Drums of Autumn (37 page)

Jamie stared at him, eyes narrowed, but made no move to take the quill. I felt a sudden sinking in my belly.

Jamie was left-handed but had been taught forcibly to write with his right hand, and then had that right hand crippled. Writing, for him, was a slow, laborious business that left the pages blotted, sweat-stained, and crumpled, and the writer himself in no better case. There was no power on earth that would make him humiliate himself in that fashion before the Sergeant.

“Write. It. Down.” The Sergeant bit off the words between his teeth.

Jamie’s eyes narrowed further, but before he could speak, I reached out and snatched the pen from the Sergeant’s grasp.

“I was there; let me do it.”

Jamie’s hand closed on mine before I could dip the quill in the inkwell. He plucked the pen from my fingers and dropped it in the center of the desk.

“Your clerk can wait upon me later, at my aunt’s house,” he said briefly to Murchison. “Come with me, Claire.”

Not waiting for an answer from the Sergeant, he grasped my elbow and all but pulled me to my feet. We were outside before I knew what had happened. The wagon still stood under the tree, but now it was empty.

“Well, she’s safe for the moment,
Mac Dubh,
but what in hell shall we do with the woman?” Duncan scratched at the stubble on his chin; he and Ian had spent three days in the forest, searching, before finding the slave Pollyanne.

“She’ll no be easy to move,” Ian put in, snaring a piece of bacon off the breakfast table. He broke it in half, and handed one piece to Rollo. “The poor lady near died of terror when Rollo sniffed her out, and we had God’s own time gettin’ her on her feet. We couldna get her on a horse at all; I had to walk with my arm around her, to keep her from fallin’ down.”

“We must get her clear away, somehow.” Jocasta frowned, blank eyes half hooded in thought. “Yon Murchison was at the mill again yesterday morning, making a nuisance of himself, and last night, Farquard Campbell sent to tell me that the man has declared it was murder, and he’s called for men to search the district for the slave who did it. Farquard’s sae hot under his collar, I thought his head would burst into flame.”

“Do ye think she
could
have done it?” Chewing, Ian looked from Jamie to me. “By accident, I mean?”

In spite of the hot morning, I shuddered, feeling in memory the unyielding stiffness of the metal skewer in my hand.

“You have three possibilities: accident, murder, or suicide,” I said. “There are
lots
easier ways of committing suicide, believe me. And no motive for murder, that we know of.”

“Be that as it may,” Jamie said, neatly fielding the conversation, “if Murchison takes the slave woman, he’ll have her hanged or flogged to death within a day. He’s no need of trial. No, we must take her clear out of the district. I’ve arranged it with our friend Myers.”

“You’ve arranged
what
with Myers?” Jocasta asked sharply, her voice cutting through the babble of exclamations and questions that greeted this announcement.

Jamie finished buttering the piece of toast that he held, and handed it to Duncan before speaking.

“We shall take the woman into the mountains,” he said. “Myers says she’ll be welcome among the Indians; he kens a good place for her, he says. And she’ll be safe there from Wee Billy Murchison.”

“We?”
I asked politely. “And who’s
we
?”

He grinned at me in reply.

“Myers and myself, Sassenach. I need to go to the backcountry to have a look before the cold weather comes, and this will be a good chance. Myers is the best guide I could have.”

He carefully refrained from noting that it might be as well for
him
to be temporarily out of Sergeant Murchison’s sphere of influence, but the implication was not lost on me.

“Ye’ll take me, will ye not, Uncle?” Ian brushed the matted hair out of his face, looking eager. “Ye’ll need help wi’ that woman, believe me—she’s the size of a molasses barrel.”

Jamie smiled at his nephew.

“Aye, Ian. I expect we can use another man along.”

“Ahem,” I said, giving him an evil stare.

“To keep an eye on your auntie, if nothing else,” Jamie continued, giving the stare back to me. “We leave in three days, Sassenach—if Myers can sit a horse by then.”

Three days didn’t allow much time, but with the assistance of Myers and Phaedre, my preparations were completed with hours to spare. I had a small traveling box of medicines and tools, and the saddlebags were packed with food, blankets, and cooking implements. The only small matter remaining was that of attire.

I recrossed the ends of the long silk strip across my chest, tied the ends in a jaunty knot between my breasts, and examined the results in the looking glass.

Not bad. I extended my arms and jiggled my torso from side to side, testing. Yes, that would do. Though perhaps if I took one more turn around my chest before crossing the ends…

“What, exactly, are ye doing, Sassenach? And what in the name of God are ye wearing?” Jamie, arms crossed, was leaning against the door, watching me with both brows raised.

“I am improvising a brassiere,” I said with dignity. “I don’t mean to ride sidesaddle through the mountains wearing a dress, and if I’m not wearing stays, I don’t mean my breasts to be joggling all the way, either. Most uncomfortable, joggling.”

“I daresay.” He edged into the room and circled me at a cautious distance, eyeing my nether limbs with interest. “And what are
those
?”

“Like them?” I put my hands on my hips, modeling the drawstring leather trousers that Phaedre had constructed for me—laughing hysterically as she did so—from soft buckskin provided by one of Myers’s friends in Cross Creek.

“No,” he said bluntly. “Ye canna be going about in—in—” He waved at them, speechless.

“Trousers,” I said. “And of course I can. I wore trousers all the time, back in Boston. They’re very practical.”

He looked at me in silence for a moment. Then, very slowly, he walked around me. At last, his voice came from behind me.

“Ye wore them outside?” he said, in tones of incredulity. “Where folk could see ye?”

“I did,” I said crossly. “So did most other women. Why not?”

“Why
not
?” he said, scandalized. “I can see the whole shape of your buttocks, for God’s sake, and the cleft between!”

“I can see yours, too,” I pointed out, turning around to face him. “I’ve been looking at your backside in breeks every day for months, but only occasionally does the sight move me to make indecent advances on your person.”

His mouth twitched, undecided whether to laugh or not. Taking advantage of the indecision, I took a step forward and put my arms around his waist, firmly cupping his backside.

“Actually, it’s your kilt that makes me want to fling you to the floor and commit ravishment,” I told him. “But you don’t look at all bad in your breeks.”

He did laugh then, and bending, kissed me thoroughly, his hands carefully exploring the outlines of my rear, snugly confined in buckskin. He squeezed gently, making me squirm against him.

“Take them off,” he said, pausing for air.

“But I—”

“Take them off,” he repeated firmly. He stepped back and tugged loose the lacing of his flies. “Ye can put them back on again after, Sassenach, but if there’s flinging and ravishing to be done, it’ll be me that does it, aye?”

P
ART
F
IVE

Strawberry Fields Forever

14

FLEE FROM WRATH TO COME

August 1767

T
hey had hidden the woman in a tobacco shed on the edge of Farquard Campbell’s furthest fields. There was little chance of anyone noticing—other than Campbell’s slaves, who already knew—but we took care to arrive just after dark, when the lavender sky had faded nearly to gray, barely outlining the dark bulk of the drying shed.

The woman slid out like a ghost, cloaked and hooded, and was hoisted onto the extra horse, bundled hastily aboard like the package of contraband she was. She drew up her legs and clung to the saddle with both hands, doubled up in a ball of panic; evidently she’d never been on a horse before.

Myers tried to hand her the reins, but she paid no attention, only clung tight and moaned in a sort of melodic agony of terror. The men were becoming restive, glancing over their shoulders into the empty fields, as though expecting the imminent arrival of Sergeant Murchison and his minions.

“Let her ride with me,” I suggested. “Maybe she’ll feel safer that way.”

The woman was detached from her mount with some difficulty and set down on the horse’s rump behind my saddle. She smelt strongly of fresh tobacco leaves, pungently narcotic, and something else, a little muskier. She at once flung her arms around my waist, holding on for dear life. I patted one of the hands clutched about my middle, and she squeezed tighter, but made no other move or sound.

Little wonder if she was terrified, I thought, turning my horse’s head to follow Myers’s. She might not know about the hullabaloo Murchison was raising in the district, but she could have no illusions about what might happen if she was caught; she had certainly been among the crowd at the sawmill two weeks earlier.

As an alternative to certain death, flight into the arms of red savages might be slightly preferable, but not by much, to judge from her trembling; the weather was far from cold, but she shook as though with chill.

She nearly squeezed the stuffings out of me when Rollo appeared, stalking out of the bushes like some demon of the forest. My horse didn’t like the look of him, either, and backed up, snorting and stamping, trying to jerk the reins away from me.

I had to admit that Rollo was reasonably fearsome, even when he was in an amiable mood, which he was, at the moment—Rollo loved expeditions. Still, he undoubtedly presented a sinister aspect; all his teeth were showing in a grin of delight, his slitted eyes half closed as he whiffed the air. Add to that the way the grays and blacks of his coat faded into the shadows, and one was left with the queer and unsettling illusion that he had materialized out of the substance of the night, Appetite incarnate.

He trotted directly past us, no more than a foot away, and the woman gasped, her breath hot on my neck. I patted her hand again, and spoke to her, but she made no answer. Duncan had said she was Africa-born and spoke little English, but surely she must understand a few words.

“It will be all right,” I said again. “Don’t be afraid.”

Occupied with horse and passenger, I hadn’t noticed Jamie, until he appeared suddenly by my stirrup, light-footed as Rollo.

“All right, Sassenach?” he asked softly, putting a hand on my thigh.

“I think so,” I said. I nodded at the death-grip round my middle. “If I don’t die of suffocation.”

He looked, and smiled.

“Well, she’s in no danger of fallin’ off, at least.”

“I wish I knew something to say to her; poor thing, she’s so afraid. Do you suppose she even knows where we’re taking her?”

“I shouldna think so—
I
dinna ken where we’re going.” He wore breeks for riding, but had his plaid belted over them, the free end slung across the shoulder of his coat. The dark tartan blended into the shadows of the forest as well as it had the shades of the Scottish heather; all I could see of him was a white blotch of shirt-front and the pale oval of his face.

“Do you know any useful
taki-taki
to say to her?” I asked. “Of course, she might not know that, either, if she wasn’t brought through the Indies.”

He turned his head and looked up at my passenger, considering.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, there’s the one thing they’ll all know, no matter where they’ve come.” He reached out and squeezed the woman’s foot firmly.

“Freedom,” he said, and paused. “
Saorasa
. D’yke ken what I say?”

She didn’t loosen her grip, but her breath went out in a shuddering sigh, and I thought I felt her nod.

The horses followed each other in single file, Myers in the lead. The rough track was not even a wagon trail, only a sort of flattening of under-growth, but it did at least provide clear passage through the trees.

I doubted that Sergeant Murchison’s vengeance would pursue us so far—if he pursued us at all—but the sense of escape was too strong to ignore. We shared an unspoken but pervasive sense of urgency, and with no particular discussion, agreed to ride on as far as possible.

My passenger was either losing her fear or simply becoming too tired to care anymore; after a midnight stop for refreshment she allowed Ian and Myers to boost her back on the horse without protest, and while she never released her hold on my waist, she did seem to doze now and then, her forehead pressed against my shoulder.

The fatigue of long riding crept over me, too, aided by the hypnotic soft thudding of the horses’ feet, and the unending susurrus of the pines overhead. We were still in the longleaf forest, and the tall, straight trunks surrounded us like the masts of long-sunk ships.

Lines of an ancient Scottish song drifted through my mind—
“How many strawberries grow in the salt sea; how many ships sail in the forest?”
—and I wondered muzzily whether the composer had walked through a place like this, unearthly in half-moon and starlight, so dreamlike that the borders between the elements were lost; we might as well be afloat as earthbound, the heave and fall beneath me the rise of planking, and the sound of the pines the wind in our sails.

We stopped at dawn, unsaddled the horses, hobbled them, and left them to feed in the long grass of a small meadow. I found Jamie, and curled up at once into a nest of grass beside him, the horses’ peaceful champing the last thing I heard.

We slept heavily through the heat of the day, and awoke near sunset, stiff, thirsty, and covered with ticks. I was profoundly thankful that the ticks seemed to share the mosquitoes’ general distaste for my flesh, but I had learned on our trip north to check Jamie and the others every time we slept; there were always outriders.

“Ick,” I said, examining a particularly juicy specimen, the size of a grape, nestling amid the soft cinnamon hair of Jamie’s underarm. “Damn, I’m afraid to pull that one; it’s so full it’ll likely burst.”

He shrugged, busy exploring his scalp with the other hand, in search of further intruders.

“Leave it while ye deal with the rest,” he suggested. “Perhaps it will fall of its own accord.”

“I suppose I’d better,” I agreed reluctantly. I hadn’t any objection to the tick’s bursting, but not while its jaws were still embedded in Jamie’s flesh. I’d seen infections caused by forcibly interrupted ticks, and they weren’t anything I wanted to deal with in the middle of a forest. I had only a rudimentary medical kit with me—though this luckily included a very fine pair of small tweezer-pointed forceps from Dr. Rawlings’s box.

Myers and Ian seemed to be managing all right; both stripped to the waist, Myers was crouched over the boy like a huge black baboon, fingers busy in Ian’s hair.

“Here’s a wee one,” Jamie said, bending over and pushing his own hair aside so I could reach the small dark bleb behind his ear. I was engaged in gently maneuvering the creature out, when I became aware of a presence near my elbow.

I had been too tired to take much notice of our fugitive when we made camp, rightly assuming that she wasn’t going to wander off into the wilderness by herself. She had wandered as far as a nearby stream, though, returning with a bucket of water.

She set this on the ground, dipped up a handful of water and funneled it into her mouth. She chewed vigorously for a moment, cheeks puffed out. Then she motioned me aside and, lifting a surprised Jamie’s arm, spat forcefully and profusely into his armpit.

She reached into the dripping hollow, and with delicate fingers appeared to tickle the parasite. She certainly tickled Jamie, who was very sensitive in that particular region. He turned pink in the face and flinched at her touch, all the muscles in his torso quivering.

She held tight to his wrist, though, and within seconds, the bulging tick dropped off into the palm of her hand. She flicked it disdainfully away, and turned to me, with a small air of satisfaction.

I had thought she resembled a ball, muffled in her cloak. Seen without it, she still did. She was very short, no more than four feet, and nearly as wide, with a close-cropped head like a cannonball, her cheeks so round that her eyes were slanted above them.

She looked like nothing so much as one of the carved African fertility images I had seen in the Indies; massive of bosom, heavy of haunch, and the rich, burnt-coffee color of a Congolese, with skin so flawless that it looked like polished stone under its thin layer of sweat. She held out her hand to me, showing me a few small objects in her palm, the general size and shape of dried lima beans.

“Paw-paw,” she said, in a voice so deep that even Myers turned his head toward her, startled. It was a huge, rich voice, reverberant as a drum. Seeing my reaction to it, she smiled a little shyly, and said something I didn’t quite understand, though I knew it was Gaelic.

“She says ye must not swallow the seeds, for they’re poison,” Jamie translated, eyeing her rather warily as he wiped his armpit with the end of his plaid.

“Hau,” Pollyanne agreed, nodding vigorously. “Poi-zin.” She stooped over the bucket for another handful of water, washed it round her mouth, and spat it at a rock with a noise like a gunshot.

“You could be dangerous with that,” I told her. I didn’t know whether she understood me, but she gathered from my smile that I meant to be cordial; she smiled back, popped two more of the paw-paw seeds into her mouth, and beckoned to Myers, already chewing, the seeds making little crunching pops as she pulverized them between her teeth.

By the time we had eaten supper and were ready to leave, she was nervously willing to try riding alone. Jamie coaxed her to the horse, and showed her how to let the beast smell her. She trembled as the big nose nudged her, but then the horse snorted; she jumped, giggled in a voice like honey poured out of a jug, and allowed Jamie and Ian between them to boost her aboard.

Pollyanne remained shy of the men, but she soon gained enough confidence to talk to me, in a polyglot mixture of Gaelic, English, and her own language. I couldn’t have translated it, but both her face and body were so expressive that I could often gather the sense of what she was saying, even though I understood only one word in ten. I could only regret that I was not equally fluent in body language; she didn’t understand most of my questions and remarks, so I had to wait until we made camp, when I could prevail on Jamie or Ian to help me with bits of Gaelic.

Freed—at least temporarily—from the constraint of terror, and becoming cautiously secure in our company, a naturally effervescent personality emerged, and she talked with abandon as we rode side by side, regardless of my comprehension, laughing now and then with a low hooting noise like wind blowing across the mouth of a cave.

She became subdued only once: when we passed through a large clearing where the grass rose in strange undulant mounds, as though a great serpent lay buried underneath. Pollyanne went silent when she saw them, and in an effort to hurry her horse, instead succeeded only in pulling on the reins and stopping it dead. I rode back to help her.

“Droch àite,”
she murmured, glancing out of the corner of her eye at the silent mounds. A bad place.
“Djudju.”
She scowled, and made a small, quick gesture with her hand, some sign against evil, I thought.

“Is it a graveyard?” I asked Myers, who had circled back to see why we had stopped. The mounds were not evenly spaced, but were distributed around the edge of the clearing in a pattern that didn’t look like any natural formation. The mounds seemed too large to be graves, though—unless they were cairns, such as the ancient Scots built, or mass graves, I thought, uneasy at the memory of Culloden.

“Not to say graveyard,” he replied, pushing his hat back on his head. “ ’Twas a village once. Tuscarora, I expect. Those rises there”—he waved a hand—“those are houses, fallen down. The big ’un to the side, that will have been the chief’s longhouse. It be taken no time atall, the grasses come over it. From the looks, though, this ’un will have been buried a time back.”

“What happened to it?” Ian and Jamie had stopped, too, and come back to look over the small clearing.

Myers scratched thoughtfully at his beard.

“I couldn’t be sayin’, not for certain sure. Might be as sickness drove ’em out, might be as they were put to rout by the Cherokee or the Creek, though we be a mite north of the Cherokee land. Most likely as it happened during the war, though.” He dug fiercely into his beard, twisted, and flicked away the remnants of a lingering tick. “Can’t say as it’s a place I’d tarry by choice.”

Pollyanne being plainly of the same mind, we rode on. By evening, we had passed entirely out of the pines and scrubby oakland of the foothills. We were climbing in good earnest now, and the trees began to change; small groves of chestnut trees, large patches of oak and hickory, with scattered dogwood and persimmon, chinkapin and poplar, surrounded us in waves of feathery green.

The smell and feel of the air changed, too, as we rose. The overwhelming hot resins of the pine trees gave way to lighter, more varied scents, tree leaves mingled with whiffs of the shrubs and flowers that grew from every crevice of the craggy rocks. It was still damp and humid, but not so hot; the air no longer seemed a smothering blanket, but something we might breathe—and breathe with pleasure, filled as it was with the perfumes of leaf mold, sun-warmed leaves, and damp moss.