Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (116 page)

A burning stick broke in the hearth with a sharp
crack
and sparks sprayed up in a tiny fountain. A few caught in the fire screen Bree had made, glowing red for an instant before dying. The cat twitched an ear, but remained unperturbed.

I felt, rather than heard, the front door closing: a muffled vibration through the bones of the house. Aaron Cloudtree was gone. I pulled my wrapper close and went downstairs, leaving Adso to mind the fire.

“DO YOU THINK
this Scotchee can help?” I asked dubiously. Mr. Cloudtree had departed, full of whisky and pickle, with a sealed note—written in Gaelic and carefully unsigned, in case of interception or indiscretion—in his pocket, and we were sitting by the kitchen fire, sharing the rest of the whisky with the peace of the resting house around us. It was very late—perhaps two or three o’clock in the morning, judging from the deep, chilly stillness of the air outside—but neither of us wanted to go to bed.

“I dinna ken,” Jamie admitted. He rubbed both hands over his face, then shook his head, leaving his hair rumpled and flyaway, short hairs rising from his crown, red in the firelight. He yawned, blinked, and shook his head, more to dispel mental fog than to acknowledge onrushing sleep, I thought.

“It depends,” he said, after a meditative sip. “Where he is, who he can talk to. And whether he can still read the
Gàidhlig,
” he added, with a rueful smile. “If not, we’re nay worse off than before. If we’re lucky, he may be moved to find out who Cunningham’s been dealing with among the Cherokee, and maybe drop a word to the headman of that village.”

I nodded, dubious. The Cherokee territory was a vast country, with hundreds of villages. On the other hand, Jamie was well known there as the Indian agent before Scotchee, and I rather thought that while Charles Cunningham’s accomplices might be familiar with some of the Cherokee headmen, Cunningham himself almost certainly wasn’t. Alexander Duff and his son lived within a quarter mile of the Cunningham cabin; Donald MacGillies within a stone’s throw of the Duffs. Sandy Duff and Donald MacGillies were Ardsmuir men, wholly to be trusted, and I knew they had been keeping an eye on the comings and goings over the Treaty Line.

“What did you do with the rifles you took from Cunningham?” I asked, pouring another cup of hot milk and adding a drizzle of honey.

“Gave most of them to men I can trust. Speaking o’ that…” he said, and yawned again. “Oh, God…I’ll have to send word to the Overmountain men, though I canna reach them all in time. Sevier might come, though; he’s the closest, and a solid man. And he doesna much like Indians.”

Seven days later

J
AMIE COULDN’T EAT SUPPER,
though he hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. His wame was closed as a knotted glove, and he didn’t feel hungry; the lack of food sharpened his bones and cleared his head. He felt calm but as though he was standing behind a sheet of glass, watching himself.

“Eh?” Claire had said something to him, and he hadn’t heard. He made a brief gesture of apology, and she narrowed her eyes at him—not in annoyance, in concern.

“It’s fine, Sassenach,” he assured her. “Cunningham doesna want me dead. The worst that can happen is that he takes me prisoner tonight.”

“What about what happens after that?” she demanded. She was wound tight as a new watch; he could see her wee gears spinning, and smiled. One of her eyebrows went up, and he leaned over and kissed it.

“Dinna fash,
a nighean.
After that, the captain has a choice, doesn’t he? Get me off the Ridge—and good luck to him if that’s his choice—or try to take me over the Line and through the Cherokee lands to get to Ferguson—wherever that poor bastard is now. And while Cunningham’s friends have friends among the Cherokee—so do I, and if Aaron Cloudtree either found Scotchee Cameron or spoke of the matter to anyone else—and I’d wager my best stockings that he did; ye can tell he’s a blabbermouth—the captain might have a good deal more trouble in taking me anywhere than he might think.”

“Oh, good,” she said, and the line between her brows eased a bit. “So after you start a small war over the Treaty Line, the captain will just have to kill you all by himself.”

Jamie shrugged. He hadn’t thought that far, but it didn’t matter.

“He can try.”

She didn’t look much less worried, but she smiled at him, despite herself. Seeing that made him want suddenly and urgently to have her, and it plainly showed on his face, for her smile deepened—though her sidewise glance at the door convinced him that she wasn’t going to let him bend her over the table and try to finish before wee Aggie came in.

“After Lodge, then,” he said, grinning at her.

She took a deep breath and nodded.

“After Lodge,” she said, trying to sound as certain as he did.

I WAS THUMBING
through my
Merck,
roaming from pleural disorders and the use of thoracentesis to a gripping account of inflammation of the rectal mucosa, but while my cerebellum could be coaxed into a momentary distraction, my brain stem, spinal cord, and sacral nerves were having none of it. If I’d had a tail, it would have been pressed tight between my legs, and small jolts of something between electricity and nausea spurted unexpectedly through my abdomen.

The girls knew that something was afoot. They’d been silent as mice at supper, gazing as though hypnotized at Jamie. I’d been likewise hypnotized, watching him dress afterward.

I’d stayed to help clear the table, put away the remnants and orts from the meal, and smoor the fire in the kitchen hearth, and when I came up to our bedroom, I found him facing away from me, on the far side of the room. He didn’t turn round; I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard me come in. His face was reflected in the window he stood in front of, but I could see that he wasn’t looking at his reflection.

He wasn’t looking
anywhere.
His eyes were fixed and full of darkness, and his fingers moved swiftly, twitching buttons free, unwinding his neckcloth, loosening his breeches—all as though he were somewhere else, completely unaware of what his hands were doing. He was preparing to fight.

His plaid lay on the bed, along with a clean shirt and his leather jerkin. He turned, presumably to fetch it, and saw me. He looked blank, and then the life flowed back into him.

“Ye look as though ye’ve seen a ghost, Sassenach,” he said, in a voice that was almost normal. “I ken I’ve aged a bit, but surely it’s none sae bad as all that?”

“You’d scare the Devil himself,” I said. I wasn’t joking, and he knew it.

“I know,” he said simply. “I was remembering how it was, just before the charge. At Drumossie. Folk were shouting and I could see the
gunna mòr
across the field, but it didna mean anything. I was shedding my clothes, because there was nothing left but draw my sword and run across the moor. I kent I’d never make it to the other side, and I didna care.”

I couldn’t speak. Neither did he, but went quietly about the business of washing, of putting on his clean sark and his belted plaid, and when he got to his feet, he smiled at me, though his eyes still held memories.

“Dinna fash, Sassenach. Cunningham wants to hand me over to Patrick Ferguson and take the credit. It’s his best chance to make his name among the Loyalist forces.”

I nodded obediently, knowing as well as he did that the motive for starting a fight often had nothing to do with how things turned out.

He started for the door, then stopped, waiting for me. I came slowly to him, touched him. He hadn’t put on his coat yet, and his arm was solid and warm through the cloth of his shirt.

“Will it be today?” I blurted. Twice before, he’d left me on the edge of a battlefield, telling me that while the day might come that he and I would part—it wouldn’t be today. And both times, he’d been right.

He cupped my cheek in one hand and looked at me for a long moment, and I knew he was fixing me in his memory, as I had just done to him.

“I dinna think so,” he said at last, soberly. His hand fell away, my cheek suddenly cool where he’d touched it. “But I willna lie to ye, Claire; I think it will be an evil night.”

LODGE NIGHT, BY
custom, began roughly two hours after supper, to let everyone digest their food, finish their evening chores, and make their way from wherever they lived. Some homesteads were a good five or six miles from the Meeting House.

Jamie urgently wanted to arrive early, both to anticipate any ambush and to have a quiet keek around, in case Cunningham had thought to post men in the nearby woods. He didn’t, though. He stopped at the stable to check the welfare of his kine, then paused by the pigpen and counted the shadowy, stertorous forms clustered in the straw, noting that the straw had best be changed this week.

Then he walked slowly up the hill toward the Meeting House. The weather had warmed abruptly and bats were flickering through the air between the trees, snatching insects too fast to see. Brianna had told him how they did it, and if he listened close, he thought he could sometimes catch their high-pitched cries, thin and sharp as broken glass.

Tom MacLeod stepped out of the trees and fell into step beside him with a quiet “Mac Dubh.” It gave him an odd feeling, sometimes, when one of his Ardsmuir men called him that. Memories of prison, the hard things—and they were hard—but also the fleeting, regular pulse of the kinship that had kept them alive and would bind them for life. And at the bottom of his heart, always, a faint sense of his father, the Black One whose son he was.

“Dean Urnaigh dhomh,”
he whispered. Pray for me, Da.

He could hear men among the trees now, coming along the mountain trails in ones and twos and threes, recognized the voices: MacMillan, Airdrie, Wilson, Crombie, MacLean, MacCoinneach, two of the Lindsay brothers, Bobby Higgins, coming up behind him…He smiled at thought of Bobby. Bobby was one of the ten men he had told about tonight. Bobby hadn’t fought anyone save the occasional raccoon in some years, but he’d been a soldier and remembered how. And of the ten, for all he’d been an English soldier, Bobby Higgins was one of the men he would trust with his life.

He wasn’t given to vain regrets, but for a piercing instant, he thought how different this night might be if he had Young Ian by his side, and Roger Mac. If he had Germain and Jeremiah, too, waiting outside and ready to run for more help if it was needed.

At least ye won’t get any of
them
killed.
He wasn’t sure if that was his own thought or his father’s voice, but it was a small comfort.

The Crombies and Gillebride MacMillan were waiting outside the Meeting House. So were several men he knew to be quiet Loyalists—maybe Cunningham’s, maybe not—but they’d likely not lift a hand to save him, if that’s what it came down to. He thought one or two of them looked at him oddly, but the light was dim through the oiled hides over the windows; he couldn’t say for sure, and put the thought away.

He made no move to go in yet; it was customary to have a wee blether outside before they settled down to business. He replied to conversation, and laughed now and then, but caught no more than the barest sense of what was said to him. He could feel Cunningham. Out in the dark trees behind his back, waiting.

He wants to see how many men I have.

Jamie wanted to see how many men Cunningham had—and who they were. And to that end, Aidan Higgins was hiding in the brush beside the main trail that led to the Meeting House from the western part of the Ridge, and Murdo Lindsay up near the trail that led from the eastern part. If any Cherokee came to take part in tonight’s doing, they’d come that way, and God and Murdo willing, he’d hear about it in time to take action.