There was only the one stone footbridge, but the River Ness itself was naturally much the same. The river was low and the same gulls sat in the riffles, squawking companionably to one another as they picked small fish from among the stones just under the water’s surface.
“Luck to you, mate,” he said to a fat gull who sat on the bridge, and crossed the river into the town.
Here and there, a gracious residence sat comfortably insulated by its wide grounds, a grand lady spreading her skirts, ignoring the presence of the hoi polloi nearby. There was Mountgerald in the distance, the big house looking precisely as he had always known it, save that the great copper beeches that would in future surround the house had not yet been planted; instead, a row of spindly Italian cypresses leaned dismally against the garden wall, looking homesick for their sunny birthplace.
For all its elegance, Mountgerald was reputed to have been built in the oldest of the old ways—with the foundation laid over the body of a human sacrifice. By report, a workman had been lured into the hole of the cellar, and a great stone dropped onto him from the top of the newly built wall, crushing him to death. He had—so local history said—been buried there in the cellar, his blood a propitiation to the hungry spirits of the earth, who thus satisfied, had allowed the edifice to stand prosperous and untroubled through the years.
The house could be no more than twenty or thirty years old now, Roger thought. There might easily be people in the town who had worked on its building; who knew exactly what had happened in that cellar, to whom, and why.
But he had other things to do; Mountgerald and its ghost would have to keep their secrets. With a mild pang of regret, he left the big house behind, and turned his scholar’s nose into the road that led to the docks downriver.
With a feeling of what could only be called déjà vu, he pushed open the door of a pub. The half-timbered entry, with its stone flags, was as he had seen it a week before—and two hundred years hence—and the familiar smell of hops and yeast in the air was a comfort to his spirit. The name had changed, but not the smell of beer.
Roger took a deep gulp from his wooden cup and nearly choked. “All right, man?” The barman paused, a bucket of sand in his hand, to peer at Roger.
“Fine,” Roger said hoarsely. “Just fine.”
The barman nodded and went back to scattering sand, but kept a practiced eye on Roger in case he looked like vomiting on the freshly swept and sanded floor.
Roger coughed and cleared his throat, then essayed a further cautious sip. The flavor was fine; very good, in fact. It was the alcohol content that was unexpected; this stuff packed a wallop far greater than any modern beer Roger had ever encountered. Claire had said that alcoholism was endemic to the time, and Roger could easily see why. Still, if drunkenness were the greatest hazard he faced, he could deal with that.
He sat quietly by the hearth and drank, savoring the dark, bitter brew as he watched and listened.
It was a port pub, and a busy one. So near the docks on the Moray Firth, it hosted sea captains and merchants, as well as sailors from the ships in port and longshoremen and laborers from the nearby warehouses. A great deal of business of one kind and another was being transacted over the beer-stained surfaces of its many small tables.
With half an ear Roger could hear a contract being arranged for the shipping of three hundred bolts of cheap drugget cloth from Aberdeen, bound for the Colonies, with an exchange to be made for a cargo of rice and indigo from the Carolinas. A hundred head of Galloway cattle, six hundred-weight of rolled copper, casks of sulfur, molasses, and wine. Quantities and prices, delivery dates and conditions floated through the babble and beer fumes of the pub like the thick blue clouds of tobacco smoke that floated near the low ceiling-beams.
Not only goods were being bargained for. In one corner sat a ship’s captain, marked by the cut of his long, full-skirted coat and the fine black tricorne that lay on the table by his elbow. He was attended by a clerk, a ledger and a money box on the table before him, interviewing a steady stream of people, emigrants seeking passage to the Colonies for themselves and their families.
Roger watched the proceedings covertly. The ship was bound for Virginia, and after listening for some time he deduced that the cost of passage for a male passenger—for a gentleman, that is—was ten pounds, eight shillings. Those willing to travel in the steerage, packed like casks and cattle in the lower holds, might ship aboard for four pounds, two shillings each, bringing their own food for a six-weeks voyage. Fresh water, he gathered, was provided.
For those desiring passage but lacking funds, there were other means available.
“Indenturement for yourself, your wife, and your two elder sons?” The captain tilted his head appraisingly, looking over the family that stood before him. A small, wiry man, who might be in his early thirties but looked much older, shabby and bowed with labor. His wife, perhaps a little younger, standing behind her husband, eyes glued to the floor, tightly grasping the hands of two little girls. One of the girls held on to her baby brother, a lad of three or four. The elder boys stood by their father, trying to look manly. Roger thought they might be ten and twelve, allowing for the puny stature caused by malnutrition.
“Yourself and the boys, aye, that’ll do,” the captain said. He frowned at the woman, who didn’t look up. “No one will buy a woman with so many young ones—she might keep one, perhaps. You’ll have to sell the girls, though.”
The man glanced back at his family. His wife kept her head down, unmoving, not looking at anything. One of the girls twitched and jerked, though, complaining in an undertone that her hand was being crushed. The man turned back.
“All right,” he said, low-voiced. “Can they—might they—go together?”
The captain rubbed a hand across his mouth, and nodded indifferently.
“Likely enough.”
Roger didn’t wait to witness the details of the transaction. He got up abruptly and left the pub; the dark beer had lost its taste.
He paused in the street outside, fingering the coins in his pocket. It was all he had been able to collect of suitable money, in the time he’d had. He had thought that it would be enough, though; he was good-sized and had a fair amount of confidence in his own abilities. Still, the little scene he had witnessed in the pub had shaken him.
He had grown up with the history of the Highlands. He knew well enough the sorts of things that drove families to such a pitch of desperation that they would accept permanent separation and semislavery as the price of survival.
He knew all about the sale of lands that forced small crofters off the lands their families had tended for hundreds of years, all about the dreadful conditions of penury and starvation in the cities, the simple insupportableness of life in Scotland in these days. And not all his years of reading and study had prepared him for the look of that woman’s face, her eyes fixed on the fresh-sanded floor, her daughters’ hands clutched hard in her own.
Ten pounds, eight shillings. Or four pounds, two. Plus whatever it might cost for food. He had exactly fourteen shillings, threepence in his pocket, together with a handful of copper doits and a couple of farthings.
He walked slowly down the lane that led along the seaside, glancing at the collection of ships that lay moored by the wooden docks. Fishing ketches, for the most part, small galleys and brigs that plied their trade up and down the Firth, or at most ran across the Channel, carrying cargo and passengers to France. Only three large ships lay at anchor in the Firth, those of a size to brave the winds of the Atlantic crossing.
He could cross to France, of course, and take ship from there. Or travel overland to Edinburgh, a much larger port than Inverness. But it would be late in the year then, for sailing. Brianna was six weeks before him already; he could waste no time in finding her—God knew what could happen to a woman alone here.
Four pounds, two shillings. Well, he could work, certainly. With neither children nor wife to support, he could save most of his earnings.
But given that the average clerk earned something like twelve pounds per year, and that he was much more likely to find work shoveling stables than keeping accounts, the chances of his saving up passage money in any reasonable time were fairly slim.
“First things first,” he muttered. “Be sure where she’s gone, before you trouble about getting there yourself.”
Taking his hand out of his pocket, he turned right between two warehouses, and into a narrow lane. His high spirits of the morning had largely evaporated, but they lifted slightly, nonetheless, when he saw that he had been right in his guess; the harbormaster’s office was where he had known it must be—in the same squat stone building where it still would be, two hundred years hence. Roger smiled with wry humor; Scots were not inclined to make changes purely for the sake of change.
It was crowded and busy inside, with four harried clerks behind a battered wooden counter, scribbling and stamping, carrying bundles of paper to and fro, taking money and conveying it carefully into an inner office, from which they issued moments later, bearing receipts on japanned tin trays.
A crush of impatient men pressed against the counter, each endeavoring to signal by means of voice and posture that his business was much more urgent than that of the fellow standing next him. Once Roger had succeeded in capturing the attention of one of the clerks, though, there turned out to be no great difficulty in seeing the registers of the ships that had sailed from Inverness within the last few months.
“Here, wait,” he said to the young man who pushed a large, leather-bound book across the counter to him.
“Aye?” The clerk was flushed with hurry, and had a smut of ink on his nose, but paused politely, arrested in flight.
“How much d’ye get paid for working here?” Roger asked.
The clerk’s fair eyebrows lifted, but he was in too much hurry either to ask questions or to take offense at the inquiry.
“Six shillings the week,” he said briefly, and promptly disappeared in response to an irritable shout of “Munro!” from the office beyond the counter.
“Mmphm.” Roger pushed back through the crowd and took the book of registers away to a small table by the window, out of the main stream of traffic.
Having seen the conditions under which the clerks worked, Roger was impressed at the legibility of the handwritten registers. He was well accustomed to archaic spelling and eccentric punctuation, though those he was used to seeing were always yellowed and fragile, on the verge of disintegration. It gave him an odd little historian’s thrill to see the page before him fresh and white, and just beyond, the clerk who sat at a high table, copying as fast as quill could write, shoulders hunched against the hubbub in the room.
You’re shilly-shallying, said a cold little voice in the middle of his brain. She’s here or she’s not; being afraid to look won’t change it. Get on!
Roger took a deep breath and flipped open the big ledger book. The ships’ names were neatly lettered at the tops of pages, followed by the names of their masters and mates, their main cargoes and dates of sailing. Arianna. Polyphemus. Merry Widow. Tiburon. Despite his apprehensions, he couldn’t help admiring the names of the ships as he thumbed through the pages.
Half an hour later, he had ceased to marvel over both poetry and picturesqueness, barely noting each ship’s name as he ran his finger down the pages in increasing desperation. Not here, she wasn’t here!
But she had to be, he argued with himself. She had to have taken a ship to the Colonies, where else could she bloody be? Unless she hadn’t found the notice, after all … but the sick feeling under his ribs assured him that she had; nothing else would have made her risk the stones.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, which were starting to feel the strain of the handwritten pages. Then he opened his eyes, turned back to the first relevant register, and began to read again, doggedly muttering each name beneath his breath, to be sure of not missing one out.
Mr. Phineas Forbes, gentleman.
Mrs. Wilhelmina Forbes.
Master Joshua Forbes.
Mrs. Josephine Forbes.
Mrs. Eglantine Forbes.
Mrs. Charlotte Forbes …
He smiled to himself at the thought of Mr. Phineas Forbes, surrounded by his womenfolk. Even knowing that “Mrs.” here was sometimes merely the abbreviated form of “Mistress,” and thus used for both married and unmarried women—rather than the “Miss” for little girls—he found himself with an irresistible mental picture of Phineas marching stoutly aboard at the head of a train of four wives, Master Joshua no doubt bringing up the rear.
Mr. William Talbot, merchant.
Mr. Peter Talbot, merchant.
Mr. Jonathan Bicknell, physician.
Mr. Robert MacLeod, farmer.
Mr. Gordon MacLeod, farmer.
Mr. Martin MacLeod …
No Randalls this time through, either. Not for the Persephone, the Queen’s Revenge, or the Phoebe. He rubbed his aching eyes, and began on the register of the Phillip Alonzo. A Spanish name, but it was listed under Scottish registry. Sailing from Inverness, under the command of Captain Patrick O’Brian.
He hadn’t given up, but had already begun to think what to do next, if she should not be listed in the registers. Lallybroch, of course. He had been there once, in his own time, to the abandoned remains of the estate; could he find it now, without the guidance of roads and signposts?
His thoughts stopped with a jolt as his gliding finger came to a halt, near the bottom of a page. Not Brianna Randall, not the name he’d been looking for, but a name that rang bells of recognition in his mind. Fraser, read the slanted, crisp black writing. Mr. Brian Fraser. No, not Brian. And not Mr., either. He bent closer, squinting at the cramped black lettering.
He closed his eyes, feeling his heart thump hard in his chest, and relief flowed through him, intoxicating as the pub’s special dark beer. Mrs., not Mr. And what had first seemed merely an exuberant tail on the “n” of Brian was on closer inspection almost surely instead a careless “a.”
Her, it was her, it had to be! It was an unusual first name—he had seen no other Briannas or Brianas anywhere in the massive register. And even Fraser made sense, of a sort; embarked on a quixotic quest to find her father, she had taken his name, the name she was entitled to by right of birth.
He slammed the register closed, as though to keep her from escaping from the pages, and sat for a moment, breathing. Got her! He saw the fairhaired clerk eyeing him curiously from the counter and, flushing, opened the book again.
The Phillip Alonzo. Sailed from Inverness on the fourth of July, Anno Domini 1769. For Charleston, South Carolina.
He frowned at the name, suddenly uncertain. South Carolina. Was that her real destination, or only as close as she could get? A quick glance at the rest of the registers showed no ships in July for North Carolina. Perhaps she had simply taken the first ship for the southern colonies, intending to journey overland.
Or maybe he was wrong. A chill gripped him that had nothing to do with the river wind seeping through the cracks of the window next to him. He looked at the page again, and was reassured. No, there was no profession given, as there was for all the men. It was certainly “Mrs.” and therefore it must be “Briana” as well. And if “Briana” it was, then Brianna it was, too, he knew it.
He rose and handed the book across the counter to his fair-haired acquaintance.
“Thanks, man,” he said, relaxing into his own soft accent. “Can ye be tellin’ me, is there a ship in port bound for the American Colonies soon, now?”
“Oh, aye,” the clerk said, deftly stowing the register with one hand and accepting a bill of lading from a customer with the other. “Happen it will be Gloriana; she sails day after tomorrow for the Carolinas.” He looked Roger up and down. “Emigrant or seaman?” he asked.
“Seaman,” Roger said promptly. Ignoring the other’s raised eyebrow, he waved toward the forest of masts visible through the paned windows. “Where do I go
to sign on?”
Both eyebrows high, the clerk nodded in the direction of the door.
“Her master works from the Friars when he’s in port. Likely he’ll be there now—Captain Bonnet.” He forbore adding what was obvious from his skeptical expression; if Roger was a seaman, he, the clerk, was an African parrot.
“Right, mo ghille. Thanks.” Sketching a salute, Roger turned away, but turned back at the door to find the clerk still watching him, ignoring the press of impatient customers.
“Wish me luck!” Roger called, with a grin.
The clerk’s answering grin was tinged with something that might have been either admiration or wistfulness.
“Luck to ye, man!” he called, and waved in farewell. By the time the door swung shut, he was deep in conversation with the next customer, quill pen poised in readiness.
* * *
He found Captain Bonnet in the pub, as advertised, settled in a corner under a thick blue haze of smoke, to which the Captain’s own cigar was adding.
“Your name?”
“MacKenzie,” Roger said on sudden impulse. If Brianna could do it, so could he.
“MacKenzie. Any experience, Mr. MacKenzie?”
A bar of sunlight cut across the Captain’s face, making him squint. Bonnet drew back into the shadow of the settle, and the lines around his eyes relaxed, leaving Roger exposed to a gaze of uncomfortable penetration.
“It is myself has fished the herring now and then, in the Minch.”
It was no lie, at that; he’d had several teenage summers as hand on a herring boat captained by an acquaintance of the Reverend’s. The experience had left him with a useful layer of muscle, an ear for the singsong cadence of the Isles, and a fixed dislike of herring. But he knew the feel of a rope in his hands, at least.
“Ah, ye’re a good-sized lad. But a fisherman will not be the same as a sailor, sure.” The man’s soft Irish lilt left it open whether this was question, statement—or provocation.
The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle Page 389
