A Breath of Snow and Ashes (68 page)

“I’ve thought of it,” Roger said, after a pause. “
We’ve
thought. But . . .” He let his voice trail off, finding no good way to explain.

Jamie nodded again, though, as if he had. He supposed Jamie and Claire must have discussed it, even as he and Bree had, playing over the pros and cons. The dangers of the passage—and he did not underestimate those dangers, the more so in light of what Claire had told him about Donner and his comrades; what if he made it through—and Bree and Jem didn’t? It didn’t bear thinking.

Beyond that, if they all survived the passage, was the pain of separation—and he would admit that it would be painful for him, as well. Whatever its limitations or inconveniences, the Ridge was home.

Against those considerations, though, stood the dangers of the present time, for the four horsemen of the apocalypse rode widely here; it was no trick to catch a glimpse of pestilence or famine from the corner of your eye. And the pale horse and its rider were inclined to show up unexpectedly—and often.

But that’s what Jamie meant, of course, he realized belatedly.

“Because of the war, ye mean.”

“The O’Brians,” Jamie said quietly. “That will happen again, ken? Many times.”

It was spring now, not autumn, but the cold wind that touched his bones was the same as the one that had blown brown and golden leaves across the face of the little girl. Roger had a sudden vision of the two of them, Jamie and himself, standing now at the edge of this cavernous hole, like bedraggled mourners at a graveside. He turned his back on the pit, looking instead into the budding green of the chestnut trees.

“Ye know,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “when I first learned what—what Claire is, what we are, all about it—I thought, ‘How fascinating!’ To actually see history in the making, I mean. In all honesty, I maybe came as much for that as for Bree. Then, I mean.”

Jamie laughed shortly, turning round as well.

“Oh, aye, and is it? Fascinating?”

“More than I ever thought,” Roger assured him, with extreme dryness. “But why are ye asking now? I told ye a year ago that we’d stay.”

Jamie nodded, pursing his lips.

“Ye did. The thing is—I am thinking I must sell one or more of the gemstones.”

That brought Roger up a bit. He’d not consciously thought it, of course—but the knowledge that the gems were there, in case of need . . . He hadn’t realized what a sense of security that knowledge had held, until this moment.

“They’re yours to sell,” he replied, cautious. “Why now, though? Are things difficult?”

Jamie gave him an exceedingly wry look.

“Difficult,” he repeated. “Aye, ye could say that.” And proceeded to lay out the situation succinctly.

The marauders had destroyed not only a season’s whisky in the making, but also the malting shed, only now rebuilding. That meant no surplus of the lovely drink this year to sell or trade for necessities. There were twenty-two more tenant families on the Ridge to be mindful of, most of them struggling with a place and a profession that they could never have imagined, trying merely to keep alive long enough to learn how to stay that way.

“And then,” Jamie added grimly, “there’s MacDonald—speak o’ the devil.”

The Major himself had come out onto the stoop, his red coat bright in the morning sun. He was dressed for travel, Roger saw, booted and spurred, and wearing his wig, laced hat in hand.

“A flying visit, I see.”

Jamie made a small, uncouth noise.

“Long enough to tell me I must try to arrange the purchase of thirty muskets, with shot and powder—at my own expense, mind—to be repaid by the Crown, eventually,” he added, in a cynic tone that made it obvious how remote he considered this eventuality to be.

“Thirty muskets.” Roger contemplated that, pursing his own lips in a soundless whistle. Jamie had not been able even to afford to replace the rifle he had given Bird for his help in the matter of Brownsville.

Jamie shrugged.

“And then there are wee matters like the dowry I’ve promised Lizzie Wemyss—she’ll be wed this summer. And Marsali’s mother, Laoghaire—” He glanced warily at Roger, unsure how much he might know regarding Laoghaire. More than Jamie would be comfortable knowing, Roger thought, and tactfully kept his face blank.

“I owe a bit to her, for maintenance. We can live, aye, with what we’ve got—but for the rest . . . I must sell land, or the stones. And I willna give up the land.” His fingers drummed restlessly against his thigh, then stopped, as he raised his hand to wave to the Major, who had just spotted them across the clearing.

“I see. Well, then . . .” Plainly, it had to be done; it was foolish to sit on a fortune in gems, merely because they might one day be needed for a far-fetched and risky purpose. Still, the notion made Roger feel slightly hollow, like rappelling down a cliff and having someone cut your safety line.

Jamie blew out his breath.

“Well, so. I’ll send one wi’ Bobby Higgins to his Lordship in Virginia. He’ll get me a good price, at least.”

“Aye, that’s a—” Roger halted, his attention deflected by the scenario unfolding before him.

The Major, obviously well-breakfasted and cheerful, had come down the steps and was strolling toward them—oblivious of the white sow, who had emerged from her den beneath the foundation and was ambling along the side of the house, bent on her own breakfast. It would be a matter of seconds before she spotted the Major.

“Hoy!” Roger bellowed, and felt something tear in his throat. The pain was so sharp that it stopped him cold, and he clutched at his throat, struck suddenly mute.

“’Ware the pig!” Jamie was shouting, waving and pointing. The Major thrust his head forward, hand behind his ear—then caught the repeated bellows of “Pig!” and looked wildly round, just in time to see the white sow break into a ponderous trot, scything her tusks from side to side.

He would have been best served by wheeling and sprinting back to the safety of the stoop, but instead panic struck him and he ran—away from the pig, coming straight for Jamie and Roger, who promptly ran in different directions.

Glancing back, Roger saw the Major gaining on the pig with long-legged leaps, his goal evidently the cabin. Between the Major and the cabin, though, lay the open hole of the groundhog kiln, masked by the heavy growth of long spring grass through which the Major bounded.

“Pit!” Roger shouted, only the word came out in a strangled croak. Nonetheless, MacDonald seemed to hear him, for a bright red face turned in his direction, eyes bulging. It must have sounded like “Pig!” for the Major glanced back over his shoulder then to see the sow trot faster, small pink eyes fixed on him with murderous intent.

The distraction proved nearly fatal, for the Major’s spurs caught and tangled, and he sprawled headlong in the grass, losing his grip on the laced hat—which he had held throughout the chase—and sending it pinwheeling through the air.

Roger hesitated for an instant, but then ran back to help, with a smothered oath. He saw Jamie running back, too, spade held at the ready—though even a metal shovel seemed pitifully inadequate to deal with a five-hundred-pound hog.

MacDonald was already scrambling to his feet, though; before either of them could reach him, he took off running as though the devil himself were breathing on his coattails. Arms pumping and face set in puce determination, he ran for his life, bounding like a jackrabbit through the grass—and disappeared. One instant he was there, and the next he had vanished, as though by magic.

Jamie looked wide-eyed at Roger, then at the pig, who had stopped short on the far side of the kiln pit. Then, moving gingerly, one eye always on the pig, he sidled toward the pit, glancing sideways, as though afraid to see what lay at the bottom.

Roger moved to stand at Jamie’s shoulder, looking down. Major MacDonald had fallen into the deeper hole at the end, where he lay curled up like a hedgehog, arms clasped protectively over his wig—which had remained in place by some miracle, though now much bespattered with dirt and bits of grass.

“MacDonald?” Jamie called down. “Are ye damaged, man?”

“Is she there?” quavered the Major, not emerging from his ball.

Roger glanced across the pit at the pig, now some distance away, snout down in the long grass.

“Er . . . aye, she is.” To his surprise, his voice came easy, if a little hoarse. He cleared his throat and spoke a little louder. “Ye needna worry, though. She’s busy eating your hat.”

41

THE GUN-SMITH

J
AMIE ACCOMPANIED MacDonald as far as Coopersville, where he set the Major on the road back to Salisbury, equipped with food, a disreputable slouched hat against the weather, and a small bottle of whisky to fortify his bruised spirits. Then, with an internal sigh, he turned into the McGillivrays’ place.

Robin was at work in his forge, surrounded by the smells of hot metal, wood shavings, and gun oil. A lanky young man with a hatchet face was working the leather bellows, though his dreamy expression showed a certain lack of attention to the job.

Robin caught the shadow of Jamie’s entrance and glanced up, gave a quick nod, and returned to his work.

He was hammering bar iron into flat bands; the iron cylinder he meant to wrap them round to form a gun barrel was waiting, propped between two blocks. Jamie moved carefully out of range of flying sparks and sat down on a bucket to wait.

That was Senga’s betrothed at the bellows . . . Heinrich. Heinrich Strasse. He picked the name unerringly out of the hundreds he carried in his mind, and along with it came automatically all he knew of young Heinrich’s history, family, and connections, these appearing in his imagination round the boy’s long, dreamy face in a constellation of social affinities, orderly and complex as the pattern of a snowflake.

He always saw people in this way, but seldom thought of it consciously. There was something about the shape of Strasse’s face, though, that reinforced the mental imagery—the long axis of forehead, nose, and chin, emphasized by a horsey upper lip, deeply grooved, the horizontal axis shorter, but no less sharply defined by long, narrow eyes and flat dark brows above them.

He could see the boy’s origins—the middle of nine children, but the eldest boy, son of an overbearing father and a mother who dealt with this by means of subterfuge and quiet malice—sprouting in a delicate array from the rather pointed top of his head, his religion—Lutheran, but slack about it—a lacy spray under an equally pointed chin, his relation with Robin—cordial, but wary, as befitted a new son-in-law who was also an apprentice—extending like a fanned spike from his right ear, that with Ute—a mix of terror and helpless abashment—from the left.

This notion entertained him very much, and he was obliged to look away, affecting interest in Robin’s workbench, in order to keep from staring and rendering the lad uncomfortable.

The gunsmith was not tidy; scraps of wood and metal lay among a jumble of spikes, scribes, hammers, blocks of wood, bits of filthy garnet cloth and sticks of charcoal on the bench. A few papers were weighted down with a spoiled gunstock that had split in the making, their dirty edges fluttering in the hot breath of the forge. He would have taken no notice, save that he recognized the style of the drawing, would have known that boldness and delicacy of line anywhere.

Frowning, he rose and pulled the papers from under the gunstock. Drawings of a gun, executed from different angles—a rifle, there was the cutaway interior of the barrel, the grooves and landings clear—but most peculiar. One drawing showed it whole, reasonably familiar, bar the odd hornlike growths on the barrel. But the next . . . the gun seemed as though someone had broken it over his knee; it was snapped through, stock and barrel pointing downward in opposite directions, joined only by . . . what sort of hinge was that? He closed one eye, considering.

The cessation of clamor from the forge and the loud hiss of hot metal in the sump broke his fascination with the drawings and made him look up.

“Did your lass show ye those?” Robin asked, with a nod at the papers. He pulled the tail of his shirt up from behind his leather apron, and mopped steam from his sweating face, looking amused.

“No. What is she about? Is she wanting ye to make her a gun?” He relinquished the sheets to the gunsmith, who shuffled through them, sniffing with interest.

“Oh, she’s no way of paying for that,
Mac Dubh,
unless Roger Mac’s discovered a pot o’ fairy gold since last week. No, she’s only been telling me her notions of improvement in the art of riflery, asking what it might cost to make such a thing.” The cynic smile that had been lurking in the corner of Robin’s mouth broadened into a grin, and he shoved the papers back at Jamie. “I can tell she’s yours,
Mac Dubh.
What other lass would spend her time thinking of guns, rather than gowns and bairns?”

There was more than a little implied criticism in this remark—Brianna had undoubtedly been a good deal more forthright in manner than was becoming—but he let it pass for the moment. He needed Robin’s goodwill.

“Well, any woman has her fancies,” he observed mildly. “Even wee Lizzie, I suppose—but Manfred will see to that, I’m sure. He’ll be in Salisbury just now? Or Hillsboro?”

Robin McGillivray was by no means a stupid man. The abrupt transition of subject made him arch one brow, but he passed no remark. Instead, he sent Heinrich off to the house to fetch them some beer, waiting for the lad to disappear before turning back to Jamie, expectant.

“I need thirty muskets, Robin,” he said without preamble. “And I’ll need them quickly—within three months.”

The gunsmith’s face went comically blank with astonishment, but only for a moment. He blinked then, and closed his mouth with a snap, resuming his usual expression of sardonic good humor.

“Starting your own army, are ye,
Mac Dubh
?”

Jamie merely smiled at that without answering. If word got around that he meant to arm his tenantry and muster his own Committee of Safety in answer to Richard Brown’s banditry, that would do nay harm and might do good. Letting word get out that the Governor was working secretly to arm the savages, in case he required to suppress an armed rising in the backcountry, and that he, Jamie Fraser, was the agent of such action—that was an excellent way to get himself killed and his house burnt to the ground, to say nothing of what other trouble might ensue.

“How many can ye find for me, Robin? And how fast?”

The gunsmith squinted, thinking, then darted a sideways glance at him.

“Cash?”

He nodded, seeing Robin’s lips purse in a soundless whistle of astonishment. Robin kent as well as anyone that he had no money to speak of—let alone the small fortune required to assemble that many guns.

He could see the speculation in Robin’s eyes, as to where he might be planning to acquire that sort of money—but the gunsmith said nothing aloud. McGillivray’s upper teeth sank into his lower lip in concentration, then relaxed.

“I can find six, maybe seven, betwixt Salisbury and Salem. Brugge”—naming the Moravian gunsmith—“would do one or two, if he kent it was for you. . . .” Seeing the infinitesimal shake of Jamie’s head he nodded in resignation. “Aye, well, maybe seven, then. And Manfred and I can manage maybe three more—it’s only muskets you’re wanting, nothing fancy?” He tilted his head toward Brianna’s drawing with a small flash of his earlier humor.

“Nothing fancy,” Jamie said, smiling. “That’s ten, then.” He waited. Robin sighed, settling himself.

“I’ll ask about,” he said. “But it’s no an easy matter. Particularly if ye dinna mean your name to be heard in connection—and I gather ye don’t.”

“Ye’re a man o’ rare wit and discretion, Robin,” Jamie assured him gravely, making him laugh. It was true, for all that; Robin McGillivray had fought beside him at Culloden, lived three years with him in Ardsmuir; Jamie would trust him with his life—and was. He began to wish the pig had eaten MacDonald after all, but put the unworthy thought from his mind and drank the beer Heinrich brought, chatting of inconsequence and trivia until it was polite to take his leave.

He had ridden Gideon, to bear MacDonald company on his horse, but meant to leave him in Dai Jones’s barn. Through a complex bit of bargaining, Gideon would cover John Woolam’s spotted mare—to be brought up when Woolam returned from Bear Creek—and when the harvest was in come autumn, Jamie would collect a hundredweight of barley, with a bottle of whisky to Dai for his assistance.

Exchanging a bit of conversation with Dai—he could never decide whether the blacksmith was truly a man of few words, or was it only that he despaired of making the Scots understand his Welsh singsong—Jamie slapped Gideon encouragingly on the neck and left him to eat grain and fettle his loins against the coming of the spotted mare.

Dai had offered him food, but he declined; he was peckish, but looked forward to the peace of the five-mile walk home. The day was fine and pale blue, with the spring leaves murmuring to themselves overhead, and a bit of solitude would be welcome.

The decision had been made when he asked Robin to find him guns. But the situation bore thought.

There were sixty-four villages of the Cherokee; each with its own headman, its own peace chief and war chief. Only five of those villages were within his power to influence—the three villages of the Snowbird people, and two that belonged to the Overhill Cherokee. Those, he thought, would follow the leaders of the Overhill, regardless of his words.

Roger Mac had known relatively little of the Cherokee, or what their role might be in the looming fight. He had been able to say only that the Cherokee had not acted
en masse;
some villages chose to fight, some did not—some fought for one side, some for another.

Well, so. It was not likely that anything he said or did would turn the tide of war, and that was a comfort. But he could not escape the knowledge that his own time to jump was coming. So far as anyone knew now, he was a loyal subject to His Majesty, a Tory beavering away in Geordie’s interest, suborning savages and distributing guns with an eye to suppressing the riotous passions of Regulators, Whigs, and would-be republicans.

At some point, this facade must necessarily crumble to reveal him as a dyed-in-the-wool rebel and a traitor. But when? He wondered idly whether he might have a price on his head this time, and how much it would be.

It might be not so difficult, with the Scots. Grudge-bearing and hardheaded as they were, he was one of them, and personal liking might moderate the sense of outrage at his turning rebel, when the time came.

No, it was the Indians he worried over—for he came to them as the agent of the King. How suddenly to explain his change of heart? And further, do it in such a way that they might share it? Surely they would see this as treachery at worst, grossly suspicious behavior at best. He thought they would not kill him, but how in God’s name to induce them to fall in with the cause of rebellion, when they enjoyed a stable and prosperous relation with His Majesty?

Oh, God, and there was John. What could he say to his friend, when the time came? Convince him by logic and rhetoric to change his coat as well? He hissed through his teeth and shook his head in consternation, trying—and failing utterly—to envision John Grey, lifelong soldier, ex-Royal Governor, that very soul of loyalty and honor, suddenly declaring himself for rebellion and republic.

He passed on, fretting in this fashion for some time, but gradually found the walking soothe his mind, and the peace of the day lighten his heart. There would be time before supper to take wee Jem fishing, he thought; the sun was bright, but there was a certain dampness to the air under the trees that was promising for a first hatch of flies on the water. He had a feeling in his bones that the trout would rise near sunset.

In this more pleasant frame of mind, he was glad to meet his daughter, some little way below the Ridge. His heart lifted at sight of her hair, streaming wanton down her back in ruddy glory.

“Ciamar a tha thu, a nighean?”
he said, kissing her cheek in greeting.

“Tha mi gu math, mo athair,”
she said, and she smiled, but he noted a small frown that troubled the smooth flesh of her forehead like the hatch of mayfly on a trout pond.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, taking his arm. “I wanted to talk to you before you go to the Indians tomorrow.” And there was that in her tone that drove all thought of fish from his mind upon the instant.

“Oh, aye?”

She nodded, but seemed to have some difficulty in finding words—an occurrence that alarmed him still further. But he could not help her, without some notion what it was about, and so kept pace with her, silent but encouraging. A mockingbird was busy nearby, practicing its repertoire of calls. It was the bird who lived in the red spruce behind the house; he knew because it paused now and then in the midst of its chatter and trilling to give a fine imitation of Adso the cat’s midnight yowl.

“When you talked to Roger about the Indians,” Brianna said finally, and turned her head to look at him, “did he mention something called the Trail of Tears?”

“No,” he said, curious. “What is that?”

She grimaced, hunching her shoulders in a way that seemed disconcertingly familiar.

“I thought maybe he hadn’t. He said he’d told you all he knew about the Indians and the Revolution—not that he knows all that much, it wasn’t his specialty—but this happened—will happen later, after the Revolution. So he maybe didn’t think it was important. Maybe it’s not.”