by Sara Donati
If he knew more, he was hiding it well. Nor did he take any real note of Hannah's lack of reply; his tongue was loosed and he seemed eager to talk.
“No doubt he's bringing the colonel some more pretties. A man overfond of paintings and fine dishes and such is the colonel. It's bred into them, you know.”
His mouth twisted and twitched as if the idea caused him physical pain.
“Bred into who?” Hannah asked, distracted.
“Why, the Papists. French or Irish or Roman, they've all got a weakness for glittery things. Like crows.” He looked more closely at her. “You aren't one of them, are you? Has Caudebec's fighting priest won you over?”
“No,” Hannah said. “I've never even had a conversation with him.” That was true. She always managed to be busy elsewhere when he came into the stockade to say mass for the Catholic French Vermonters.
“He thinks he's got Mrs. Huntar in his net, he does. A sly one, is Father O'Neill.” A muscle in his cheek twitched. “And a wild man on a battlefield.”
Hannah was having some trouble paying attention, but the next turn in the conversation brought her back quickly.
“That ship is crawling with marines,” the voltigeur said thoughtfully. He squinted, his eyes moving over masts and deck. “It must be true that they'll be taking the prisoners with them when they go. Will Mrs. Huntar be going with them?”
There it was, then, the reason he had stopped her. She met his gaze and he lowered his eyes, a flush crawling up from the linen at his throat.
“You will have to ask her that, Mr.—”
“MacLeod,” he said, bowing from the shoulders. “Lieutenant Kester MacLeod. Will you give her my regards?”
Hannah said, “Yes, I will do that.” She turned in the direction she had come.
“I thought you were on your way to the hospital?” he called after her.
Hannah pretended she didn't hear the question, and broke into a trot.
Jennet had always liked to think of herself as a woman who rose to the occasion, one who would have fought alongside her forefathers at Stirling and Bannockburn, Falkirk and Holyrood. But here was a simple and unpleasant truth that she must confront: she was as nervous as a cat in this stockade of angry and agitated men. The prisoners needed calm and fortitude, but what Jennet most wanted and needed to do was scream and run away.
Luke was with the colonel, and what did that mean? The same question she had asked herself a hundred times and still no answer came to her.
“Will you go with us, Mrs. Huntar?” asked one of the younger boys. His splinted leg was the only thing that kept him from following her around the stockade like a puppy, even on the best of days. Today, after the guards had herded all the prisoners into the exercise yard to hear Colonel Caudebec tell them that they were to be transported, she could not turn around without bumping into him.
“Why, Jamie,” Jennet said, forcing her voice into playfulness. “Did ye think I'd leave the lads go off without me?”
The work parties had been brought back early, which was both a fortunate thing—the women had set them to hauling water so that all the men could wash—and an unfortunate one. Tempers were frayed and the heat was intense, and more than once it had fallen to Jennet to stop hard words from escalating into something far more dangerous.
The only men who had taken the news calmly were the worst off, those few who would not survive the journey.
Jennet turned now to look at the far spot the men called the hospital corner, where the unfortunates had been segregated away. Hannah was there, as she had been most of the afternoon, and so were Daniel and Blue-Jay. They were arguing, Jennet saw that by the tense line of Hannah's back and the way Daniel held his head.
“At least that lot have a choice,” said one of the men in a low, dissatisfied tone. “They don't have to go if they don't care to go.”
“Aye, they can die here or die there. Is that a choice you'd care to make, Harry Flynn?” Jennet spoke more harshly than she meant to, and saw that she had succeeded only in angering the old militiaman.
“We'll die there anyway, won't we? How many men ever leave one of them prison ships whole? Might as well put a bullet in my head now.”
“At least that would shut you up,” said another man. “Would I had the bullet to give you.”
There was uneasy laughter, and Jennet took that opportunity to pick her way across the room.
Hannah arguing with her brother was nothing unusual, but just now Jennet didn't like what she heard as she came closer. Daniel, flushed the color of ripe plums with sweat on his brow, as angry as she had ever seen him.
In a hoarse whisper he said, “You'll leave it to us, sister, and see to your patients.”
Blue-Jay looked unconcerned, which was a small comfort. He sent Jennet one of his cheerfully enigmatic half-nods, and then he said something in Kahnyen'kehàka, his voice pitched so low that no one else could hear them. Daniel flinched, and Hannah looked away, her irritation plain to read.
“What is it?” Jennet asked.
“I intend to stay behind with the men who are too sick to travel,” Hannah said.
“Well, that's no surprise,” Jennet said. “Did you think she'd run off from her patients?”
“She wants me to stay behind too,” Daniel said, batting furiously at the flies that circled his head. “But I'll carry her out of here on my back if I have to, hogtied and gagged.”
“Ah.” Jennet saw Hannah's closed expression, and Blue-Jay's watchful one. She leaned in very close so that their four heads made an uneven circle.
“Don't you think we should wait to see what Luke and Runs-from-Bears have planned before we go rushing off on our own?”
That earned her a rare full grin from Blue-Jay. “That's just what I told them, but you know it's impossible to talk sense to the Bonners when they've got their blood up.”
Jennet did not often have the chance to spend time with Blue-Jay, something she regretted. If she were ten years younger, she would have fallen in love with him with no encouragement at all, for his clear, clever way of looking at things, his generosity of spirit, and not least, she admitted to herself, for his striking looks. He had his father's height and build and his mother's beauty.
“We can't just bloody sit here and wait for Luke to rescue us,” Daniel hissed. “How do we get word to him? Do you intend to march over there and demand an explanation?” He rocked on his heels and Jennet realized that he had not had any laudanum for hours, and must be in terrible pain.
She forced herself to concentrate on his face. “As a matter of fact, cousin, that's just what I plan. The colonel sent word that I'm to dine with him and his visitors, don't you know.”
“Would you have time to stop by the hospital and ask for laudanum?” Hannah asked.
“I'll make time,” Jennet said. She paused, feeling their eyes on her. “I'll go right now.”
Outside the stockade it seemed that there was no trouble in the world at all: no war at the doorstep, no trouble ahead; not even the blackfly or the heat could dampen the grim good spirits of every soldier she saw. They were looking forward to spilling more blood, and on top of that, the paymasters had come.
When Jennet came back from the followers' camp, scrubbed and combed and made as presentable as she could be in this place, she heard the details from the guards: in the morning the paymasters would set up their tables in the shadow of the colonel's blockhouse and the soldiers would line up to get their due.
“Before we—” Uz Brodie began and then stopped himself.
“Before you sail south,” Jennet finished the thought.
He ducked his head. “You'll be safe away. Nothing to concern you, Mrs. Huntar.”
Blood and money, yes. The whole garrison hummed with it. Even the small, plump French doctor who greeted her in the hospital was in a generous mood. He gave her the medicines she wanted to help the prisoners on their way to Halifax, like an indulgent uncle who could refuse a favorite niece nothing at all.
Jennet watched the cadet make his way toward the stockade with the box and then she took a deep breath, once and twice and three times, before she went to join the colonel's supper party.
In the cooling evening breeze she paused to look at the garrison that had been her home these many months. Gulls wheeled and screeched overhead against a cloudless high-summer sky. Troops drilled on the parade ground, coatees of scarlet, buff, green, navy, aglitter with brass and pewter and silver, gleaming badges on tall felt shakos. Somewhere a sergeant was screaming at some unfortunate soldier who had proved his unworthiness yet again. One of the washerwomen went by, her back bowed over the basket she carried, her dark face blank.
Jennet would not be unhappy to leave this place, she told herself, if only she knew where she was going. Tomorrow night she might be sleeping on the transport ship, or in a feather bed in Montreal, or someplace else that she could not imagine just now.
She smoothed her skirt, touched her hair, and turned toward the colonel's quarters.
Chapter 40
Though Jennet had been called to the colonel's quarters many times, those few minutes that it took to move from the heat and misery of the stockades to the blockhouse were never enough to prepare her for the transition. The perfumed and glittering plenty should have angered her, but first and foremost, they gave her a headache.
Now and then the colonel had requested that she sup with the officers, but this evening was out of the ordinary, even for Colonel Caudebec. The cook had been hard at work for a whole day at least: there was lamb, roast beef, a haunch of venison, river trout fried in butter, fresh oysters, great bowls of peppered and mashed turnips, carrots baked in brown sugar and wine, new peas and beans glistening with pork fat, and a tureen of ragout big enough to wash in. Jennet's empty stomach churned in appreciation, while her mind was busy with other things.
To her left was a major who had been introduced to her as Jacques-René Boucher de la Bruére, of the Second Battalion of the Lower Canada Select Embodied Militia. In spite of his very long name and title de la Bruére was an unleven loaf of a man, short and squat, radiating a damp warmth. He wore a carefully molded and waxed mustache that curled at the ends, and a scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. At first, at least, he showed far more interest in the food than he did in Jennet, which suited her very well.
To her right sat Luke Bonner, of Forbes and Sons, a cousin of the Earl of Carryck. Surely, the colonel prompted, Jennet must know of the Carrycks of Annandale? Jennet did, of course; she told the officers so without flinching, though her heart was hammering so loudly that she could barely hear herself speak.
As far as Mr. Bonner himself was concerned, she had no idea if he had scars on his face or even if he still had two eyes; Jennet steadfastly refused to look him in the face for fear of what her own expression might give away.
For an hour she concentrated on her plate, glad of the conversation that went on without her, listening to Luke's part of it for some hint of what was to come tomorrow and of course finding nothing. Luke barely looked at her, spoke to her only when it was necessary, and then with courtesy that bordered on the cold. He might be a stranger, a man she had never seen before and would never see again.
To amuse herself, Jennet tried to imagine that, to see him as another woman might. Tall and broad in the shoulder, firm of jaw, his blue eyes missing little, giving away nothing. Intriguing, foreboding, mysterious. Looking at him as he was this night, no one would ever imagine the man he could be, the way he could laugh himself into a helpless quivering mass, his fine singing voice, the wild streak in him that showed up when he was on horseback, or held her in his arms. The tenderness he was capable of, his sweet teasing when the need was on him.
“More wine?” asked one of the cadets who served, and Jennet, deep in her thoughts, started.
“Go on, go on,” bellowed the colonel. “Don't deny yourself tonight, Mrs. Huntar. I doubt you'll get any Paxareti equal to that in your convent, or any wine at all, eh?”
“Convent?” asked a young lieutenant, his head inclined politely but the distaste obvious in the set of his mouth. “You are to enter a convent, Mrs. Huntar?”
“The Grey Nuns of the Hôpital Général,” answered Colonel Caudebec for her. “Father O'Neill there has arranged it all. You must know of the charitable works of the sisters, Lieutenant Hughes?”
“That must be why her hair is cropped,” said the long, consumptively thin man called Lieutenant Hughes. He was wearing the scarlet jacket of the Thirty-ninth Foot, which was unfortunate, given his pale red hair and sunburned face. He studied Jennet with an uneasy fascination, as if she were a talking dog or a horse with two heads. Which she supposed she must be, to him. Englishmen had the oddest ideas about Catholics: tails and horns and midnight masses where the blood of infants was spilled.
“My hair is short because of the heat,” Jennet said. “I prefer comfort to fashion.” She wished immediately that she had not let her irritation get the better of her. The men's attention was focused on her now, something she had been trying to avoid.
“She's a Scot,” said Major Wyndham of the King's Rangers, his surprise breaking through what had seemed a permanent expression of boredom. “A Scot and a Catholic. No wonder she's so far from home.”
“I am a Scot, sir,” Jennet said, giving him her most withering look, the one she had learned from her mother. “But I do speak English. There is no need to talk about me in the third person, as if I were a dumb animal.”
That got her a sharp and contemplative look, but no apology.
“It is true what you say,” said another major, this one with heavily French accented English. His tone was friendlier, at least, and he looked at Jennet when he spoke to her. “Life is not easy for us Catholics in Scotland, is it, madame?”
“Mrs. Huntar is a new convert. She never suffered under those unfortunate and unfair restrictions while she was in Scotland,” said the colonel, saving Jennet the trouble of lying. He raised a glass in the priest's direction. “But Mr. Bonner can tell you something of Catholics in Scotland, I think. He lived at Carryck for some years.”
Luke would not rise to such bait, but the priest was another matter. Until this moment he had added nothing to the conversation, but now he said, “It is true that the faithful suffer great deprivations in Scotland. But in this country Mrs. Huntar need never worry about such things.”
“Either you are exceedingly positive in your outlook,” Major Wyndham said shortly, “or exceedingly naïve. There is no love lost between the two faiths in Canada.”
It was something Luke might have said, had he not been keeping his own counsel. Jennet could feel his attention focusing on the priest who had concerned him for so many weeks, and she might have screamed in frustration: men would play their silly games when there were more important things to be said and done.
“What do you think of the Paxareti?” She turned to Lieutenant Hughes, who started at the abrupt and unexpected address from the solitary lady at the table.
“Damned fine,” said the younger man, who had taken so much of the wine that his words slurred and his language suffered. “Now that they've shipped Boney off to Elba it should be easier to get more of it, I hope.”
Wyndham snorted. “Hughes, you talk about the Peninsular War as if it were all a plot to deprive your table and inconvenience you. Let me remind you that good men died by the thousands while you sat in Québec with a lady on each knee.”
Lieutenant Hughes let out a barking laugh and made no effort to defend himself against these charges.
“You were there, I take it, Major Wyndham?” asked Major de la Bruére.
“From Talavera to Salamanca,” interjected Colonel Caudebec. “Ask him anything except how he ended up over here, eh, Kit?”
Jennet breathed a sigh of relief as the discussion turned to Bonaparte's war, a topic that had the military men's full attention, and Luke's too, if his expression was to be believed. She settled more comfortably int
o her chair and was wondering how she was ever to have a private word with him when Major de la Bruére leaned toward her.
He whispered, “Are you as bored as I am with the endless stories of Bonaparte?”
His hand crept into her lap, warmly pulsing, slightly damp; pelted like a rat. Jennet caught her breath, closed her eyes, picked up the unwelcome hand as gingerly as she would a soiled handkerchief, and moved it away.
The hand came creeping back, as Jennet had feared that it would.
“Perhaps you might be willing to show me around the garrison after supper?” crooned the little major. “Your lodgings are in the followers' camp, is that correct?”
For all of her girlhood, Jennet had listened to her mother's warnings about her temper. Remember Isabel. Those words came to her now, and with it the memory of her beloved half sister, who had struck out in anger and paid for it with her life.
The major's thick fingers wrapped themselves in the thin fabric of Jennet's skirt, and try as she might she could not call Isabel's face into her memory. She picked up her knife and sliced neatly into the soft web of flesh between thumb and first finger.
The major pulled away from the table, his chair catching on the Turkey rug and tipping suddenly back, wobbling for a moment before it deposited him with a thump on the floor. His bellow, Jennet noted with grim satisfaction, was like that of a calf being castrated.
“Oh, dear,” Jennet said in her most refined tone. “What a great deal of blood.”
There was a stunned silence that erupted into movement. Half the officers were hiding smiles, or trying to, while the others scrambled to help the man to his feet. A tray of glasses was dropped and a cadet tripped and fell into the jumble of men. When he was finally pulled to his feet, de la Bruére stood, pale and trembling, a napkin clutched in his bleeding hand.
“Mrs. Huntar!”
“Yes?” she asked, working very hard to put just the right confusion into her tone. And then: “Did you want me to look at it, sir? I think perhaps you should call one of the surgeons, Colonel, it looks as though the major might require stitches.”