Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (136 page)

Jamie made a quick movement and Ulysses flinched, much to my pleasure. But Jamie had merely snatched the official letter from the desk. He crumpled it into a ball and, turning, hurled it into the hearth. Then turned again on Ulysses, with an expression that made the man stiffen.

He didn’t speak. Ulysses stooped swiftly and plucked the letter out of the smoldering ashes, shook it clean, then turned on his heel and went, back straight as a butler carrying a tray.

JAMIE SAT DOWN
slowly, and set his hands very precisely on the desk in front of him, palms on the wood, ready to launch him into action. As soon as he’d decided what action to take.

There actually
was
an acting governor of North Carolina—Richard Caswell, whom we knew fairly well. He was not, though, a governor appointed by the British government; he’d been temporarily elected by the Committee of Safety appointed by the Provincial Congress; both of these rather fluid entities, but neither of them legitimate, so far as Lord George Germain was concerned.

“They can’t really…” I began, but stopped. They could. All too easily, and I swallowed, my skin prickling with sudden fear. The smell of fresh sawdust and oozing pitch had come in the front door with the gust of wind, from the spot by the red cedar tree where the men cut shims and adzed shingles for the roof. Wood. No one who’s lived through a house fire hears the word “burn” with any sense of equanimity, and I wasn’t feeling even slightly equanimous. Neither was Jamie.

“I don’t suppose it’s a forgery,” I said at last. “That letter.”

He shook his head.

“I’ve seen enough official documents to ken the seals, Sassenach.”

“Do you think—he’s responsible for it? Did he sic the government onto us?
Could
he?”

Jamie’s brows went up and he glanced at me.

“I imagine a good many folk know about it…but I doubt most of them have anything against me, and even fewer would be able to get the secretary’s attention for such a wee matter.”

“Mmm. Lord Dunmore, perhaps?” I suggested delicately. “He certainly wouldn’t care, but if he felt that he owed Ulysses something…”

The blood was rising in Jamie’s face, and his left hand folded into a fist.

“What was it the
balgair
said? That he thought of becoming a landlord himself?”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” I looked hard at the battered surface of the desk, as though the gaudy letter was still there. “And he said
he
has the original document. Not ‘the government’ or ‘Lord Germain.’ Him.”

The British government was in fact in the habit of confiscating rebel property and bestowing it on their own lackeys—they’d done it all over the Highlands, after Culloden, and Jamie had saved Lallybroch only by deeding it to his ten-year-old nephew before Culloden.

A moment’s silence.

“Do I think he has more than those two men with him?” he asked, but he wasn’t asking me, and immediately answered his own question. “Aye, I do. How many, that’s the question…”

Whatever the answer was, it propelled him to his feet, a look of decision on his face. With an underlying layer of intent ferocity that I had no trouble distinguishing. I felt much the same, shock and fear fading into fury.

“That
bastard
!” I said.

He didn’t reply, but thrust his head out into the hall and bellowed, “Aidan!” in the direction of the kitchen.

BOBBY HIGGINS TURNED
up first, his pale face flushed with alarm and excitement. He wasn’t a good horseman but could ride well enough on an open trail—and since the bear, he had resumed carrying a musket.

“Ian will be coming down, quick as he can,” Jamie told him, hastily saddling and bridling Phineas, the fastest of our three saddle horses. “And I’ve sent the lads to carry word to the Lindsays, Gilly MacMillan, and the McHughs. They’ll spread the word further, but they’ll come on here by themselves. You come wi’ me, and when we’re sure of the track, I’ll send ye back here to tell the others and lead them on to join me, aye?”

“Yes, sir!” Bobby said it by reflex, straightening his back. Once a soldier, always a soldier. Jamie clapped him on the shoulder and put his own foot in the stirrup.

“Away, then.”

He blessed whoever was in charge of the weather, be that saint or demon, for the rain had held off, and it was no trick to follow the trail of Ulysses and his two men on the muddy ground.

It shortly became evident that there
were
more than two men with Ulysses; Jamie and Bobby came upon a spot nay more than a mile from the house, where the marks in the churned-up mud made it clear that Ulysses had joined a band of twenty men, at least; maybe more.

“Go back to the house!” he shouted to Bobby, and waved a hand, encompassing the small clearing. “Tell Ian to bring as many men here as he can and leave word for the rest; a blind man could follow this lot!”

Bobby nodded, pulled down his hat, and set off uphill, leaning perilously back in his saddle, reins clutched to his chest. Jamie grimaced, but waved reassuringly when Bobby looked back over his shoulder. He only needed to stay on the horse as far as the house.

“Even if he falls off and breaks his neck,” he muttered to himself, reining round, “they can follow our track this far. If it doesna pour.” He looked upward, into a dizzying swirl of black clouds, and saw the flash of silent lightning. He counted ten before the roll of distant thunder reached him.

“Trobhat!”
he said to Phin, and they set off downhill, following the black hoofprints still showing clear.

THE MOUNTED BAND
was moving briskly, but not fleeing. And while there were sprinkles of rain on his face, the storm had not yet broken. Jamie kept well back, always with an ear behind him for his own men coming.

And come they did, to his unspoken but vast relief. He heard them and reined uphill to meet them out of earshot of the troops he was following—he supposed they must be regular British troops, for Ulysses wouldn’t go through the mummery of pretending to be a British soldier if he weren’t one. If they were, though, he’d have to go canny. He wasn’t wanting a physical fight; his infant militia weren’t up to taking on trained soldiers yet.

The back of his mind had been keeping its peace to this point, but now it took the opportunity of his relaxed vigilance to ask him just what the devil he
did
want.

He wanted to get Ulysses alone, with a dirk in his hand and five minutes to use it, but failing that, he wanted to catch up to the man and go through his saddlebags, both for the damned letter—why had he not been quick enough to stop the man taking it?—
and
for the original grant, should Ulysses be carrying it. Which meant cutting him out of his own companions and sequestering him somewhere, briefly. He would have given the rest of the fingers on his right hand to have Young Ian with him now, but he didn’t dare wait.

He crossed himself, with a quick prayer to St. Michael, and threaded his horse carefully through a clump of spruce. Emerging on the far side, he saw the flash of a horse’s flank and heard the jingle of harness.

“
Trobhad a seo!
Over here!” It wasn’t raining yet, but the air still held that strange, muffled quality and he felt as though he’d shouted through a pillow.

They heard him, though, and within a minute or two, they were on their way.

“Who is it we’re after, sir?” asked Anson McHugh, politely. The eldest of Tom McHugh’s sons, he’d come with his father and a younger brother, as well as the Lindsay brothers and a few others who lived close enough to get the summons in time.

“A band of black British soldiers,” Jamie told him.

“Black soldiers?” Anson asked, looking puzzled. “Is there such a thing, then?”

“There is,” Jamie assured him dryly. “Lord Dunmore—ye ken Lord Dunmore? Oh, ye don’t. Nay matter—he started it some years back by getting into a moil wi’ the Virginians he was meant to be governing. They wouldna do as he said, so he put out word that any slave who chose to join the army would be freed. And fed, clothed, and paid,” he added, thinking that this was more than most Continental soldiers could expect.

Anson nodded, his long young face serious. All the McHughs were serious, save their mother, Adeline—and God knew the woman needed a sense of humor, wi’ seven bairns, all boys.

“Is it treason we’re going to commit, then?” Anson asked. A faint gleam of excitement came into his eyes at the thought.

“Very likely,” Jamie said, and suppressed an inappropriate smile at the thought. He’d had a flash of memory: a contentious conversation between himself and John Grey, on a road in Ireland. Grey, annoyed by Jamie’s refusal to tell him what he knew about Tobias Quinn’s aims, had said,
“I suppose it is frivolous to point out that assisting the King’s enemies—even by inaction—is treason.”

To which he had himself replied evenly,
“It is not frivolous to point out that I am a convicted traitor. Are there judicial degrees of that crime? Is it additive? Because when they tried me, all they said was ‘treason’ before putting a rope around my neck.”

He was surprised to find that the inappropriate smile had crept onto his face despite the current urgent situation—and the fraught circumstances of the memory. A shout from Gillebride MacMillan made him turn sharply from Anson and kick his horse into the highest pace he could sustain on a slippery blanket of wet pine needles.

Panting with the hurry, they reached Gillebride, who silently pointed the way with his chin.

The soldiers had stopped by a small creek to water the horses; that was luck. He could see Ulysses standing on the near bank, leaning against a bare willow’s trunk, the drooping, leafless branches falling in a sort of cage about him.

Taking that as a good omen, Jamie gathered his men and made his aims known. He let Anson McHugh shout, “One…two…
three
!” and on that signal, the group split like a dropped egg, Gillebride and the McHughs going for the left flank, as it were, with himself and the Lindsays riding straight into the creek to split the group, and himself meaning to seize upon Ulysses—Kenny Lindsay to back him up, if needed.

“Make sure o’ the horses!” he shouted, leaning toward Kenny. “I dinna ken which one belongs to our man. It’s the saddlebags I want!”

“Aye, Mac Dubh,” Lindsay said, grinning, and Jamie let out a Highland whoop that made Phineas—unused to such a thing—swerve madly, ears laid back.

The black soldiers sprang up at once to defend themselves, but most of them were dismounted, and their horses hadn’t liked the screech any more than Phineas did. Ulysses had started from his willow tree like a water rat flushed by a fox, and dived for his tethered horse.

Jamie pulled his own horse up into a slithering stop amid a shower of wet leaves and flung himself off. He ran through the creek edge, ignoring rocks and the cold water that splashed his legs, and threw himself at Ulysses just as the man was getting his left foot into the stirrup. His blood was up and he dragged Ulysses away from the horse, shoved him, then punched him in the belly.