An Echo in the Bone (161 page)

“Aye, he came home last night; he’ll be safe now, wi’ the Tories and the army gone.”

“Safe,” she said, with a skeptical intonation. “As safe as anyone may be, in times like these, thee means.” She’d taken off her cap because of the heat and brushed the damp, dark hair back from her cheeks.

He smiled, but said nothing. She knew as well as he did what the illusions of safety were.

“Fergus says the British mean to cut the colonies in half,” he remarked. “Separate north from south and deal with them separately.”

“Does he? And how does he know this?” she asked, surprised.

“A British officer named Randall-Isaacs; he talks to Fergus.”

“He is a spy, thee means? For which side?” Her lips compressed a little. He wasn’t sure where spying fell, in terms of Quaker philosophy, but didn’t care to ask just now. It was a tender subject, Quaker philosophy.

“I shouldna like to have to guess,” he said. “He passes himself off as an American agent, but that may be all moonshine. Ye canna trust anyone in wartime, aye?”

She turned round to look at him at that, hands behind her back as she leaned against the sycamore.

“Can thee not?”

“I trust you,” he said. “And your brother.”

“And thy dog,” she said, with a glance at Rollo, writhing on the ground to scratch his back. “Thy aunt and uncle, too, and Fergus and his wife? That seems a fair number of friends.” She leaned toward him, squinting in concern. “Does thy arm pain thee?”

“Och, it’s well enough.” He shrugged with his good shoulder, smiling. His arm did hurt, but the sling helped. The ax blow had nearly severed his left arm, cutting through the flesh and breaking the bone. His aunt said he had been lucky, in that it had not damaged the tendons. The body is plastic, she said. Muscle would heal, and so would bone.

Rollo’s had; there was no trace of stiffness from the gunshot wound, and while his muzzle was growing white, he slid through the bushes like an eel, sniffing industriously.

Rachel sighed and gave him a direct look under dark, level brows.

“Ian, thee is thinking something painful, and I would much prefer thee tells me what it is. Has something happened?”

A great many things had happened, were happening all around them, would continue to happen.

How could he tell her … ? And yet he couldn’t not.

“The world is turning upside down,” he blurted. “And you are the only constant thing. The only thing I—that binds me to the earth.”

Her eyes softened.

“Am I?”

“Ye ken verra well that you are,” he said gruffly. He looked away, his heart pounding. Too late, he thought, with a mixture of dismay and elation. He’d begun to speak; he couldn’t stop now, no matter what might come of it.

“I know what I am,” he said, awkward but determined. “I would turn Quaker for your sake, Rachel, but I ken I’m not one in my heart; I think I never could be. And I think ye wouldna want me to say words I dinna mean or pretend to be something I canna be.”

“No,” she said softly. “I would not want that.”

He opened his mouth but couldn’t find more words to say. He swallowed, dry-mouthed, waiting.

She swallowed, too; he saw the slight movement of her throat, soft and brown; the sun had begun to touch her again, the nut-brown maiden ripening from winter’s pale bloom.

The artillerymen loaded the last of the cannon into a wagon, hitched their limbers to teams of oxen, and with laughter and raucous talk moved up the road toward the ferry point. When they were gone at last, a silence fell. There were still noises—the sound of the river, the rustle of the sycamore, and far beyond, the bellowings and crashings of an army on the move, the sound of violence impending. But between them, there was silence.

I’ve lost, he thought, but her head was still bent in thought. Is she maybe praying? Or only trying to think how to send me away?

Whichever it was, she lifted her head and stood up, away from the tree. She pointed at Rollo, who was lying couchant now, motionless but alert, yellow eyes following every movement of a fat robin foraging in the grass.

“That dog is a wolf, is he not?”

“Aye, well, mostly.”

A small flash of hazel told him not to quibble.

“And yet he is thy boon companion, a creature of rare courage and affection, and altogether a worthy being?”

“Oh, aye,” he said with more confidence. “He is.”

She gave him an even look.

“Thee is a wolf, too, and I know it. But thee is my wolf, and best thee know that.”

He’d started to burn when she spoke, an ignition swift and fierce as the lighting of one of his cousin’s matches. He put out his hand, palm forward, to her, still cautious lest she, too, burst into flame.

“What I said to ye, before … that I kent ye loved me—”

She stepped forward and pressed her palm to his, her small, cool fingers linking tight.

“What I say to thee now is that I do love thee. And if thee hunts at night, thee will come home.”

Under the sycamore, the dog yawned and laid his muzzle on his paws.

“And sleep at thy feet,” Ian whispered, and gathered her in with his one good arm, both of them blazing bright as day.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Brigadier General Simon Fraser

There are, as anyone who’s read my books will already realize, a
lot
of Simon Frasers running around the eighteenth century. The Brigadier who fought gallantly and was killed at Saratoga is not one of the Frasers of Lovat, but a Fraser of Balnain. That is, not a direct descendant of the Old Fox but certainly a relation of the family. He had an illustrious military career, including the famous taking of Quebec with James Wolfe in 1759 (which battle forms a part of a novella entitled “The Custom of the Army,” a Lord John Grey story which will be published in March of 2010 as part of an anthology titled
Warriors
—in case you want more details).

My reason for mentioning the Brigadier particularly, though, is the interesting matter of his grave. Most accounts of Saratoga that mention Simon Fraser of Balnain report that he was buried in the evening of the day he died, within the boundaries of the Great Redoubt (not Breymann’s Redoubt, which Jamie stormed with Benedict Arnold, but the larger one on the field), at his own request. Some accounts add details, such as the attendance of Balcarres’s rangers, or of the Americans firing a minute gun in Fraser’s honor when they realized what was taking place, while other accounts consider these romantic but probably apocryphal details and say that he was attended only by the close members of his staff.

Now, it isn’t always possible to go in person to a place you’re writing about, nor is it always necessary. It
is
usually desirable, though, and luckily, Saratoga is pretty accessible, and the battlefield there is well preserved and curated. I’ve walked the field there three times over the course of several years since I first decided that I wanted to use this particular battle as a centerpiece of a book, if not the book I happened to be writing at the time. On one of these occasions, I was there alone, there were no other tourists, and I got into conversation with one of the park employees (dressed in period costume and posted at the rebuilt site of the Bemis farm).

After he patiently answered a lot of intrusive questions (“Are you wearing underwear?” being one of them, and “No,” being the answer. “Long shirttails,” being the further explanation for how one avoids chafing while wearing homespun breeches), allowed me to handle his Brown Bess musket and explained the loading and firing of it, we got into a discussion of the battle and its personalities—since I did, at this point, know quite a lot about it.

General Fraser’s grave was at that point noted on the Park Service map—but it wasn’t in the Great Redoubt; it was located near the river. I’d been down there but found no marker for it, and so inquired where it was—and why wasn’t it in the Great Redoubt? I was informed that the Park Service had at one point—I don’t know when, but fairly recently—done an archaeological excavation of the Great Redoubt, including the supposed gravesite. To everyone’s surprise, General Fraser was
not
buried there, nor was anyone else. There were signs that a grave had once been dug, and a uniform button was found there, but no signs whatever of a body. (And while the body itself would be long since decomposed, you would expect still to see some signs.) There was (the employee told me) an account that said that General Fraser’s grave had been moved to a site near the river, and that that was why the map was so marked—but no one knew where the specific place was, or, in fact, whether the General was in
that
one, either, which was why there was no marker there.

Well, novelists are a conscienceless lot. Those of us who deal with history tend to be fairly respectful of such facts as are recorded (always bearing in mind the proviso that just because it’s in print, it isn’t necessarily
true)
. But give us a hole to slide through, an omission in the historic record, one of those mysterious lacunae that occur in even the best-documented life … so all in all, I rather thought that perhaps General Fraser had been sent home to Scotland. (Yes, they did send bodies to and fro in the eighteenth century, on occasion. Someone exhumed poor old Tom Paine from his grave in France, intending to ship him back to America so he could be interred there with honor as a prophet of the Revolution. His body was lost in transit, and no one’s ever found it. Speaking of interesting lacunae …)

Anyway, as it happened, I went to Scotland last year, and while wandering round the countryside in search of a logical place near Balnain in which to plant General Fraser, stumbled over (literally) the large chambered cairn at Corrimony. Such sites are always evocative, and when I read on the sign posted there that there had once been a body in the central chamber, but it had evidently decayed into the soil (there
were
traces of bones left in the earth, even after a thousand years or more),
and
that the tomb had been broken into sometime in the nineteenth century (thus explaining why you won’t find anything in the cairn if you happen to go there now) … well, hey.

(People always ask novelists where they get their ideas. Everywhere!)
Quaker Plain Speech

The Religious Society of Friends was founded around 1647 by George Fox. As part of the Society’s belief in the equality of all men before God, they did not use honorific titles (such as

“Mr./Mrs.,” “General/Colonel,” etc.), and used “plain speech” in addressing everyone.

Now, as any of you who know a second language with Latin roots (Spanish, French, etc.) realize, these languages have both a familiar and a formal version of “you.” So did English, once upon a time. The “thee” and “thou” forms that most of us recognize as Elizabethan or biblical are in fact the English familiar forms of “you”—with “you” used as both the plural familiar form (“all y’all”), and the formal pronoun (both singular and plural). As English evolved, the familiar forms were dropped, leaving us with the utilitarian “you” to cover all contingencies.

Quakers retained the familiar forms, though, as part of their “plain speech,” until the twentieth century. Over the years, though, plain speech also evolved, and while “thee/thy” remained,

“thou/thine” largely disappeared, and the verb forms associated with “thee/thy” changed. From about the mid-eighteenth century onward, plain speech used “thee” as the singular form of “you”

(the plural form remained “you,” even in plain speech), with the same verb forms normally used for third-person singular. For example, “He knows that/Thee knows that.” The older verb endings—“knowest,” “doth,” etc.—were no longer used.

Scots/Scotch/Scottish

As noted elsewhere
(Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
, see Author’s Notes), in the eighteenth century (and indeed, well into the mid-twentieth century), the word “Scotch” and its variants (e.g., “Scotchman”) were commonly used (by both English people
and
Scots) to describe an inhabitant of Scotland. The terms “Scottish” and “Scots” were also occasionally used, though less common.

Typos and Terminology

There may be an impulse to regard the term “mess-kid” (as used in Part Three of this book) as a typographical error. It’s not. A mess-kid was a shallow, circular bucket in which sailors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were served their food. A mess-
kit
, on the other hand, referred to the utensils carried and used by a soldier.

By the same token, while “crotch” is the usual American English term, the older form, “crutch,”

would have been used in eighteenth-century English-English usage. Which is not to say there aren’t any typographical errors in this book (despite the heroic efforts of Ms. Kathy Lord, the copy editor; the alerts of various friends and translators who read the manuscript in chunks; and a fair amount of diligence by myself, these things happen) but these particular terms aren’t.

Saratoga

A tremendous amount of historical research goes into a book like this (I am often bemused by letters from people telling me they’d visited a museum, seen some eighteenth-century artifacts, and been struck all a-heap by discovering that I hadn’t just made it all up!), and while there isn’t room to acknowledge or list even a fraction of the sources I’ve used, I did want to mention one specific book.

The two battles of Saratoga were historically important, remarkably dramatic, and very complex, both in the logistics of the battles and in the troop movements and politics that led up to them. I was fortunate to find, early on in my researches, Richard M. Ketchum’s
Saratoga
, which is an amazingly well-done portrait of the battles, the background, and the plethora of colorful individuals who took part. I just wanted to recommend this book to those of you with a deeper interest in the historical aspects, as these could only be touched on lightly in the context of a novel.

Loch Errochty and Tunnel Tigers

During the 1950s and ’60s, a great hydroelectric scheme was implemented in the Scottish Highlands. The work of a great many “tunnel tigers” (also known as “the Hydro boys”)—laborers, many of them from Ireland and Poland—went into digging tunnels through the mountains and building dams for the creation of man-made lochs. Loch Errochty is in fact one of these man-made lochs. The tunnel I’ve drawn as being associated with it (complete with miniature train) is like those common to the hydroelectric scheme as a whole, but I don’t know that there actually
is
one at Loch Errochty. On the other hand, the dam, turbine service chamber, and fish-viewing chamber at Pitlochry are indeed all there. So are the anglers.