A Breath of Snow and Ashes (15 page)

“What’s he a-doin’ in her room, then? Don’t he know she’s betrothed?” Kezzie asked, righteously.

“Her father’s with her, too,” Jamie assured them. “Her reputation’s safe, aye?”

Jo snorted briefly, but the brothers exchanged glances, then left together, slender shoulders set in determination to oust this threat to Lizzie’s virtue.

“So you’ll do it?” I set down the pestle. “Be an Indian agent?”

“I think I must. If I do not—Richard Brown surely will. I think I canna risk that.” He hesitated, then drew close and touched me lightly, fingers on my elbow. “I’ll send the lads back at once with the berries ye need. I may need to stay for a day, maybe two. For the talking, aye?” To tell the Cherokee that he was now an agent for the British Crown, he meant—and to make arrangements for word to be spread that the headmen of the mountain villages should come down later to a council for parley and gifts.

I nodded, feeling a small bubble of fear swell under my breastbone. It was starting. No matter how much one knows that something dreadful is going to happen in the future, one somehow never thinks it will be
today.

“Not—don’t stay away too long, will you?” I blurted, not wanting to burden him with my fears, but unable to keep quiet.

“No,” he said softly, and his hand rested for an instant in the small of my back. “Dinna fash yourself; I’ll not tarry.”

The sound of feet descending the stairs echoed in the hall. I supposed Mr. Wemyss had shooed the Beardsleys out, along with Bobby. They didn’t stop, but went off without speaking, casting looks of veiled dislike at Bobby, who seemed quite oblivious to them.

“Yon lad said you wanted to speak to me, zur?” He’d regained some color, I was glad to see, and seemed steady enough on his feet. He glanced uneasily at the table, still spread with the sheet I’d put him on, and then at me, but I merely shook my head. I’d finish dealing with his piles later.

“Aye, Bobby.” Jamie made a brief gesture toward a stool, as though to invite Bobby to sit, but I cleared my throat in a meaningful manner, and he stopped, then leaned against the table, rather than sitting down himself.

“Those two who came—Brown, they’re called. They’ve a settlement some way away. Ye said ye’ve heard of the Committees of Safety, aye? So ye’ll have some notion what they’re about.”

“Aye, zur. Tha Browns, zur—did they want me?” He spoke calmly enough, but I saw him swallow briefly, Adam’s apple bobbing in his slender throat.

Jamie sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. The sun was slanting through the window now, and struck him directly, making his red hair glow with flame—and picking out here and there a flicker of the silver that was beginning to show among the ruddy strands.

“They did. They kent ye were here; heard of ye, doubtless from someone ye met along the way. Ye’ll have told folk where ye were headed, I suppose?”

Bobby nodded, wordless.

“What did they want with him?” I asked, tipping the ground root bark and berries into a bowl and pouring hot water over them to steep.

“They didna make that quite clear,” Jamie said dryly. “But then, I didna give them the chance. I only told them they’d take a guest from my hearth over my dead body—and theirs.”

“I thanks ’ee for that, zur.” Bobby took a deep breath. “They—knew, I reckon? About Boston? I’d not told anyone
that,
surely.”

Jamie’s frown deepened slightly.

“Aye, they did. They pretended to think I didna ken; told me I was harboring a murderer unbeknownst, and a threat to the public welfare.”

“Well, the first is true enough,” Bobby said, touching his brand gingerly, as though it still burned him. He offered a wan smile. “But I dunno as I s’ould be a threat to anyone, these days.”

Jamie dismissed that.

“The point is, Bobby, that they do ken ye’re here. They’ll not come and drag ye away, I think. But I’d ask ye to go canny about the place. I’ll make provision to see ye safely back to Lord John, when the time comes, with an escort. I gather ye’re no quite finished with him?” he asked, turning to me.

“Not quite,” I replied equably. Bobby looked apprehensive.

“Well, then.” Jamie reached into the waist of his breeches, and drew out a pistol, which had been hidden by the folds of his shirt. It was, I saw, the fancy gilt-edged one.

“Keep it by ye,” Jamie said, handing it to Bobby. “There’s powder and shot in the sideboard. Will ye look out for my wife and family, then, whilst I’m gone?”

“Oh!” Bobby looked startled, but then nodded, tucking the pistol away in his own breeches. “I will so, zur. Depend upon it!”

Jamie smiled at him, his eyes warming.

“That’s a comfort to me, Bobby. Will ye maybe go and find my son-in-law? I’ll need a word with him before I go.”

“Aye, zur. Right away!” He squared his shoulders and set off, an expression of determination on his poet’s face.

“What do you think they would have done with him?” I asked softly, as the outer door closed behind him. “The Browns.”

Jamie shook his head.

“God knows. Hanged him at a crossroad, maybe—or maybe only beaten him and driven him out of the mountains. They want to make a show of being able to protect the folk, aye? From dangerous criminals and the like,” he added, with a twist of the mouth.

“A government derives its powers from the just consent of the governed,”
I quoted, nodding. “For a Committee of Safety to have any legitimacy, there needs to be an obvious threat
to
the public safety. Clever of the Browns to have reasoned that out.”

He gave me a look, one auburn brow raised.

“Who said that?
The consent of the governed.
”

“Thomas Jefferson,” I replied, feeling smug. “Or rather, he will say it in another two years.”

“He’ll steal it from a gentleman named Locke in another two years,” he corrected. “I suppose Richard Brown must ha’ been decently educated.”

“Unlike me, you mean?” I said, unruffled. “If you expect trouble from the Browns, though, should you have given Bobby
that
particular pistol?”

He shrugged.

“I’ll need the good ones. And I doubt verra much that he’ll fire that one.”

“Counting on its deterrent effect?” I was skeptical, but he was likely right.

“Aye, that. But more on Bobby.”

“How so?”

“I doubt he’d fire a gun again to save his own life—but he would, maybe, to save yours. And should it come to such a pass, they’ll be too close to miss.” He spoke with dispassion, but I felt the hairs prickle down my nape.

“Well, that’s a comfort,” I said. “And just how do you know what he’d do?”

“Talked to him,” he said briefly. “The man he shot in Boston was the first he’d ever killed. He doesna want to do it again.” He straightened, and moved restlessly toward the counter, where he busied himself in straightening a scatter of small instruments I had laid out for cleaning.

I moved to stand beside him, watching. There was a handful of small cautery irons and scalpels, soaking in a beaker of turpentine. He took them out, one by one, wiped them dry and laid them back in their box, neatly, side by side. The spade-shaped metal ends of the irons were blackened by use; the scalpel blades were weathered to a soft glow, but the sharp edges gleamed, a hairbreadth of bright silver.

“We’ll be all right,” I said quietly. I meant it to be a reassuring statement, but it came out with a tinge of question.

“Aye, I know,” he said. He put the last iron in its box, but didn’t replace the lid. Instead, he stood, hands spread flat on the counter, looking straight ahead.

“I dinna want to go,” he said softly. “I dinna want to do this.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to me, or to himself—but I thought he wasn’t referring only to his journey to the Cherokee village.

“Neither do I,” I whispered, and moved a little closer, so I felt his breathing. He lifted his hands then and turned toward me, taking me into his arms, and we stood wrapped close, listening to each other’s breathing, the bitter smell of the brewing tea seeping through the homely scents of linen, dust, and sun-warmed flesh.

There were still choices to be made, decisions to reach, actions to take. Many of them. But in one day, one hour, one single declaration of intent, we had stepped across the threshold of war.

10

DUTY CALLS

J
AMIE HAD SENT BOBBY after Roger Mac, but found himself too restless to wait, and set off himself, leaving Claire to her brewing.

Everything seemed peaceful and beautiful outside. A brown sheep with a pair of lambs stood indolently in her pen, jaws moving in a slow stupor of satisfaction, the lambs hopping awkwardly to and fro like fuzzy grasshoppers behind her. Claire’s herb bed was full of leafing greens and sprouting flowers.

The well lid was ajar; he bent to draw it into place and found the boards had warped. He added fixing that to the constant list of chores and repairs that he carried in his head, wishing fervently that he could devote the next few days to digging, hauling manure, shingling, and the like, instead of what he was about to do.

He’d rather bury the old privy pit or castrate pigs than go and ask Roger Mac what he kent about Indians and revolutions. He found it mildly gruesome to discuss the future with his son-in-law, and tried never to do it.

The things Claire told him of her own time seemed often fantastic, with the enjoyable half-real sense of faery tales, and sometimes macabre, but always interesting, for what he learned of his wife from the telling. Brianna tended to share with him small, homely details of machinery, which were interesting, or wild stories of men walking on the moon, which were immensely entertaining, but no threat to his peace of mind.

Roger Mac, though, had a cold-blooded way of talking that reminded him to an uncomfortable degree of the works of the historians he’d read, and had therefore a sense of concrete doom about it. Talking to Roger Mac made it seem all too likely that this, that, or the other frightful happenstance was not only indeed
going
to happen—but would most likely have direct and personal consequences.

It was like talking to a particularly evil-minded fortune-teller, he thought, one you hadn’t paid enough to hear something pleasant. The thought made a sudden memory pop up on the surface of his mind, bobbing like a fishing cork.

In Paris. He’d been with friends, other students, drinking in the piss-smelling taverns near the
université.
He’d been fairly drunk himself when someone took a fancy to have his palms read, and he had pushed with the others into the corner where the old woman who did it always sat, scarcely visible amid the gloom and clouds of pipe smoke.

He hadn’t intended to do it himself; he had only a few pennies in his pocket, and didn’t mean to waste them on unholy nonsense. He’d said so, loudly.

Whereupon a scraggy claw had shot out of the darkness and seized his hand, sinking long, filthy nails into his flesh. He’d yelped in surprise, and his friends all laughed. They laughed harder when she spat in his palm.

She rubbed the spittle into his skin in a businesslike way, bent close enough that he could smell the ancient sweat of her and see the lice crawling in the grizzled hair that keeked from the edge of her rusty-black shawl. She peered into his hand and a dirty nail traced the lines of it, tickling. He tried to pull his hand away, but she tightened her grip on his wrist, and he found to his surprise that he could not break it.

“T’es un chat, toi,”
the old woman had remarked, in tones of malicious interest. “You’re a cat, you. A little red cat.”

Dubois—that was his name, Dubois—had at once begun to miaou and yowl, to the amusement of the others. He himself refused to rise to the bait, and saying only,
“Merci, madame,”
tried again to pull away.

“Neuf,”
she said, tapping rapid random places on his palm, then seizing a finger and wiggling it by way of emphasis. “You have a nine in your hand. And death,” she’d added offhandedly. “You’ll die nine times before you rest in your grave.”

She’d let go then, amidst a chorus of sarcastic
“aou-la-las!”
from the French students, and laughter from the rest.

He snorted, sending the memory back where it came from, and good riddance to it. The old woman refused to go so easily, though, and called to him through the years, as she’d called through the raucous, beer-filled air of the tavern.

“Sometimes dying doesn’t hurt,
mon p’tit chat,
” she’d called after him, mocking. “But more often it does.”

“No it doesn’t,” he muttered, and stopped, appalled, hearing himself. Christ. It wasn’t himself he was hearing, but his godfather.

“Don’t be afraid, laddie. It doesna hurt a bit, to die.”
He missed his footing and staggered, caught himself and stood still, a taste of metal on the back of his tongue.

His heart was thumping, suddenly, for no reason, as though he had run miles. He saw the cabin, certainly, and heard the calling of jays in the half-leafed chestnut trees. But he saw even more clearly Murtagh’s face, the grim lines of it relaxing into peace and the deep-set black eyes fixed on his, shifting in and out of focus, as though his godfather looked at once at him and at something far beyond him. He felt the weight of Murtagh’s body in his arms, growing suddenly heavy as he died.

The vision vanished, as abruptly as it had come, and he found himself standing next to a rain puddle, staring at a wooden duck half-mired in the mud.

He crossed himself, with a quick word for the repose of Murtagh’s soul, then bent and retrieved the duck, washing the mud away in the puddle. His hands were trembling, and little wonder. His memories of Culloden were few and fragmentary—but they were beginning to come back.

So far, such things had come to him only in glimpses at the edge of sleep. He’d seen Murtagh there before, and in the dreams that followed.

He hadn’t told Claire about them. Not yet.

He pushed open the door of the cabin, but it was empty, the hearth smoored, spinning wheel and loom standing idle. Brianna was likely at Fergus’s place, visiting Marsali. Where would Roger Mac be now? He stepped back outside and stood listening.

The thump of an ax came faintly from somewhere in the forest beyond the cabin. It stopped, then, and he heard men’s voices, raised in greeting. He turned and headed for the trail that led upslope, half grown over with spring grass, but showing the black smudges of fresh footmarks.

What might the old woman have told him if he’d paid her? he wondered. Had she lied to spite him for his miserliness—or told him the truth, for the same reason?

One of the more disagreeable things about talking to Roger Mac was that Jamie was sure he always told the truth.

He’d forgotten to leave the duck at the cabin. Wiping it on his breeches, he pushed grimly through the sprouting weeds, to hear what fate awaited him.