Drums of Autumn (96 page)

“What ye want to do,” her father told her, slowly circling the patch, “is to watch and see which direction the honeybees go. And not get stung.”

A dozen times, they lost sight of the tiny messengers they followed, lost in the broken light over a stream, disappearing into brush too thick to follow. Each time, Jamie cast to and fro, finding another patch of flowers.

“There’s some!” she cried, pointing to a flash of brilliant red in the distance.

He squinted at them and smiled, shaking his head.

“Nay, not red,” he said. “The wee hummingbirds like the red ones, but bees like yellow and white—yellow’s best.” He plucked a small white daisy from the grass near her feet and handed it to her—the petals were streaked with pollen, fallen from the delicate stamens in the round yellow center of the bloom. Looking closer, she saw a tiny beetle the size of a pinhead crawl out of the center, its shiny black armor dusted with gold.

“The hummingbirds drink from the long-throated flowers,” he explained. “But the bees canna get all the way inside. They like the broad, flat flowers like this, and the ones that grow in heavy bunches. They light on them and wallow, till they’re covered over wi’ the yellow.”

They hunted up and down the mountainside, laughing as they dodged the bomber assaults of enraged bumblebees, hunting telltale patches of yellow and white. The bees liked the mountain laurel, but too many of those patches were too high to see over, too dense to pass through.

It was late afternoon before they found what they were looking for. A snag, the remnants of a good-sized tree, its branches reduced to stumps, bark worn away to show weathered silver wood beneath—and a wide split in the wood, through which the bees were crowding, hanging in a veil around it.

“Oh, good,” Jamie said, with satisfaction at the sight. “Sometimes they hive in the rocks, and then there’s little ye can do.” He unslung the ax at his belt, and his bags, and gestured to Brianna to sit down on a nearby rock.

“It’s best to wait till dark,” he explained. “For then all the swarm will be inside the hive. Meanwhile, will ye have a bite to eat?”

They shared the rest of the food, and talked sporadically, watching the light fade from the nearby mountains. He let her fire the long musket when she asked, showing her how to load a new round: swab the barrel, patch the ball, ram home ball, patch, and wadding with a charge of powder from the cartridge; pour the rest of the powder into the priming pan of the flintlock.

“You’re no a bad shot at all, lass,” he said, surprised. He bent and picked up a small chunk of wood, setting it on top of a large boulder as a target. “Try again.”

She did, and again, and again, growing used to the awkward weight of the weapon, finding the lovely balancing point of its length and its natural seat in the curve of her shoulder. It kicked less than she’d expected; black powder hadn’t the force of modern cartridges. Twice chips flew from the boulder; the third time the chunk of wood disappeared in a shower of fragments.

“Verra nice,” he said, one eyebrow raised. “And where in God’s name did ye learn to shoot?”

“My father was a target shooter.” She lowered the gun, cheeks flushed with pleasure. “He taught me to shoot with a pistol or a rifle. A shotgun, too.” Then her cheeks flushed a deeper hue, remembering. “Um. You wouldn’t have seen a shotgun.”

“No, I dinna suppose I have,” was all he said, his face a careful blank.

“How will you move the hive?” she asked, wanting to cover the awkward moment. He shrugged.

“Oh, once the bees have gone to their rest, I shall blow a bit o’ smoke into the hive, to keep them stunned. Then chop free the part of the trunk that’s got the combs in it, slide a bit of flat wood beneath it, and wrap it in my plaid. Once at the house, I’ll nail a bit of wood top and bottom, to make a bee gum.” He smiled at her. “Come morning, the bees will come out, look around, and venture out for the nearest flowers.”

“Won’t they realize they aren’t in their proper place?”

He shrugged again.

“And what will they do about it, if they do? They’ve no means to find their way back, and they’ll have no home left here to come to. Nay, they’ll be content in the new place.” He reached for the gun. “Here, let me clean it; the light’s too bad for shooting.”

Conversation died, and they sat in silence for half an hour or so, watching darkness fill the hollows below, an invisible tide that crept higher by the minute, engulfing the trunks of the trees so that the green canopies seemed to float on a lake of darkness.

At last she cleared her throat, feeling that she must say
something
.

“Won’t Mama be worried about us, coming back so late?”

He shook his head, but didn’t answer; only sat, a grass blade drooping idle in his hand. The moon was edging its way above the trees, big and golden, lopsided as a smudged teardrop.

“Your mother did tell me once that men meant to fly to the moon,” he said abruptly. “They hadna done it yet, that she knew, but they meant to. Will ye know about that?”

She nodded, eyes fixed on the rising moon.

“They did. They will, I mean. She smiled faintly. “
Apollo,
they called it—the rocket ship that took them.”

She could see his smile in answer; the moon was high enough to shed its radiance on the clearing. He tilted his face up, considering.

“Aye? And what did they say of it, the men who went?”

“They didn’t need to say anything—they sent back pictures. I told you about the television?”

He looked a little startled, and she knew that like most things she had told him from her time, he had no real grasp of the reality of moving, talking pictures, let alone the notion that such things could be sent through thin air.

“Aye?” he said, a little unsurely. “You’ve seen these pictures, then?”

“Yes.” She rocked back a little, hands clasped around her knees, looking up at the misshapen globe above them. There was a faint nimbus of light around it, and farther out in the starlit sky, a perfect, hazy ring, as though it were a big yellow stone dropped into a black pond, frozen in place as the first ripple formed.

“Fair weather tomorrow,” he said, looking up at it.

“Will it be?” She could see everything around them, almost as clearly as in the daylight, but the color had fled now; everything was black and gray—like the pictures she described.

“It took hours, waiting. No one could say exactly how long it would take them to land and get out in their space suits—you know there isn’t any air on the moon?” She raised a questioning brow, and he nodded, attentive as a schoolboy.

“Claire told me so,” he murmured.

“The camera—the thing that made the pictures—was looking out of the side of the ship, so we could see the foot of the ship itself, settled in the dust, and the dust rising up over it like a horse’s hoof when it puts its foot down.

“It was flat where the ship came down; covered with a soft, powdery kind of dust, with little rocks scattered on it here and there. Then the camera moved—or maybe another one started sending pictures—and you could see that there were rocky cliffs off in the distance. It’s barren—no plants, no water, no air—but sort of beautiful, in an eerie kind of way.”

“It sounds like Scotland,” he said. She laughed at the joke, but thought she heard under the humor his longing for those barren mountains.

Wanting to distract him, she waved upward at the stars, beginning to burn brighter in the velvet sky.

“The stars are really suns, like ours. It’s only that they’re so far away from us, they look tiny. They’re so far away that it may take years and years for their light to reach us; in fact, sometimes a star has died and we still see its light.”

“Claire told me that, long ago,” he said softly. He sat a moment, then got up with an air of decision.

“Come then,” he said. “Let’s take the hive, and be off home.”

The night was warm enough that we had left the hide window-covering unpinned and rolled aside. Occasional moths and June bugs blundered in to drown themselves in the cauldron or commit fiery suicide on the hearth, but the cool leaf-scented air that washed over us was worth it.

On the first night, Ian had gallantly given Brianna the trundle bed and gone off to sleep with Rollo on a pallet in the herb shed, assuring her that he liked the privacy. Leaving, his quilt over one arm, he had clapped Jamie solidly on the back and squeezed his shoulder in a surprisingly adult gesture of congratulation that made me smile.

Jamie had smiled, too; in fact, he had scarcely stopped smiling in several days. He wasn’t smiling now, though his face bore a tender, inward look. There was a half-full moon riding the sky, and enough light came through the window for me to see him clearly as he lay on his back beside me.

I was surprised that he wasn’t asleep yet. He had risen well before dawn and spent the day with Brianna on the mountain, returning long after dark with a plaid full of smoke-stunned bees, who were likely to be more than irritated when they woke in the morning and discovered the trick perpetrated on them. I made a mental note to keep away from the end of the garden where the row of bee gums sat; newly moved bees were inclined to sting first and ask questions afterward.

Jamie gave a massive sigh, and I rolled toward him, curving myself to fit against him. The night wasn’t cold, but he wore a shirt to bed, in deference to Brianna’s modesty.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked softly. “Does the moonlight bother you?”

“No.” He was looking out at the moon, though; it rode high above the ridge, not yet full, but a luminous white that flooded the sky.

“If it’s not the moon, it’s something.” I rubbed his stomach lightly, and let my fingers curve around the wide arch of his ribs.

He sighed again, and squeezed my hand.

“Och, it’s no more than a foolish regret, Sassenach.” He turned his head toward the trundle bed, where the dark spill of Brianna’s hair fell in a moon-polished mass across the pillow. “I am only sorry that we must lose her.”

“Mm.” I let my hand rest flat on his chest. I had known it would come—both the realization and the parting itself—but I hadn’t wanted to speak of it, and break the temporary spell that had bound the three of us so closely.

“You can’t really lose a child,” I said softly, one finger tracing the small, smooth hollow in the center of his chest.

“She must go back, Sassenach—ye know it as well as I do.” He stirred impatiently but didn’t move away. “Look at her. She’s like Louis’s camel, no?”

Despite my own regrets, I smiled at the thought. Louis of France kept a fine menagerie at Versailles, and on good days the keepers would exercise certain of the animals, leading them through the spreading gardens, to the edification of startled passersby.

We had been walking in the gardens one day, and turned a corner to find the Bactrian camel advancing toward us down the path, splendid and stately in its gold and silver harness, towering in calm disdain above a crowd of gawking spectators—strikingly exotic, and utterly out of place among the formalized white statues.

“Yes,” I said, though with a reluctance that squeezed my heart. “Yes, of course she’ll have to go back. She belongs there.”

“I ken that well enough.” He put his own hand over mine, but kept his face turned away, looking at Brianna. “I shouldna grieve for it—but I do.”

“So do I.” I put my forehead against his shoulder, breathing in the clean male scent of him. “It’s true, though—what I said. You can’t truly lose a child. Do you—do you remember Faith?”

My voice trembled slightly as I asked it; we had not spoken in years of our first daughter, stillborn in France.

His arm curled around me, pulling me against him.

“Of course I do,” he said softly. “D’ye think I would ever forget?”

“No.” The tears were flowing down my face, but I was not truly weeping; it was no more than the overflow of feeling. “That’s what I mean. I never told you—when we were in Paris, to see Jared—I went to the Hôpital des Anges; I saw her grave there. I—I brought her a pink tulip.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I took her violets,” he said, so softly I almost didn’t hear him.

I was quite still for a moment, tears forgotten.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Neither did you.” His fingers traced the bumps of my spine, brushing softly up and down the line of my back.

“I was afraid you’d feel…” My voice trailed off. I had been afraid he would feel guilty, worry that I blamed him—I once had—for the loss. We were newly reunited, then; I had no wish to jeopardize the tender link between us.

“So was I.”

“I’m sorry that you never saw her,” I said at last, and felt him sigh. He turned toward me and put his arms around me, his lips brushing my forehead.

“It doesna matter, does it? Aye, it’s true, what ye say, Sassenach. She was—and we will have her, always. And Brianna. If—when she goes—she will still be with us.”

“Yes. It doesn’t matter what happens; no matter where a child goes—how far or how long. Even if it’s forever. You never lose them. You can’t.”

He didn’t answer, but his arms tightened round me, and he sighed once more. The breeze stirred the air above us with the sound of angels’ wings, and we fell slowly asleep together, as the moonlight bathed us in its ageless peace.

43

WHISKY IN THE JAR

I
didn’t like Ronnie Sinclair. I never
had
liked him. I didn’t like his half-handsome face, his foxy smile, or the way his eyes met mine: so direct, so openly honest, that you
knew
he was hiding something even when he wasn’t. I particularly didn’t like the way he was looking at my daughter.

I cleared my throat loudly, making him jump. He turned a sharp-toothed smile on me, idly turning a truss ring in his hands.

“Jamie says he’ll need a dozen more of the small whisky casks by the end of the month, and I’ll need a large barrel of hickory wood for the smoked meat, as soon as you can manage.”

He nodded and made a number of cryptic marks on a slab of pine that hung on the wall. Oddly for a Scot, Sinclair couldn’t write but had some sort of private shorthand that enabled him to keep track of orders and accounts.

“Right, Missus Fraser. Anything else?”

I paused, trying to reckon up all the possible necessities for cooperage that might spring up before snowfall. There would be fish and meat to salt down, but those did better in stoneware jars; wooden casks left them tasting of turpentine. I had a good seasoned barrel for apples and another for squash already; the potatoes would be stored on shelves to keep from rotting.

“No,” I decided. “That will be all.”

“Aye, missus.” He hesitated, twirling the cask band faster. “Will Himself be coming down before the casks are ready?”

“No; he has the barley to get in, and the slaughtering to do, as well as the distilling. Everything’s late, because of the trial.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Why, though? Do you have a message for him?”

Sited at the foot of the cove nearest the wagon road, the cooper’s shop was the first building most visitors encountered, and thus a reception point for most gossip that came from outside Fraser’s Ridge.

Sinclair tilted his gingerly head, considering.

“Och, likely it’s nothing. Only that I’ve heard of a stranger in the district, asking questions about Jamie Fraser.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Brianna’s head snap round, distracted at once from her inspection of the spokeshavers, mallets, saws, and axes on the wall. She turned, skirt rustling in the wood shavings that littered the shop, ankle-deep.

“Do you know the stranger’s name?” she asked anxiously. “Or what he looks like?”

Sinclair shot her a look of surprise. He was oddly proportioned, with slender shoulders but muscular arms, and hands so huge that they might have belonged to a man twice his height. He looked at her, and his broad thumb unconsciously stroked the metal of the ring, slowly, over and over again.

“Why, I couldna speak to his appearance, mistress,” he said, politely enough, but with a hungry look in his eyes that made me want to take the truss ring away from him and wrap it around his neck. “He gave his name as Hodgepile, though.”

Brianna’s face lost its look of hope, though the muscle at the edge of her mouth curved slightly at the name.

“I don’t suppose
that
could be Roger,” she murmured to me.

“Likely not,” I agreed. “He wouldn’t have any reason to use a false name, anyway.” I turned back to Sinclair.

“You won’t have heard of a man called Wakefield, will you? Roger Wakefield?”

Sinclair shook his head decisively.

“No, missus. Himself has put word about that if such a one should come, he’s to be taken to the Ridge at once. If yon Wakefield sets foot within the county, you’ll hear of it as soon as I do.”

Brianna sighed, and I heard her swallow her disappointment. It was mid-October, and while she said nothing, she was clearly growing more anxious by the day. She wasn’t the only one, either; she had told us what Roger was trying to do, and the thought of the variety of disasters that might have befallen him in the attempt was enough to keep me wakeful at night.

“—about the whisky,” Sinclair was saying, jerking my attention back to him.

“The whisky? Hodgepile was asking about Jamie and whisky?”

Sinclair nodded, and set down the truss ring.

“In Cross Creek. No one would say a word to him, o’ course. But the one who told me did say as the one who spoke to the man thought him a soldier.” He grimaced briefly. “Hard for a lobsterback to wash the flour from his hair.”

“He wasn’t dressed as a soldier, surely?” Foot soldiers wore their hair in a tight folded queue, wrapped round a core of lamb’s wool and powdered with rice flour—which, in this climate, rapidly turned to paste as the flour mixed with sweat. Still, I imagined Sinclair meant the man’s attitude rather than his appearance.

“Och, no; he did claim to be a fur trader—but he walked wi’ a ramrod up his arse, and ye could hear the leather creak when he talked. So Geordie McClintock said.”

“Likely one of Murchison’s men. I’ll tell Jamie—thank you.”

I left the cooper’s shop with Brianna, wondering just how much trouble this Hodgepile might prove to be. Likely not much; the sheer distance from civilization and the inaccessibility of the Ridge was protection against most intrusions; one of Jamie’s purposes in choosing it. The multiple inconveniences of remoteness would be outweighed by its benefits, when it came to war. No battle would be fought on Fraser’s Ridge, I was sure of that.

And no matter how virulent Murchison’s grudge might be, or how good his spies, I couldn’t see his superiors allowing him to mount an armed expedition more than a hundred miles into the mountains, for the sole purpose of extirpating an illegal distillery whose total output was less than a hundred gallons a year.

Lizzie and Ian were waiting for us outside, occupied in gathering kindling from Sinclair’s rubbish heap. A cooper’s work generated immense quantities of shavings, splinters, and discarded chunks of wood and bark, and it was worth the labor of picking them up, to save splitting kindling by hand at home.

“Can you and Ian load the barrels, honey?” I asked Brianna. “I want a look at Lizzie in the sunlight.”

Brianna nodded, still looking abstracted, and went to help Ian heave the half-dozen small kegs outside the shop into the wagon. They were small, but heavy.

It was the skill that went into these particular barrels that had earned Ronnie Sinclair his land and shop, in spite of his less than prepossessing personality; not every cooper knew the trick of charring the inside of an oak barrel so as to lend a beautiful amber color and deep smoky flavor to the whisky aging gently inside.

“Come here, sweetie. Let me see your eyes.” Lizzie obediently widened her eyes, and let me pull down the lower lid to see the white sclera of the eyeball.

The girl was still shockingly thin, but the nasty yellow tinge of jaundice was fading from her skin, and her eyes were nearly white again. I cupped my fingers gently under her jaw; lymph glands only slightly swollen—that was better, too.

“Feeling all right?” I asked. She smiled shyly, and nodded. It was the first time she had been outside the cabin since her arrival with Ian three weeks before; she was still wobbly as a new calf. Frequent infusions of Jesuit bark had helped, though; she had had no fresh attacks of fever in the last week, and I had hopes of clearing up the liver involvement in short order.

“Mrs. Fraser?” she said, and I jumped, startled to hear her talk. She was so shy that she could seldom bring herself to say anything to me or to Jamie directly; she murmured her needs to Brianna, who conveyed them to me.

“Yes, dear?”

“I—I couldna help hearing what yon cooper said—about how Mr. Fraser’s asked word of Miss Brianna’s man. I did wonder—” Her words trailed off in a spasm of shyness, and a faint rose-pink blush showed in her transparent cheeks.

“Yes?”

“Could he ask for my father, do ye think?” The words came out in a rush, and she blushed still harder.

“Oh, Lizzie! I’m sorry.” Brianna, finished with the barrels, came and hugged her little maid. “I hadn’t forgotten, but I hadn’t thought, either. Just a minute, I’ll go and tell Mr. Sinclair.” With a whiff of skirts, she vanished into the cool dimness of the cooper’s shop.

“Your father?” I asked. “Have you lost him?”

The girl nodded, pressing her lips together to prevent their quivering.

“He’ll ha’ gone as a bondsman, but I dinna ken where; only it would be to the southern colonies.”

Well, that limited the search to several hundred thousand square miles, I thought. Still, it could do no harm to ask Ronnie Sinclair to put out word. Newspapers and other printed matter were scarce in the South; most real news still passed by word of mouth, handed on in shops and taverns, or carried by slaves and servants between far-flung plantations.

The thought of newspapers gave me a small nasty jolt of remembrance. Still, seven years seemed comfortingly far away—and Brianna must be right; whether the house was doomed to burn on January 21 or not, surely it would be possible for us not to be in it on that date?

Brianna appeared, rather red in the face, swung aboard the wagon, and picked up the reins, waiting impatiently for the rest of us.

Ian, seeing her flushed face, frowned and glanced toward the cooper’s shop.

“What is it, Coz? Did yon wee mannie say aught amiss to ye?” He flexed his hands, nearly as large as Sinclair’s.

“No,” she said tersely. “Not a word. Are we ready to go?”

Ian picked Lizzie up and swung her into the wagon bed, then put out a hand and helped me up on the seat by Brianna. He glanced at the reins in Brianna’s hands; he had taught her to drive the mules, and took professional pride in her skill.

“Watch the bugger on the gee side,” he advised her. “He’ll no be pullin’ his share o’ the load, unless ye touch him up now and again wi’ a slap across the rump.”

He subsided into the wagon bed with Lizzie as we set off up the road. I could hear him telling her outlandish stories, and her faint giggle in reply. The baby of his own family, Ian was charmed by Lizzie and treated her like a younger sister, by turns nuisance and pet.

I glanced over my shoulder at the receding cooper’s shop, then at Brianna.

“What did he do?” I asked, quietly.

“Nothing. I interrupted him.” The flush across her wide cheekbones grew deeper.

“What on earth was he doing?”

“Drawing pictures on a piece of wood,” she said, and bit the inside of her cheek. “Of naked women.”

I laughed, as much from shock as from amusement.

“Well, he hasn’t got a wife, and not likely to get one soon; women are very scarce in the colony generally, and even more so up here. I suppose one can’t blame him.”

I felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for Ronnie Sinclair. He’d been alone for a very long time, after all. His wife had died in the terrible days after Culloden, and he himself had spent more than ten years in prison before being transported to the Colonies. If he had made connections here, they had not endured; he was a solitary man, and suddenly I saw his avid questing for gossip, his stealthy watching—even his use of Brianna for artistic inspiration—in a different light. I knew what it was like to be lonely.

Brianna’s embarrassment had faded, and she was whistling softly under her breath, hunched casually over the reins—a Beatles’ tune, I thought, though I never could keep pop groups straight.

The idle thought floated insidiously through my mind; if Roger didn’t come, she wouldn’t be left alone for long, either here or when she returned to the future. But that was ridiculous. He
would
come. And if not…

A thought I had been trying to keep at bay sneaked past my defenses and appeared in my mind, full-blown.
What if he had chosen not to come?
I knew they had had some sort of argument, though Brianna had been tight-lipped about it. Had he been so infuriated that he would go back without her?

I rather thought the possibility had occurred to her, too; she had stopped speaking much of Roger, but I saw the anxious light spring up in her eyes whenever Clarence announced a visitor, and saw it die each time the visitor proved to be one of Jamie’s tenants, or some of Ian’s Tuscaroran friends.

“Hurry up, you blighter,” I muttered under my breath. Brianna caught it, and smartly snapped the reins over the left mule’s rump.

“Gee up!” she shouted, and the wagon rattled faster, jolting over the narrow track toward home.

“It’s a far cry from the still-cellar at Leoch,” Jamie said, ruefully poking at the makeshift pot still at the edge of the small clearing. “It does make whisky, though—of a sort.”

In spite of his diffidence, Brianna could see that he was proud of his infant distillery. It was nearly two miles from the cabin, located—as he explained—close to Fergus’s place, so that Marsali could come up several times a day to keep an eye on the operation. In return for this service, she and Fergus had a slightly larger share in the resulting whisky than did the other farmers on the Ridge, who supplied the raw barley and helped in the distribution of the liquor.

“No, darlin’, ye dinna want to be eating that nasty wee thing,” Marsali said firmly. She grasped her son’s wrist and began prying open his fingers, one by one, in an effort to free the large and madly wriggling insect that—in open contradiction of his mother’s adjuration—he very obviously
did
want to be eating.

“Feh!” Marsali dropped the cockroach on the ground and stamped on it.

Germaine, a stoic, stubby child, didn’t cry at the loss of his treat, but glowered balefully under his blond fringe. The cockroach, nothing daunted by rough treatment, rose out of the leaf mold and walked off, staggering only slightly.

“Oh, I shouldna think it would do him harm,” Ian said, amused. “I’ve eaten them, now and again, wi’ the Indians. The locusts are better, though—especially the smoked ones.”

Marsali and Brianna both made gagging noises, causing Ian to grin even wider. He picked up another bag of barley and poured a thick layer into a flat rush basket. Two more roaches, suddenly exposed to the light of day, skittered madly over the side of the basket, fell to the ground and dashed away, disappearing under the edge of the crudely built malting floor.