Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (112 page)

“I don’t know,” William said. “If everything goes smoothly, perhaps a month, six weeks…If it doesn’t—illness, bad weather, travel mishaps—troop movements…” As usual, he felt a slight pang at thought of the army, and the sense of constant purpose it embodied. “It could be longer.”

Amaranthus nodded. The toad suddenly inflated its throat and let rip an enormous, resonant
whonk!
It repeated this cry several times, as William and Amaranthus watched it in astonishment, then gave them an accusing look and shuffled out of its basin and away under a frond of something green.

Amaranthus giggled, and William smiled, charmed at the sound. The tension between them had broken, and he reached to draw the cape back around her shoulders, quite naturally. Just as naturally, she stepped into his arms, and no one could have said, then or afterward, whose idea the kiss had been, nor yet what followed.

J
OHN CINNAMON HEAVED WILLIAM’S
saddlebags aboard the mare, then looked the animal over carefully, circling her with squinted eyes, trying to pick up her forefoot, attempting to tighten the cinch (and loosening it in the process), and generally annoying the horse. Cinnamon was somewhat embarrassed at being rescued from the Saint-Domingue navy and had been taking particular care not to be a nuisance since the adventure.

“She’s a good horse, but she’ll probably kick you if you don’t leave off pestering her.” William was amused, but also moved at Cinnamon’s clumsy solicitude. He knew Cinnamon wished to go with him—probably not trusting him to manage the task of retrieving Dottie by himself without being arrested, hanged by accident, or killed by highwaymen—but not enough to leave without his portrait being finished.

“It will be all right,” he said, clapping Cinnamon on the shoulder and bending to retighten the cinch. “It will be nearly winter by the time I get to Virginia. Armies don’t fight in winter. I’ve been in the army; I know.”

“Yes,
imbécile,
” Cinnamon replied mildly. “
I
know. Didn’t you tell me that the last time you were in the army you got hit on the head by a German deserter and thrown into a ravine, where you almost died and had to be rescued by your Scottish cousin that you hate?”

“I don’t hate Ian Murray,” William said, with some coldness. “I owe him my life, after all.”

“Which is why you hate him,” Cinnamon said, matter-of-factly, and handed William his own best knife, with the beaded sheath. “That, and you want his wife. Don’t tell me it will be all right. I’ve seen what kind of trouble you get into when you
are
with me. I’ll light a candle to the Blessed Virgin every day until you come back with your cousin.”

“Merci beaucoup,”
William said, with elaborate sarcasm. “You don’t have that much money.” But he meant it, and Cinnamon grinned at him.

“Have you got a good thick cloak? And woolen drawers to keep your balls warm?”

“You look after your own balls,” William advised him, putting his foot in the stirrup. “Mind yourself, and do what my sister tells you.”

Cinnamon widened his eyes and crossed himself.

“You think I would dare to do otherwise?” he said. “That is a fearsome woman. Beautiful,” he added thoughtfully, “but large and dangerous. And besides, I want my portrait to look like me. If I made her angry…” He crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth.

William laughed, and tucking the knife into his belt, patted it and took up the reins.

“Serve you right,
gonze. Adieu!
”

Cinnamon shook his head.

“Au revoir,”
he corrected soberly.
“Et bon voyage!”

BAR A FEW SHOWERS
and one day of solid rain, the weather held and the roads were not bad. As for armies, though…

His job was to retrieve Dottie and bring her home. No one had mentioned her husband, who was presumably still an escaped prisoner of war. Granted, Denzell Hunter might be with Dottie in Virginia, but if he weren’t…He knew his cousin well; he knew Denzell Hunter well, too, and thought that once Dottie was safe, Hunter would likely have returned to the Continental army, as a matter of personal belief as well as military duty. Uncle Hal had shown him the official dispatches and told him what General Prévost supposed to be true, regarding both British and American troop dispositions. Winter was coming, and all hostilities had essentially ceased up north. Sir Henry Clinton had been lurking in New York since Monmouth, and George Washington—according to Hal’s dispatches, which his uncle had thought likely accurate—was still keeping the main body of his men in winter quarters in New Jersey.

One of Washington’s generals, though—Lincoln, the man who’d mounted the unsuccessful siege of Savannah—had gone north with his troops and was presently holding the city of Charles Town, and Clinton wanted it.

“So according to the latest, Sir Henry was intending to send some fourteen thousand troops down the coast to take the place, once D’Estaing’s frogs quit New York, but he was delayed by needing to go and protect Newport, which is where the frogs went next.” Uncle Hal had riffled through the small stack of dispatches, peering through his half spectacles. “And
then
the frogs bloody turn up here! You did say you thought you’d seen D’Estaing himself?”

“With my own eyes,” William assured his uncle, who snorted briefly.

“And we know that Lincoln left here after the siege failed and went up to hold Charles Town, which puts something of a stumbling block in Clinton’s path,” Lord John had put in.

“Being that winter is coming, Sir Henry’s intentions may have been further delayed by the weather—and the minor problem of housing his fourteen thousand troops, in case Benjamin Lincoln doesn’t immediately oblige by surrendering Charles Town. That being so, I’ve no idea what you might find if you go through Charles Town—or anywhere near it—but…”

“But it would be a lot faster to go through Charles Town than round it,” William finished, smiling. “Don’t worry, Uncle Hal. I’ll get to Virginia as quickly as I possibly can.”

Uncle Hal’s face, shadowed with tiredness and worry, relaxed into one of those rare, charming smiles that made you feel as though everything would be fine, because surely the world could not resist him.

“I know you will, Willie,” he said, with affection. “Thank you.”

William had therefore set out on his mission with a warm heart, stout boots, a good horse, and a purse full of gold, Uncle Hal meaning to ensure that he would lack for nothing in transporting Dorothea back to her father’s arms. Uncle Hal hadn’t happened to mention any role for Denzell Hunter in these transactions, but Lord John eventually had.

“He’s a Quaker, of course,” he told William, privately, “but he’s also a surgeon in the Continental army.
And
an escaped prisoner of war—he broke his parole, he says. He may be with Washington now, which means he’s likely in New Jersey. If he is, bloody leave him there and bring Dottie back with you at once, no matter what she says—or does—to you.”

“She’s a Quaker now, isn’t she?” William asked. “She won’t do anything violent.”

Lord John gave him a look.

“Somehow I doubt that religious conviction will be sufficient to overcome Dorothea’s familial tendencies toward high-handedness. Remember who her bloody father is.”

“Mm,” William said noncommittally. He was in fact recalling that the last time he had told a young Quaker woman—Denzell Hunter’s bloody sister, no less!—that she wouldn’t strike him, she had slapped his face. She’d also called him a rooster, which he rather resented.

William hadn’t given Denzell much thought during the discussion of Dottie’s rescue, but if he had, he would have come to the same conclusion as had Papa and Uncle Hal. He would, he thought, send word to Denzell as to Dottie’s whereabouts and well-being, at least.

William was feeling at once slightly heroic, sentimental, and magnanimous. This was largely due to his current feelings regarding Amaranthus, which were confused but suffusingly pleasant. Half of him urgently wished he had taken advantage of Mrs. Fleury’s summerhouse to accomplish the first step of the plan Amaranthus had suggested to him. The other half was rather glad he hadn’t.

In fact, he hadn’t, largely because of Dottie’s baby, and Amaranthus’s reaction to news of her death, which had abruptly made the child real to him. Before seeing Amaranthus’s sudden tears, he had himself felt the sadness of the situation, but it was an abstract sadness, safely distant from himself. But when Amaranthus wept for the child, he had been struck quite suddenly—and painfully—by the realization that she, little Minerva Joy, had been an actual person, one whose death had grievously wounded those who had loved her, for however short a time.

It was the tenderness engendered by this thought, as much as lust, that had made him touch Amaranthus, enter that kiss.

He touched his own lips with the back of his hand. Such a strange kiss, and somehow wonderful. For those few moments, when their lips had met and their bodies pressed together, kindling each other in the wet, chilly garden, it was as though some connection had been forged between them—as though he knew her now, in some way beyond words.

And he’d bloody wanted to know her a lot further—and she him. At one point, he’d slid his hand up the long bare thigh under her skirts, taken her mound in the palm of his hand, and felt the fullness, the slickness of her, wanting him. The pads of his fingers rubbed half consciously against his palm, tingling.

He swallowed and tried to put the memories of Amaranthus away. For now.

But the tenderness remained—and the thought of the baby. That’s why he’d stopped. Because it had suddenly occurred to him that what he was doing might in fact cause someone real to be born.

And that it somehow wasn’t right that he should oblige that someone to take on burdens that were—rightfully or not—his own to bear.

But if I married her, and
didn’t
go away if she fell pregnant…
His son—God, what a thought, his son!—would still inherit Ellesmere’s title and Dunsany’s, but not until he was ready for it. He could prepare the boy, show him…

“Jesus.” He shook his head violently, driving out the thoughts, or trying to. The notion was new, frightening—and quite thrilling, in a way. He pushed it aside, his mind sliding back to its memories of Amaranthus and her soft blond brows, trickling water, pungent grass, and the gleaming black eyes of the watchful toad.

He barely noticed the miles pacing away beneath his horse’s hooves, and stopped only when darkness made the road disappear.

HE STOPPED FOR THE
night in a hamlet some thirty miles north of Richmond. William felt the pull of Mount Josiah: He’d passed within a few miles of the road that would take him there, and for a few moments he was there in spirit, sitting on the broken porch with Manoke and John Cinnamon, eating fried catfish and pig meat smoked underground, the faint sweet scent of tobacco riding on the evening breeze.

He wondered briefly whether perhaps he should take Dottie there for a while. The weather was getting colder and rain more frequent; a newly bereaved woman weakened by illness surely oughtn’t to be required to ride through storms and mud for weeks. And if Manoke was still in residence, he and the Indian could easily repair enough of the house to give them shelter…

No. This was a fantasy, born of his own desire to sit still on his shattered stoop and think about things. He needed to get Dottie back to Uncle Hal as soon as possible, where she could be taken care of, heal in the bosom of her family.
And,
said a small treacherous voice in the back of his mind,
you might just want to see Amaranthus again before too long.

“That, too,” he said aloud, and nudged his horse into a faster pace.

He had enough money to bring Dottie back by coach—but that was assuming a coach was to be had. The settlement of Wilkins Corner boasted three oxen, one mule, and a small herd of goats, plus the odd pig or two. There were only four houses, and a brief inquiry of a woman milking a goat sent him directly to the door of Fear God Elmsworth.

This gentleman proved to be in his eighties and quite deaf, but his much younger wife—only sixty or so—was able by shouting into his ear at a distance of two inches to get across to him William’s identity and mission.

“Dorothea, you say?” Mr. Elmsworth cocked a bushy brow at William. “What’s he want with her?”

“I…am…her…
cousin,
” William said, leaning down to address the old gentleman at the top of his voice.

“Cousin? Cousin?” The old man looked at his wife for confirmation of this unlikely statement, and receiving it, shook his head. “You don’t look nothin’ like her.”

William turned to the wife.

“Will you please tell your husband that Dorothea’s father is my uncle, and his brother is my stepfather?”

The woman heard this but was plainly baffled by the genealogical information, for she opened her mouth for a moment, then shut it, frowning.

“Never mind,” William said, keeping his patience. “Please, just tell Dorothea that I’m here.”

“Dorothea ain’t here,” said Mr. Elmsworth, somehow catching this. He looked puzzled and glanced at his wife. “Is she?”

“No, she isn’t,” said Mrs. Elmsworth, looking puzzled as well.

William took a deep breath and decided that shaking Mrs. Elmsworth until her head rattled wouldn’t be the act of a gentleman.

“Where is she?” he inquired, gently.

Mrs. Elmsworth looked surprised.

“Why, her brother came and fetched her, near on a month ago.”

WILLIAM HAD NODDED
in automatic response to Mrs. Elmsworth, but then actually
heard
what she’d said and jerked as though stung by a bee.

“Her brother,” he repeated carefully, and both the old people nodded. “Her brother. What was his name?”

Mr. Elmsworth, who was now lighting his long-stemmed clay pipe, removed it from his mouth long enough to say, “Eh?”

“He don’t know,” Mrs. Elmsworth said, shaking her capped head in apology. “I was workin’ in the orchard when the man came, and by the time I came back, they’d gone away together. Dorothea left a sweet note, thanking us for looking after her, but she said nothin’ about her brother’s name in it, and my husband was too deaf to understand what they said, beyond them making signs to him.”

“Ah.”

It was possible that Mr. Elmsworth had misunderstood the situation entirely, William reflected, but it
was
just possible that it had been Henry. When last he’d seen Henry Grey, the man had been living in Philadelphia with a very handsome Negro landlady who might or might not be a widow, recovering slowly from having lost a foot or two of his guts after being shot in the abdomen. William supposed that Denzell might have paused in Philadelphia on his way to New Jersey and given Henry word of Dorothea’s presence, and either had asked Henry to go and fetch her or Henry had determined to do so on his own.

A sudden thought struck him, though, and he inflated his lungs, leaned down close to Mr. Elmsworth’s hairy earhole, and shouted, “Did he wear a
uniform
?”

Mr. Elmsworth started and dropped his pipe, which his wife fortunately caught before it could shatter on the floor.

“Goodness, young man,” he said reprovingly. “ ’Tisn’t manners to shout indoors. That’s what I was always taught as a young’un.”

“I beg pardon, sir,” William said, in a slightly lower tone. “Mrs. Hunter has…two brothers, you see; I wondered which it might be.”

Henry had been invalided out of the army, but his elder brother, Adam, the middle one of William’s three cousins, was captain in an infantry battalion.

“Oh, ah,” said Mrs. Elmsworth, and set about questioning her husband in a high-pitched howl, eventually eliciting a dubious opinion that the young fellow might have been in some sort of uniform, though with so many folk going about with guns and colored britches and fancy buttons these days, ’twas hard to say.

“We don’t hold with vanity, see,” he explained to William. “Being Friends, like. Not with armies nor guns, neither, save they’re for hunting. Hunting’s all right. Folk have to eat, you know,” he added, giving William a faintly accusatory look.

William kept his patience, there being no choice, and was rewarded with a more promising thought. He turned to Mrs. Elmsworth.

“Will you ask your husband, please—did the man who came for Dorothea resemble her?” For Henry and Benjamin were slender and dark-haired, like their father, but Adam looked like his mother, as did Dottie, both being fair-haired and pink-cheeked, with rounded chins and large, dreamy blue eyes.

Mr. Elmsworth had grown somewhat tense during the questioning and was puffing on his pipe with an air of agitation, but relaxed when this was put to him. He exhaled a great cloud of blue smoke and nodded, hard.

“He did, then,” he said. “Very like, very like.”
Adam.
William relaxed, too, and thanked the Elmsworths profusely, though they refused any gift of money.

As he prepared to take his leave, he had another thought.

“Ma’am—do you still have the note my cousin wrote to you?”

This request resulted in a quarter hour of fussing about the tiny house, picking up sticky jars of preserves and putting them down again, and concluding in Mr. Elmsworth’s belated recollection that he had used the note to light his candle.

“There wasn’t much to it, son,” Mrs. Elmsworth told him sympathetically, seeing his disappointment. “She only thanked us for keeping her, and said as how her brother would take her to her husband.”

IT WAS LATE
in the day by now, and his horse was tired and in need of food, so despite his urge to ride off immediately, he reluctantly accepted the hospitality of the Elmsworths’ small barn for the night. They had invited him to share their supper as well, but having seen that their supper was to consist of a dab of cornmeal porridge with a few drops of molasses and a few slices of hard and curling bread, he assured them that he had a little food in his saddlebags and retired to the barn to see to Betsy’s needs before seeking the refuge of his own thoughts.

In fact, he had a bruised apple and a small chunk of hard cheese, this oozing grease and slightly moldy. He paid little attention to his sparse supper, though, his mind being occupied with what the devil to do next.

Adam.
It had to be Adam. The problem was that he didn’t know where Adam was supposed to be. He’d not seen his cousin in more than a year, and such conversation as he’d had lately with Papa and Uncle Hal hadn’t touched on Adam at all, everyone being taken up with Benjamin’s death.

The last he
had
heard of Adam, his cousin was a captain of infantry, but (wisely, he thought) not in his father’s regiment. Hal’s sons had all concluded, early in their military careers, that their chances of remaining on good terms with their father depended on not serving under him, and they purchased their commissions accordingly.

“Well, start from the other end, then, ass,” he said impatiently. “The only way Adam would have found out where Dottie was, is from Denzell. We assume Denzell is with Washington, and Uncle Hal says that Washington is in winter quarters in New Jersey.”

All right, then. He belched slightly, tasting the sweet decay of the apple’s soft spots, and relaxed a little, hunching his greatcoat up round his ears and curling his toes inside his cold, damp boots. He didn’t
need
to know where Adam was or had been, if this reasoning was sound. But his guess was that Adam was with Clinton’s army in New York—if they still were in New York. If Clinton was intending to go take Charles Town, though, surely he wouldn’t be doing it so late in the year? Still, if the Hunters were
not
with Washington in New Jersey, Adam was his only source of information as to their whereabouts.

Betsy lifted her tail and deposited a steaming cascade of horse apples, two feet away from where William sat on an upturned pail. William leaned over and rubbed his frozen hands above the warmth, thinking.

He did wonder why Denzell had decided to send for Dottie, having placed her with the Elmsworths for safety, but that wasn’t important. His own choice seemed clear: either ride on to New York and look for Adam, go to New Jersey and look for Denzell, or turn round and ride back to Savannah and tell Uncle Hal what he’d learned.

He dismissed this last option.

It was roughly the same distance from where he was to either New York or New Jersey—about three hundred miles. He glanced out through the open half door at the cloudy sky. Maybe a week, if the roads were decent.

“Which they won’t be,” he said, watching small hard flecks of what wasn’t quite yet snow drift in to land on his hands and face, melting in tiny pinpricks of cold. “Nothing else to do, though, is there?”