. The men threaten to burn down the house, and there’s some speculation as to whether this might be It, the ultimate cause of that sinister newspaper clipping. But the date is wrong…and perhaps Mrs. Bug, who Jamie sent off at the men’s appearance, has succeeded in procuring help….
Mrs. Bug has found help, but it’s Hiram Crombie and some of the other fisher-folk; all of them are disposed to believe The Worst about Claire, Jamie, or both. Still, Hiram’s unbending conscience won’t stand for anything like a lynching. He will agree that Mrs. Fraser ought to be taken to Hillsborough and there committed to the proper authorities, but only with a guarantee of safety.
Richard Brown’s idea of such a guarantee is enough to make Jamie start measuring the distance between him and Brown’s throat, but Tom Christie steps out of the
crowd and announces that he will accompany Mrs. Fraser to Hillsborough, to assure her safety (and, by implication, to assure that she doesn’t try to escape). The other Protestants respect Christie and grudgingly agree that this can be done. Jamie, naturally, is not letting Claire go anywhere without him—and so Jamie, Claire, and Tom Christie set off willy-nilly with Brown and the Committee of Safety, bound for Hillsborough.
The journey is not without incident; Claire is now the main focus of suspicion, it being widely assumed that she killed her husband’s pregnant mistress and cut the child from her womb. She is stoned, jeered at, and generally harassed along the way, though Jamie protects her from the worst of it.
Neither is she the only one having a difficult time. Watching Tom Christie at the campfire one night, Jamie sees him watching Claire and realizes that Christie is in love with her.
Poor bugger, he thought.
RICHARD BROWN, AFTER a murmured conversation with one of his lieutenants, decamps on some business of his own. The rest of the party pushes on to Brunswick, where they abruptly set upon Jamie, restraining him while they drag Claire away, riding hell-for-leather.
My throat was raw from screaming, and my stomach hurt, bruised and clenched in a knot of fear. Our speed had slowed, now that we had left Brunswick behind, and I concentrated on breathing; I wouldn’t speak until I was sure I could do so without my voice trembling.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked finally. I sat stiff in the saddle, enduring an unwanted intimacy with the man behind me.
“New Bern,” he said, with a note of grim satisfaction. “And then, thank God, we’ll be shut of you at last.”
CLAIRE IS DELIVERED to the sheriff in New Bern and locked up in a cell with a woman named Sadie Ferguson, a forger. During the night, the women hear screaming from the kitchen on the other side of the wall, and they are released from their cell to help with the difficult birth of a slave woman—the sheriff’s wife being incapable with drink and no hand at midwifery.
Meanwhile, Jamie has been bound and dumped in a boat shed near the shore. His nephew Ian had been traveling close behind Brown’s party, keeping an eye on them, and Jamie hopes Ian was near enough to see what happened when he was separated from Claire. His only comfort at the moment is that Tom Christie was with the party that took Claire; he’s sure that Christie would protect her, if he could.
Ian does show up to release his uncle—and brings news. He succeeded in following Richard Brown about his private business and managed to overhear a conversation between Brown and the lawyer Forbes.
Brown’s aim was simple at this point—to rid himself of the encumbrance the Frasers had become. He knew of Forbes and his relations with Jamie, owing to all the gossip after the tar incident in the summer of last year, and the confrontation at Mecklenburg in May. And so he offered to hand the two of them over to Forbes, for what use the lawyer might make of the situation.
“So he strode to and fro a bit, thinking—Forbes, I mean—they were in his warehouse, ken, by the river, and me hiding behind the barrels o’ tar. And then he laughs, as though he’s just thought of something clever.”
Forbes’s suggestion was that Brown’s men should take Jamie, suitably bound, to a small landing that he owned, near Brunswick. From there, he would be taken onto a ship headed for England, and thus safely removed from interference in the affairs of either Forbes or Brown—and, incidentally, rendered unable to defend his wife.
Claire, meanwhile, should be committed to the mercies of the law. If she were to be found guilty, well, that would be the end of her. If not, the scandal attendant upon a trial would both occupy the attention of anyone connected to her and destroy any influence they might have—thus leaving Fraser’s Ridge ripe for the pickings, and Neil Forbes a clear field toward claiming leadership of the Scottish Whigs in the piedmont.
Jamie listened to this in silence, torn between anger and a reluctant admiration.
“A reasonably neat scheme,” he said. He was feeling steadier now, the queasiness disappearing with the cleansing flow of anger through his blood.
“Oh, it gets better, Uncle,” Ian assured him. “Ye recall a gentleman named Stephen Bonnet?”
“I do. What about him?”
He tries to think what he might have told Ian about Bonnet, but the pirate has vanished from their ken before Ian’s return from the Mohawk—so far as he knows, Ian might have heard the name, but little else.
“Cousin Brianna told me about him,” Ian says, his voice careful. Christ, has she told him Bonnet had raped her? Likely, given the way Ian is acting now.
“It’s Mr. Bonnet’s ship, Uncle, that’s to take ye to England.” Amusement was beginning to show in his nephew’s voice again. “It seems Lawyer Forbes has had a verra profitable partnership with Bonnet for some time—him and some merchant friends in Wilmington. They’ve shares in both the ship and its cargoes. And since the English blockade, the profits have been greater still; I take it that our Mr. Bonnet is a most experienced smuggler.”
Jamie said something extremely foul in French….
BACK AT THE jail, Claire and Sadie Ferguson have been released by Mrs. Tolliver, the sheriff’s wife, to help with the laundry. Meanwhile, Mrs. Tolliver passes out in the shade of the house and is thus not available to deal with a gentleman who arrives, asking who is the midwife?
Claire admits that she is, whereupon the man asks what crime she’s charged with.
The constable, a rather dim young man, pursed his lips at this, looking dubiously back and forth between us.
“Ahh…well, one of ’em’s a forger,” he said, “and t’other’s a murderess. But as to which bein’ which…”
“I’m the murderess,” Sadie said bravely, adding loyally, “She’s a very fine midwife!” I looked at her in surprise, but she shook her head slightly and compressed her lips, adjuring me to keep quiet.
Not until she is well away with the gentleman—who proves to be an aide to Governor Josiah Martin—does Claire learn that forgery is a capital offense; a murderess might well get off with whipping and being branded in the face. Still, she isn’t being taken away for execution.
She’s taken to Tryon’s Palace, the governor’s residence, where she is introduced to Mrs. Martin, the governor’s wife, who is heavily pregnant—and most interested at meeting a murderess.
“Is it true?” Mrs. Martin asked suddenly, startling me.
“Is what true?”
“They say you murdered your husband’s pregnant young mistress, and cut the baby from her womb. Did you?”
I put the heel of my hand against my brow and pressed, closing my eyes. How on earth had she heard that? When I thought I could speak, I lowered my hands and opened my eyes.
“She wasn’t his mistress, and I didn’t kill her. As for the rest—yes, I did,” I said, as calmly as I could.
She stared at me for a moment, her mouth hanging open. Then she shut it with a snap and crossed her forearms over her belly.
“Trust George Webb to choose me a proper midwife!” she said—and much to my surprise, began to laugh. “He doesn’t know, does he?”
“I would assume not,” I said, with extreme dryness. “I didn’t tell him. Who told you?”
“Oh, you are quite notorious, Mrs. Fraser,” she assured me. “Everyone has been talking of it. George has no time for gossip, but even he must have heard of it. He has no memory for names, though. I do.”
Claire looks for a means of escape but fails to find one. She tends Mrs. Martin, who has digestive difficulties, and bides her time.
An opportunity seems to present itself when the governor’s aide, George Webb, comes to fetch her to the governor’s office; the governor has lost his clerk.
“What, Webb?” he demanded, scowling at me. “I need a secretary, and you bring me a midwife?”
“She’s a forger,” Webb said baldly. That stopped whatever complaint the Governor had been going to bring forth. He paused, mouth slightly open, still frowning at me.
“Oh,” he said, in an altered tone. “Indeed.”
“Accused of forgery,” I said politely. “I haven’t been tried, let alone convicted, you know.”
Martin is dubious but desperate, and discovering that Claire can in fact write a fair hand, he puts her to work copying official documents. She divides her time between copying documents and checking on Mrs. Martin, noticing as she passes the windows that the cannon that guard the palace are being dismounted. The governor says casually that they are being taken to be repaired in anticipation of the Queen’s birthday salute, but Claire is bright enough to realize that he’s afraid of the cannon being seized by the Rebels and turned on the palace.
The governor is very afraid. He has Claire dressed in one of his wife’s outfits and takes her out in his carriage, as though he and his wife were merely going for a drive. Meanwhile, the faithful George Webb escapes from the palace with Mrs. Martin, taking her to a place of safety—and the governor’s carriage suddenly speeds up, tearing out of the town of New Bern…and pursued by Jamie, who has sneaked into New Bern, having found out where Claire is and intending to rescue her.
He had never seen Josiah Martin, but thought the plump, self-important-looking gentleman must surely be the— His eye caught the merest glimpse of the woman, and his heart clenched like a fist. Without an instant’s thought, he was pelting after the carriage, as hard as he could run.
In his prime, he could not have outrun a team of horses. Even so, he came within a few feet of the carriage, would have called, but had no breath, no sight, and then his foot struck a misplaced cobble and he fell headlong.
He lay stunned and breathless, vision dark and his lungs afire, hearing only the receding clatter of hooves and carriage wheels, until a strong hand seized his arm and jerked.
“We’ll avoid notice, he says,” Ian muttered, bending to get his shoulder under Jamie’s arm. “Your hat’s flown off, did ye notice that? Nay, of course not, nor the whole street staring, ye crack-brained gomerel. God, ye weigh as much as a three-year bullock!”
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 16