The Fiery Cross (41 page)

“Well, I thank ye for the compliment, Sassenach,” he said. “Mammoth, is it?” He thrust his arms upward and stretched again, casually arching his back, which—quite inadvertently, I didn’t think—enhanced any incidental resemblances that one might note between the half-engorged morning anatomy of a man, and the facial adornments of a pachyderm.

I laughed.

“That’s not
precisely
what I meant,” I said. “Stop waggling; Lizzie’s coming in any minute. You’d better put your shirt on or get back in bed.”

The sound of footsteps on the landing sent him diving under the quilts, and sent the little cat scampering up the sheet in fright. In the event, it was Mr. Wemyss himself who had brought the dish of cream, sparing his daughter a possible sight of Himself in the altogether.

The weather being fine, we had left the shutters open the night before. The sky outside was the color of fresh oysters, moist and pearly gray. Mr. Wemyss glanced at it, blinked and nodded at Jamie’s thanks, and toddled back to his bed, thankful for a last half hour’s sleep before the dawn.

I disentangled the kitten, who had taken refuge in my hair, and set him down by the bowl of cream. I didn’t suppose he could ever have seen a bowl of cream in his life, but the smell was enough—in moments, he was whisker-deep, lapping for all he was worth.

“He’s a fine thrum to him,” Jamie remarked approvingly. “I can hear him from here.”

“He’s lovely; wherever did you get him?” I nestled into the curve of Jamie’s body, enjoying his warmth; the fire had burned far down during the night, and the air in the room was chilly, sour with ash.

“Found him in the wood.” Jamie yawned widely, and relaxed, propping his head on my shoulder to watch the tiny cat, who had abandoned himself to an ecstasy of gluttony. “I thought I’d lost him when Gideon bolted—I suppose he’d crept into one of the saddlebags, and came up wi’ the other things.”

We lapsed into a peaceful stupor, drowsily cuddled in the warm nest of our bed, as the sky lightened, moment by moment, and the air came alive with the voices of waking birds. The house was waking, too—a baby’s wail came from below, followed by the stir and shuffle of rising, the murmur of voices. We should rise, too—there was so much to be done—and yet neither of us moved, each reluctant to surrender the sense of quiet sanctuary. Jamie sighed, his breath warm on my bare shoulder.

“A week, I think,” he said quietly.

“Before you must go?”

“Aye. I can take that long to settle things here, and speak to the men from the Ridge. A week then, to pass through the country between the Treaty Line and Drunkard’s Creek and call a muster—then I’ll bring them here to drill. If Tryon should call up the militia, then . . .”

I lay quiet for a moment, my hand wrapped round Jamie’s, his loose fist curled against my breast.

“If he calls, I’ll go with you.”

He kissed the back of my neck.

“D’ye wish it?” he said. “I dinna think there will be need. Neither you nor Bree know of any fighting will be done here now.”

“That only means that if anything
will
happen, it won’t be a huge battle,” I said. “This—the Colonies—it’s a big place, Jamie. And two hundred years of things happening—we wouldn’t know about the smaller conflicts, especially ones that happened in a different place. Now, in Boston—” I sighed, squeezing his hand.

I wouldn’t know a great deal about events in Boston myself, but Bree would; growing up there, she had been exposed in school to a good bit of local and state history. I had heard her telling Roger things about the Boston Massacre—a small confrontation between citizens and British troops that had taken place the past March.

“Aye, I suppose that’s true,” he said. “Still, it doesna seem as though it will come to anything. I think Tryon only means to frighten the Regulators into good behavior.”

This was in fact likely. However, I was quite aware of the old adage—“Man proposes and God disposes”—and whether it was God or William Tryon in charge, heaven only knew what might happen in the event.

“Do you think so?” I asked. “Or only hope so?”

He sighed, and stretched his legs, his arm tightening about my waist.

“Both,” he admitted. “Mostly I hope. And I pray. But I do think so, too.”

The kitten had completely emptied the dish of cream. He sat down with an audible thump on his tiny backside, rubbed the last of the delicious white stuff from his whiskers, then ambled slowly toward the bed, sides bulging visibly. He sprang up onto the coverlet, burrowed close to me, and fell promptly asleep.

Perhaps not quite asleep; I could feel the small vibration of his purring through the quilt.

“What do you think I should call him?” I mused aloud, touching the tip of the soft, wispy tail. “Spot? Puff? Cloudy?”

“Foolish names,” Jamie said, with a lazy tolerance. “Is that what ye were wont to call your pussie-baudrons in Boston, then? Or England?”

“No. I’ve never had a cat before,” I admitted. “Frank was allergic to them—they made him sneeze. And what’s a good Scottish cat name, then—Diarmuid? McGillivray?”

He snorted, then laughed.

“Adso,” he said, positively. “Call him Adso.”

“What sort of name is that?” I demanded, twisting to look back at him in amazement. “I’ve heard a good many peculiar Scottish names, but that’s a new one.”

He rested his chin comfortably on my shoulder, watching the kitten sleep.

“My mother had a wee cat named Adso,” he said, surprisingly. “A gray cheetie, verra much like this one.”

“Did she?” I laid a hand on his leg. He rarely spoke of his mother, who had died when he was eight.

“Aye, she did. A rare mouser, and that fond of my mother; he didna have much use for us bairns.” He smiled in memory. “Possibly because Jenny dressed him in baby-gowns and fed him rusks, and I dropped him into the millpond, to see could he swim. He could, by the way,” he informed me, “but he didna like to.”

“I can’t say I blame him,” I said, amused. “Why was he called Adso, though? Is it a saint’s name?” I was used to the peculiar names of Celtic saints, from Aodh—pronounced OOH—to Dervorgilla, but hadn’t heard of Saint Adso before. Probably the patron saint of mice.

“Not a saint,” he corrected. “A monk. My mother was verra learned—she was educated at Leoch, ye ken, along with Colum and Dougal, and could read Greek and Latin, and a bit of the Hebrew as well as French and German. She didna have so much opportunity for reading at Lallybroch, of course, but my father would take pains to have books fetched for her, from Edinburgh and Paris.”

He reached across my body to touch a silky, translucent ear, and the kitten twitched its whiskers, screwing up its face as though about to sneeze, but didn’t open its eyes. The purr continued unabated.

“One of the books she liked was written by an Austrian, from the city of Melk, and so she thought it a verra suitable name for the kit.”

“Suitable . . . ?”

“Aye,” he said, nodding toward the empty dish, without the slightest twitch of lip or eyelid. “Adso of Milk.”

A slit of green showed as one eye opened, as though in response to the name. Then it closed again, and the purring resumed.

“Well, if he doesn’t mind, I suppose I don’t,” I said, resigned. “Adso it is.”

A
WEEK LATER, we—that is, the women—were engaged in the backbreaking business of laundry when Clarence the mule let out his clarion announcement that company was coming. Little Mrs. Aberfeldy leaped as though she’d been stung by a bee, and dropped an armload of wet shirts in the dirt of the yard. I could see Mrs. Bug and Mrs. Chisholm opening their mouths in reproach, and took the opportunity to wipe my hands on my apron and hurry round to the front, to greet whatever visitor might be approaching.

Sure enough; a bay mule was coming out of the trees at the head of the trail, followed by a fat brown mare on a leading rein. The mule’s ears flicked forward and he brayed enthusiastically in reply to Clarence’s greeting. I stuck my fingers in my ears to block the ungodly racket, and squinted against the dazzle of the afternoon sun to make out the mule’s rider.

“Mr. Husband!” Pulling my fingers out of my ears, I hurried forward to greet him.

“Mrs. Fraser—good day to thee!”

Hermon Husband pulled off his black slouch hat and gave me a brief nod of greeting, then slid off the mule with a groan that spoke of a good many hours in the saddle. His lips moved soundlessly in the framework of his beard as he straightened stiffly; he was a Quaker, and didn’t use strong language. Not out loud, at least.

“Is thy husband at home, Mrs. Fraser?”

“I just saw him heading for the stable; I’ll go and find him!” I shouted, above the continued braying of the mules. I took the hat from him, and gestured toward the house. “I’ll see to your animals!”

He nodded thanks and limped slowly round the house, toward the kitchen door. From the back, I could see how painfully he moved; he could barely put weight on his left foot. The hat in my hand was covered with dust and mud stains, and I had smelled the odor of unwashed clothes and body when he stood near me. He’d been a long time riding, and not just today—for a week or more, I thought, and sleeping rough for the most of it.

I unsaddled the mule, removing in the process two worn saddlebags half-filled with printed pamphlets, badly printed and crudely illustrated. I studied the illustration with some interest; it was a woodcut of several indignant and righteous-looking Regulators defying a group of officials, among whom was a squat figure I had no trouble identifying as David Anstruther; the caption didn’t mention him by name, but the artist had captured the Sheriff’s resemblance to a poisonous toad with remarkable facility. Had Husband taken to delivering the bloody things door-to-door? I wondered.

I turned the animals out into the paddock, dumped the hat and saddlebags by the porch, then trekked up the hill to the stable, a shallow cave that Jamie had walled with thick palisades. Brianna referred to it as the maternity ward, since the usual occupants were imminently expectant mares, cows, or sows.

I wondered what brought Hermon Husband here—and whether he was being followed. He owned a farm and a small mill, both at least two days’ ride from the Ridge; not a journey he would undertake simply for the pleasure of our company.

Husband was one of the leaders of the Regulation, and had been jailed more than once for the rabble-rousing pamphlets he printed and distributed. The most recent news I had heard of him was that he had been read out of the local Quaker meeting, the Friends taking a dim view of his activities, which they regarded as incitement to violence. I rather thought they had a point, judging from the pamphlets I’d read.

The door of the stable stood open, allowing the pleasantly fecund scents of straw, warm animals, and manure to drift out, along with a stream of similarly fecund words. Jamie, no Quaker, did believe in strong language, and was using rather a lot of it, albeit in Gaelic, which tends toward the poetic, rather than the vulgar.

I translated the current effusion roughly as, “May your guts twine upon themselves like serpents and your bowels explode through the walls of your belly! May the curse of the crows be upon you, misbegotten spawn of a lineage of dung flies!” Or words to that effect.

“Who are you talking to?” I inquired, putting my head round the stable door. “And what’s the curse of the crows?”

I blinked against the sudden dimness, seeing him only as a tall shadow against the piles of pale hay stacked by the wall. He turned, hearing me, and strode into the light from the door. He’d been running his hands through his hair; several strands were pulled from their binding, standing on end, and there were straws sticking out of it.

“Tha nighean na galladh torrach!”
he said, with a ferocious scowl and a brief gesture behind him.

“White daughter of a bi—oh! You mean that blasted sow has done it again?”

The big white sow, while possessed of superior fatness and amazing reproductive capacity, was also a creature of low cunning, and impatient of captivity. She had escaped her brood pen twice before, once by the expedient of charging Lizzie, who had—wisely—screamed and dived out of the way as the pig barged past, and again by assiduously rooting up one side of the pen, lying in wait until the stable door was opened, and knocking me flat as she made for the wide-open spaces.

This time, she hadn’t bothered with strategy, but merely smashed out a board from her pen, then rooted and dug under the palisades, making an escape tunnel worthy of British prisoners-of-war in a Nazi camp.

“Aye, she has,” Jamie said, reverting to English now that his initial fury had subsided somewhat. “As for the curse o’ the crows, it depends. It might mean ye want the corbies to come down on a man’s fields and eat his corn. In this case, I had in mind the birds pecking out the evil creature’s eyes.”

“I suppose that would make her easier to catch,” I said, sighing. “How near is she to farrowing, do you think?”

He shrugged and shoved a hand through his hair.

“A day, two days, three, maybe. Serve the creature right if she farrows in the wood and is eaten by wolves, her and her piglets together.” He kicked moodily at the heap of raw earth left by the sow’s tunneling, sending a cascade of dirt down into the hole. “Who’s come? I heard Clarence yammering.”