Jamie, with Germain and Jemmy, joins them in the dark. Roger takes charge of the little boys, and Brianna tells Jamie about Disneyland and the magic of being there with her family, in a place outside time.
“A giant rat?” he said, sounding slightly stunned. “And they take the weans to play with it?”
“Not a rat, a mouse,” she corrected him. “And it’s really a person dressed up like a mouse.”
“Oh, aye?” he said, not sounding terribly reassured….
“You know what?” she said, and he made a small interrogatory noise in reply.
“It was nice—it was great—but what I really, really loved about it was that when we were there, it was just the three of us, and everything was perfect. Mama wasn’t worrying about her patients, Daddy wasn’t working on a paper—they weren’t ever silent or angry with each other. Both of them laughed—we all laughed, all the time…while we were there.”
He made no reply, but tilted his head so it rested against hers. She sighed again, deeply.
“Jemmy won’t get to go to Disneyland—but he’ll have that. A family that laughs—and millions of little lights in the trees.”
PART 7: ROLLING DOWNHILL
Jamie writes a letter to Lord John, explaining his need for money from the gems he has confided to his friend. He has a matter of business in hand, he writes, concerning the acquisition of a number of guns. He had hoped to arrange the matter through a friend but must now explore other arrangements.
Since Manfred McGillivray’s defection and the estrangement of the McGillivray family, Jamie can’t get the muskets he needs for the Cherokee from Robin McGillivray, so he is hoping that Lord John knows a useful smuggler.
Meanwhile, the Frasers are coming down from the mountain to attend a barbecue at River Run, held in honor of Flora MacDonald, heroine of the Rising, who has recently moved to the colony with her husband and family.
Perhaps, though, the guns are not going to make it into the Indians’ hands. Jamie shows Claire a letter from John Ashe, another militia colonel, regarding the North Carolina Committee of Correspondence and the formation of the new Continental Congress.
Everyone who is anyone in the colony attends the barbecue—including Neil Forbes, the local lawyer who once paid court to Brianna and who now approaches Claire privately.
“I hear that your husband is collecting guns, Mrs. Fraser,” he said, his voice at a low and rather unfriendly pitch.
“Oh, really?” I was holding an open fan, as was every other woman there. I waved it languidly before my nose, hiding most of my expression. “Who told you such a thing?”
“One of the gentlemen whom he approached to that end,” Forbes said. The lawyer was large and somewhat overweight; the unhealthy shade of red in his cheeks might be due to that, rather than to displeasure. Then again…
“If I might impose so far upon your good nature, ma’am, I would suggest that you exert your influence upon him, so as to suggest that such a course is not the wisest?”
“To begin with,” I said, taking a deep breath of hot, damp air, “just what course do you think he’s embarked upon?”
“An unfortunate one, ma’am,” he said. “Putting the best complexion upon the matter, I assume that the guns he seeks are intended to arm his own company of militia, which is legitimate, though disturbing; the desirability of that course would rest upon his later actions. But his relations with the Cherokee are well known, and there are rumors about that the weapons are destined to end in the hands of the savages, to the end that they may turn upon His Majesty’s subjects who presume to offer objection to the tyranny, abuse, and corruption so rife among the officials who govern—if so loose a word may be employed to describe their actions—this colony.”
I gave him a long look over the edge of my fan.
“If I hadn’t already known you were a lawyer,” I remarked, “that speech would have done it. I think that you just said that you suspect my husband of wanting to give guns to the Indians, and you don’t like that. On the other hand, if he’s wanting to arm his own militia, that might be all right—providing that said militia acts according to your desires. Am I right?”
A flicker of amusement showed in his deep-set eyes, and he inclined his head toward me in acknowledgment.
“Your perception astounds me, ma’am,” he said.
Major MacDonald, needless to say, does not share Mr. Forbes’s opinions. He is acting as impresario for Mrs. MacDonald, whom he’s encouraging to make speeches supporting the Crown all through the colony. Jamie is outwardly composed, but Claire senses his inner disturbance and asks about it.
“I kent I should have to stand one day against a good many of them, aye? To fight friends and kin. But then I found myself standing there, wi’ Fionnaghal’s hand upon my head like a blessing, face to face wi’ them all, and watching her words fall upon them, see the resolve growing in them…and all of a sudden, it was as though a great blade had come down from heaven between them and me, to cleave us forever apart. The day is coming—and I cannot stop it.”
All political undercurrents come to an abrupt halt when Jocasta appears, in the grip of shattering pain from her eye. Claire, who has already privately diagnosed the probable cause of Jocasta’s blindness as glaucoma, intercedes, puncturing Jocasta’s eyeball with a sterile needle, thus draining away some of the fluid exerting pressure on the optic nerve.
When Jocasta has recovered enough to speak, she tells Jamie that the man has come back for the gold. He entered her sitting room and told her that he meant to take the gold back to its rightful owner. She recognized his voice, and when he seized her wrist and twisted it, trying to terrorize her, she reached into her workbag, pulled out her small, very sharp embroidery knife, and went for his balls. She succeeded in wounding him slightly, and he fled.
The man was not Stephen Bonnet, though; he was the third man who had brought the gold ashore from France, many years before.
At Jocasta’s behest, Ulysses takes Jamie and Claire to show them the hiding place where half of a gold ingot had been kept—and is now gone.
Roger has gone to discover the requirements for ordination. Jamie and Claire send the Bugs back to the Ridge but remain at River Run for a while, in case either the mysterious man or Stephen Bonnet should return. Brianna also remains, and she undertakes a painting commission for one of Jocasta’s friends. Chatting with her cousin Ian, though, she shows him two miniatures she’s painted secretly—of her parents. She coaxes Ian to let her sketch him, and he reluctantly consents, but the sitting is interrupted when they hear someone on the terrace, whistling “Yellow Submarine.”
It’s Donner, the time traveler from Hodgepile’s band. He’s come in search of Claire, wanting her to tell him how to get back to his own time—and is intrigued to meet Brianna, who he rightly surmises is also a traveler.
I was shocked, but less so than I might have been. I had felt that Donner was alive. Hoped he was, in spite of everything. Still, seeing him face to face, sitting in Jocasta’s morning room, struck me dumb. He was talking when I came in, but stopped when he saw me. He didn’t stand up, naturally, nor yet offer any observations on my survival; just nodded at me, and resumed what he’d been saying.
“To stop whitey. Save our lands, save our people.”
“But you came to the wrong time,” Brianna pointed out. “You were too late.”
Donner gave her a blank look.
“No, I didn’t—1766, that’s when I was supposed to come, and that’s when I came.” He pounded the heel of his hand violently against the side of his head. “Crap! What was wrong with me?”
“Congenital stupidity?” I suggested politely, having regained my voice. “That, or hallucinogenic drugs.”
The blank look flickered a little, and Donner’s mouth twitched.
“Oh. Yeah, man. There was some of that.”
Donner tells them more about the group of time travelers he belonged to, but the conversation is interrupted by Ulysses, accompanied
by an incensed gentleman who claims that Donner stole his purse. He did and is summarily marched off to the jail in Cross Creek.
Ian’s opinion is that the authorities will hang Donner, and Jamie, arriving belatedly, shares both this opinion and approval of the notion. He is reluctantly persuaded, though, that either Claire or Brianna needs to speak to the man at least once more and agrees to talk to the jailer. In the meantime, though, he has news: Manfred McGillivray has been spotted, in a brothel. No one knows quite where the brothel is but somewhere in the vicinity.
Claire is inclined to find this hopeful but is less sure about Jamie’s other news. A local printer named Simms is having trouble because of his political sympathies and wishes to sell. Jamie has it in mind to buy the shop and set Fergus up in the printing business, that being a respectable trade that can be managed with one hand.
“That’s a brilliant idea!” I said. “Only…what would Fergus use for money to buy it?”
Jamie coughed and looked evasive.
“Aye, well. I imagine some sort of bargain might be struck. Particularly if Simms is anxious to sell up.”
“All right,” I said, resigned. “I don’t suppose I want to know the gory details. But, Ian—” I turned to him, fixing him with a beady eye. “Far be it from me to offer you moral advice. But you are not—repeat, not—to be questioning whores in any deeply personal manner. Do I make myself clear?”
“Auntie!” he said, pretending shock. “The idea!” But a broad grin spread across his tattooed face.
“TAR AND FEATHERS”—The acquisition of Fogarty Simms’s printshop is a little more eventful than Jamie expects it to be—featuring an attempt to tar-and-feather the original proprietor, the appearance of Isaiah Morton—and Isaiah Morton’s first wife, the musket-wielding Jezebel Hatfield—and Claire’s acquisition of a penis syringe from Dr. Fentiman’s maid.
The end of the riot is a blizzard of feathers over the downtown area and a call on the local brothel by Claire, who wishes to administer penicillin to the local whores, and Jamie—who does not want to accompany her but has been obliged to come against his will.
“Sassenach,” he said, and I turned to find him regarding me with a bloodshot glint.
“Yes?”
“Ye’ll pay for this.”
Roger returns to the Ridge, to be greeted with delight by Brianna. He explains that while he’s met most of the qualifications for ordination and is provisionally a minister of the Word, he does have to wait for a Presbytery Session before he can be ordained.
PART 8: THE CALL
Roger begins to work doggedly on improving his voice, knowing that he needs to preach. His first sermon is attended by everyone on the Ridge—including Claire and Jamie, who heroically snatches up a wandering snake (in spite of his rather natural horror of snakes), in order to keep it from ruining Roger’s first appearance as a minister.
Roger and Brianna both savor his triumph—but Roger dreams that night of the bodhrana talking and of the man he clubbed to death during Claire’s rescue.
LORD JOHN WRITES to Jamie, apologizing for having inadvertently given his name to one Josiah Quincy, who has sent out a list of the North Carolina Committee of Correspondence, showing Jamie’s name as one of the members. Lord John warns Jamie of the dangers of this and urges him to make sure that there are no other seditious documents that could incriminate him as a Rebel.
In other news, he reports that his (and Jamie’s) son, William, has purchased a lieutenant’s commission and will take up service with his regiment more or less at once. Moving to more delicate matters, he notes that Bobby Higgins has apparently formed an attachment to two young ladies on Fraser’s Ridge, and he, Lord John, wishes to engage in the preliminary negotiations necessary to secure marriage with either Lizzie Wemyss or Malva Christie—Lord John to provide various inducements to further Bobby’s suit.
Claire is amused—and a little concerned—at Bobby’s involvement with the two girls, and their discussion leads to a contemplation of Joseph Wemyss’s situation; since the rupture of his daughter’s betrothal and their relations with the McGillivrays (and the loss of Fraulein Berrisch, sent away to a distant relative), Joseph has taken to his bed in depression. Talk of marriage leads further, to Jamie’s observation on Roger and the widow McCallum:
“Have ye not seen the way the widow McCallum looks at him?”
“No,” I said, taken aback. “Have you?”
He nodded.
“I have, and so has Brianna. She bides her time for the moment—but mark my words, Sassenach: if wee Roger does not see the widow safely marrit soon, he’ll find hell nay hotter than his own hearth.”
“Oh, now. Roger isn’t looking back at Mrs. McCallum, is he?” I demanded.
“No, he is not,” Jamie said judiciously, “and that’s why he’s still in possession of his balls.”
Malva, who has been helping Claire with herbal preparations, appears at this point, putting a stop to such discussions, and Claire goes to feed the pig—the notorious white sow, who has her den under the foundation of the house—wondering as she does so about the relations between Malva and Young Ian, for he also seems smitten by the young woman.
Jamie undertakes to transmit Bobby’s offer to Mr. Wemyss but meets with obdurate refusal. Joseph Wemyss admits that Bobby seems a good young man but is afraid of the effect of his murderer’s brand; if Bobby should lose his lordship’s patronage, the people of the community might easily turn on him—and on his wife and family.
Jamie is compelled to transmit this bad news to Bobby, who is downcast but in the course of the conversation mentions that he supposes Jamie will be going to the meeting.
What meeting? Jamie asks. A meeting of the Committee of Correspondence—one that Jamie has not been informed of, despite his writing several letters of inquiry to men he knows on the committee.
“When I heard nothing, I wrote myself, to the six men I know personally within the Committee of Correspondence. No answer from any of them.” His stiff finger tapped once against his leg, but he noticed, and stilled it.
“They don’t trust you,” I said, after a moment’s silence.
ON THE TWENTIETH of September, Roger preached a sermon on the text, God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. On the twenty-first of September, one of those weak things set out to prove the point.
The weak thing in question is a microbe. An amoeba, to be exact, which lives in one of the springs on the Ridge and which afflicts a number of its inhabitants with a virulent flux.
“A NOISOME PESTILENCE”—The flux spreads through the community, exhausting Claire and those helping her. She tells Jamie, in the light of one surreal dawn, what she knows of this kind of warfare.
“The year after I was born,” I said, “there was a great epidemic of influenza. All over the world. People died in hundreds and thousands; whole villages disappeared in the space of a week. And then came the other, my war.”
The words were quite unconscious, but hearing them, I felt the corner of my mouth twitch with irony. Jamie saw it and a faint smile touched his own lips. He knew what I meant—that odd sense of pride that comes of living through a terrible conflict, leaving one with a peculiar feeling of possession. His wrist turned, his fingers wrapping tight around my own.
“And she has never seen plague or war,” he said, beginning to understand. “Never?” His voice held something odd. Nearly incomprehensible, to a man born a warrior, brought up to fight as soon as he could lift a sword; born to the idea that he must—he would—defend himself and his family by violence. An incomprehensible notion—but a rather wonderful one.
“Only as pictures. Films, I mean. Television.” That one he would never understand, and I could not explain. The way in which such pictures focused on war itself; bombs and planes and submarines, and the thrilling urgency of blood shed on purpose; a sense of nobility in deliberate death.
He knew what battlefields were really like—battlefield
s, and what came after them.
“The men who fought in those wars—and the women—they didn’t die of the killing, most of them. They died like this—” A lift of my mug toward the open window, toward the peaceful mountains, the distant hollow where Padraic MacNeill’s cabin lay hidden. “They died of illness and neglect, because there wasn’t any way to stop it.”
“I have seen that,” he said softly, with a glance at the stoppered bottles. “Plague and ague run rampant in a city, half a regiment dead of flux.”
“Of course you have.”
Brianna is afraid—not for herself but for her children, trapped in a time when war and plague are both everyday disasters.
CLAIRE FINDS THE guilty amoeba, trapped in the objective of her microscope. With the help of Malva, among others, she is gradually winning the war against it; there are no new cases of dysentery on the Ridge, and the sick are beginning to recover. But not all recover, and at one funeral, Claire herself collapses.
Claire is deathly ill and, in the grip of fever and delirium, comes to the point where she sees death clearly—and can choose, as Jamie once chose. The thing that affects her decision is the sight of Jamie, standing by the window in the grip of sorrow and despair, Malva Christie standing near him, trying to comfort him.
Someone moved near him. A dark-haired woman, a girl. She came close, touched his back, murmuring something to him. I saw the way she looked at him, the tender inclination of her head, the intimacy of her body swaying toward him.
No, I thought, with great calm. That won’t do.
I looked once more at myself lying on the bed, and with a feeling that was at once firm decision and incalculable regret, I took another breath.
CLAIRE SLOWLY RETURNS to consciousness, only to be horrified at the discovery that Mrs. Bug and Malva have cut off her hair, in the belief that it would lower her fever.
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 13
