FOUR BLOODY HOURS. Hours spent slogging through an undulant countryside filled with mobs of Continental soldiers, clots of militia, and more bloody rocks than anyplace required for proper functioning, if you asked Grey. Unable to stand the blisters and shreds of raw skin any longer, he’d taken off his shoes and stockings and thrust them into the pockets of his disreputable coat, choosing to hobble barefoot for as long as he could bear it.
Should he meet anyone whose feet looked his size, he thought grimly, he’d pick up one of the omnipresent rocks and avail himself.
After a considerable amount of travail, Lord John finds himself in earshot of British artillery, recognizable from the frequency and routine of their firing. This is, of course, the artillery company that Jamie’s men are trying to extirpate, and Lord John runs afoul of a couple of American teenagers whose father has just been killed by a cannonball and who are thus not inclined to handle an Englishman gently.
Jamie arrives in time to prevent the boys from killing Grey—or, more likely, Grey killing them. He revokes Lord John’s parole, thus gracefully saving him from the dishonor of breaking it, and sends him off under the nominal guard of the two boys—in the full expectation that he’ll promptly escape. His mind thus relieved of responsibility for one man, Jamie returns to increasingly heated battle.
The day of the battle is the hottest day of the year, and soldiers are dropping from heatstroke faster than from wounds. Claire treats everything from minor gashes to blown-off hands, dripping with sweat and keeping up her own level of hydration with water laced with brandy.
Meanwhile, in the larger scheme of things, General Lee has been screwing things up. Having haughtily neglected to send out scouts, he’s running into trouble.
So is William. His horse having thrown a shoe, he approaches a company of German grenadiers, asking them where the nearest farrier might be. One soldier courteously replies that there are hussars two companies behind and they will likely be accompanied by a farrier. But William overhears a whispered fragment of panicked conversation behind him: “He speaks German! He knows, he heard!” Before he can make sense of this, one of the grenadiers picks up a rock and brains him with it.
Ian is also having trouble. He’s been harassed all day by the two Abenakis, who finally manage to trap him in the bottom of a watercourse, after he’s rushed down to see if the long-legged, red-coated soldier lying in the bottom might be his cousin William. It is, but before he can determine more than the basic fact that William is still alive, Ian finds himself fighting for his own life.
Ian breaks away from his assailants and gains temporary refuge in the branches of a tree. Before the Abenaki can figure out how to get at him, they’re interrupted by the sounds of a large body of men approaching and decide that discretion is the better part of valor, decamping with Ian’s mare.
Ian manages to crawl up the bank and into hiding, and after resting for a bit, he goes to find Jamie, in order to get another mount and to procure help for William. On his way, he runs into General Lee’s main body, swirling in disorder, but can’t take time to worry about it. He manages to tell Jamie about William—but an arrow coming out of nowhere strikes him in the upper arm, and he keels over.
He struggles up again, though, insisting that he must take men to rescue William, and Jamie reluctantly agrees, breaking off the arrow so that Ian can move with less difficulty. Meanwhile some of Jamie’s men have caught up with the Abenakis and bring back one of the Indians, dead.
Jamie takes what hasty measures he can, but he can’t take long about it; Lee’s disorganization is fast turning into a panicked rout. Everything teeters on a razor’s edge—and then George Washington comes galloping up on his white horse to demand to know the meaning of this. Failing to get a satisfactory answer from Lee, he relieves the general of command and rallies the troops single-handedly, riding through the companies, waving his hat and shouting for men to follow him.
There was barely time to summon Corporal Greenhow and detail him to take five men and accompany Ian, before Washington came close enough to spot Jamie and his companies. The general’s hat was in his hand and his face was afire, anger and desperation subsumed in eagerness, and the whole of his being radiating something Jamie had seldom seen, but recognized. Had felt himself, once. It was the look of a man risking everything, because there was no choice.
“Mr. Fraser!” Washington shouted to him, and his wide mouth stretched wider in a blazing grin. “Follow me!”
Ian and his men find William and load him onto a horse, meaning to carry him back to the American camp, but are interrupted by a party of British soldiers, who retrieve William but capture Ian in the process.
Lord John has succeeded in escaping from his own captors and has finally located a British company, to whom he promptly surrenders. They give him badly needed water and make him sit down with some other prisoners, until someone has time to decide what to do with him; his attempts to explain himself to the very young lieutenant in charge of prisoners earn him nothing but a probably broken arm. Among the other prisoners, though, is a wounded Mohawk scout, whom Lord John recognizes as Ian Murray, Jamie’s nephew.
Ian and Lord John exchange coded remarks in Latin, and Ian stands up and informs the young lieutenant of Grey’s identity.
Back at the British camp, whence William has been removed, he wakes to find his uncle Hal beside his cot.
“Papa…” he whispered.
“No, but the next best thing,” said his uncle Hal, taking a firm hold on the groping hand and sitting down beside him. “How’s the head?”
William closed his eyes and tried to focus on something other than the pain.
“Not…that bad.”
“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” his uncle murmured, cupping William’s cheek and turning his head to the side. “Let’s have a look.”
***
“It will likely come back to you.” His uncle paused. “Do you happen to remember where you last saw your father?”
His defenses down, William reveals the Awful Truth:
William felt an unnatural calm come over him. He just bloody didn’t care anymore, he told himself. The whole world was going to know, one way or another.
“Which one?” he said flatly, and opened his eyes. His uncle was regarding him with interest, but no particular surprise.
“You’ve met Colonel Fraser, then?” Hal asked.
“I have,” William said shortly. “How long have you known about it?”
“Roughly three seconds, in the sense of certainty,” his uncle replied. He reached up and unfastened the leather stock around his neck, sighing with relief as it came off. “Good Lord, it’s hot.” The stock had left a broad red mark; he massaged this gently, half-closing his eyes. “In the sense of thinking there was something rather remarkable in your resemblance to the aforesaid Colonel Fraser…since I met him again in Philadelphia recently. Prior to that, I hadn’t seen him for a long time—not since you were very small, and I never saw him in close conjunction with you then, in any case.”
While William gathers the scattered pieces of his wits and his life, the battle rages on. Unlike most eighteenth-century battles, this one is not a matter of massed armies meeting each other. Sir Henry Clinton’s army is moving in three separate bodies, each under a different commander; Washington’s troops are likewise divided; and, most important, the ground is chopped and riven by several creeks and their ravines. The day is a series of vicious pitched battles, fought wherever enemies catch sight of each other.
Swaying with weariness and heat, Claire notices the fighting only by its results: a constant flood of wounded and men suffering—and dying—from heatstroke. Alarm breaks through her exhaustion, though, when a young man she recognizes from one of Jamie’s companies appears. His wound is minor, but his presence means that the fighting she hears nearby involves Jamie.
Corporal Greenhow assures her that General Fraser was neither dead nor wounded when last seen, which is comforting
so far as it goes. But the fighting is not only nearby—soldiers are running through the tombstones of the extensive churchyard, and Claire sees a British officer fall, wounded, and be killed. A peculiar fight ensues over the body, with Americans and British troops, apparently crazed by heat and battle, each trying to seize the fallen officer.
Jamie is in the fighting nearby and sees the unseemly struggle over the fallen officer’s body. He sees something more alarming, too: Claire’s white canvas tent, and Claire herself outside it, a basin of bloodstained bandages at her feet. Random shots are being fired all round.
He was already following Bixby toward the road but glanced back. Yes, the men who had the dead British officer were taking him into the church, and there were wounded men sitting near the door, more of them near a small white—God, that was Claire’s tent, was she—
He saw her at once, as though his thought had conjured her, right there in the open. She was standing up, staring openmouthed, and no wonder—there was a Continental regular on a stool beside her, holding a bloodstained cloth, and more such cloths in a basin at her feet. But why was she out here? She—
And then he saw her jerk upright, clap a hand to her side, and fall.
A SLEDGEHAMMER HIT me in the side, making me jerk, the needle dropping from my hands. I didn’t feel myself fall but was lying on the ground, black and white spots flashing round me, a sense of intense numbness radiating from my right side. I smelled damp earth and warm grass and sycamore leaves, pungent and comforting.
Shock, I thought dimly, and opened my mouth, but nothing but a dry click came out of my throat. What…The numbness of the impact began to lessen, and I realized that I had curled into a ball, my forearm pressed by reflex over my abdomen. I smelled burning, and fresh blood, very fresh. I’ve been shot, then.
“Sassenach!” I heard Jamie’s bellow over the roaring in my ears. He sounded far off, but I heard the terror in his voice clearly. I wasn’t disturbed by it. I felt very calm.
“Sassenach!” The spots had coalesced. I was looking down a narrow tunnel of light and spinning shadow. At the end of it was the shocked face of Corporal Greenhow, the needle dangling by its thread from the half-sewn gash in his forehead.
PART 5: COUNTING NOSES
Jamie falls to his knees beside Claire, terrified that she’s dying. He’s interrupted by a messenger with an urgent summons from General Lee. Jamie’s response to this is to make the messenger remove his coat and waistcoat, whereupon:
Stooping swiftly, he scooped a handful from the horrifying puddle of bloody mud and, standing, wrote carefully on the messenger’s white back with a finger:
I resign my commission. J. Fraser.
He made to fling the remnants of mud away but, after a moment’s hesitation, added a smeared and reluctant “Sir” at the top of the message, then clapped the boy on the shoulder.
“Go and show that to General Lee,” he said. The lieutenant went pale.
“The general’s in a horrid passion, sir,” he said. “I dassen’t!”
Jamie looked at him. The boy swallowed, said, “Yes, sir,” shrugged on his garments, and went at a run, unbuttoned and flapping.
Unexpected succor comes from the church: Captain Leckie approaches at a run, hurdling tombstones, and with Jamie’s help succeeds in stanching the bleeding, at least temporarily.
As evening falls, Claire is lying on a kitchen table in the township of Freehold, and Denzell Hunter is laying out his knives, preparing to remove the musket ball from her side. Jamie is present, silent and anguished as he watches, praying that she won’t die and wishing with all his heart that he could somehow spare her the agonies of the next half hour.
His prayers are answered by the appearance of Dorothea Grey, in company with some American soldiers. She’s carrying a basket, sent by the Marquis de La Fayette, containing all manner of French goodies for the nourishment of Mrs. Fraser: jellies, fruits, cheeses…and…
“And he sent this,” she said, a rather smug look on her face as she held up a squat green-glass bottle. “Thee will want this first, I think, Denny.”
“What—” Denny began, reaching for the bottle, but Dorothea had pulled the cork, and the sweet cough-syrup smell of sherry rolled out—with the ghost of a very distinctive herbal scent beneath it, something between camphor and sage.
“Laudanum,” said Jamie, and his face took on such a startling look of relief that only then did I realize how frightened he had been for me. “God bless ye, Dottie!”
“It occurred to me that Friend Gilbert might just possibly have a few things that might be useful,” she said modestly. “All the Frenchmen I know are dreadful cranks about their health and have enormous collections of tonics and pastilles and clysters. So I went and asked.”
But La Fayette’s basket contains something else helpful, as Claire realizes when she smells Roquefort cheese. The mold that makes that sort of cheese is Penicillium, and before she falls into a laudanum swoon, she instructs Denny to pack the wound with cheese, once the ball is removed.
“Again, Sassenach,” Jamie whispered, lifting my head and putting the spoon to my lips, sticky with sherry and the bitter taste of opium. “One more.” I swallowed and lay back. If I died, would I see my mother again? I wondered, and experienced an urgent longing for her, shocking in its intensity.
I was trying to summon her face before me, bring her out of the floating horde of strangers, when I suddenly lost my grip on my own thoughts and began to float off into a sphere of dark, dark blue.
“Don’t leave me, Claire,” Jamie whispered, very close to my ear. “This time, I’ll beg. Dinna go from me. Please.” I could feel the warmth of his face, see the glow of his breath on my cheek, though my eyes were closed.
“I won’t,” I said—or thought I said—and went. My last clear thought was that I’d forgotten to tell him not to marry a fool.
Denzell’s surgery is successful, but Claire has lost a lot of blood; Jamie sits up with her through the night and the next day and night, sponging her and giving her water and praying. The fate of the Continental army and the outcome of the battle mean nothing to him—though he does spare a thought now and then for Ian…and William.
At nightfall on the day of battle, Lord John Grey walks into the British camp, accompanied by a wounded Mohawk. As they pass one of the campfires, his companion spots an Abenaki scout and, to Grey’s astonishment, attacks him. The fight is brutal and brief; Ian overpowers his enemy and holds a knife to his throat, but then—with regard for Rachel and her principles—with an effort, lets the man go, telling him that he gives him back his life.
In the excitement, most of the crowd likely didn’t hear the Indian’s reply, but Grey and André did. He sat up, very slowly, hands shaking as they pressed a fold of his shirt to the shallow cut across his throat, and said, in an almost conversational tone, “You will regret that, Mohawk.”
Murray was breathing like a winded horse, his ribs visible with each gasp. Most of the paint had gone from his face; there were long smears of red and black down his glistening chest, and only a horizontal streak of some dark color remained across his cheekbones—that and a smudge of white on the point of his shoulder, above the arrow wound. He nodded to himself, once, then twice. And, without haste, stepped back into the circle of firelight, picked up a tomahawk that was lying on the ground, and, swinging it high with both hands, brought it down on the Indian’s skull.
The sound froze Grey to the marrow and silenced every man present. Murray stood still for a moment, breathing heavily, then walked away. As he passed Grey, he turned his head and said, in a perfectly conversational tone of voice, “He’s right. I would have,” before disappearing into the night.
William’s fretting is relieved by the appearance of his father—battered and bruised, but alive and plainly glad to see William in a similar condition:
“If you and I have things to say to each other, Willie—and of course we do—let it wait until tomorrow. Please. I’m not…” He mad
e a vague, wavering gesture that ended nowhere.
The lump in William’s throat was sudden and painful. He nodded, hands clenched tight on the bedding. His father nodded, too, drew a deep breath, and turned toward the tent flap—where, William saw, Uncle Hal was hovering, eyes fixed on his brother and brows drawn with worry.
William’s heart seized, in a lump more painful than the one in his throat.
“Papa!” His father stopped abruptly, turning to look over his shoulder.
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” William blurted.
A smile blossomed slowly on his father’s battered face.
“Me, too,” he said.
MEANWHILE, IAN MAKES his way alone out of the British camp and heads in the general direction of the American lines. Wounded and with a nascent fever, he walks through the night in conversation with his dead father, finally stumbling off the trail with the knowledge that he can go no farther. He manages to pull a layer of pine needles over himself and surrenders to the night.
Hal tends to John’s cut and battered feet, gets him food, and fills him in on recent events: notably the revelation regarding William’s paternity and the outcome of the battle.
“How long have you known?” Hal asked curiously.
“For certain? Since Willie was two or three.” He suddenly gave an enormous yawn, then sat blinking stupidly. “Oh—meant to ask. How did the battle go?”
Hal looked at him with something between affront and amusement. “You were bloody in it, weren’t you?”
“My part of it didn’t go that well. But my perspective was somewhat limited by circumstance. That, and having only one working eye,” he added, gently prodding the bad one. A good night’s sleep…Longing for bed made him sway, narrowly catching himself before simply falling into Hal’s cot.
“Hard to tell.” Hal fished a crumpled towel out of a basket of laundry lurking disreputably in a corner and, kneeling down, lifted Grey’s feet out of the oil and blotted them gently. “Hell of a mess. Terrible ground, chopped up by creeks, either farmland or half covered in trees…Sir Henry got away with the baggage train and refugees all safe. But as for Washington…” He shrugged. “So far as I can tell from what I saw and heard, his troops acquitted themselves well. Remarkably well,” he added thoughtfully. He rose to his feet. “Lie down, John. I’ll find a bed somewhere else.”
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 31