The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (504 page)

“She might understand,” he said. “That doesn’t mean she wants to hear it.”

22

THE FIERY CROSS

The men were gone. Jamie, Roger, Mr. Chisholm and his sons, the MacLeod brothers … they had all disappeared before daybreak, leaving no trace behind save the jumbled remains of a hasty breakfast, and a collection of muddy bootprints on the doorsill.

Jamie moved so quietly that he seldom woke me when he left our bed to dress in the dark predawn. He did usually bend to kiss me goodbye, though, murmuring a quick endearment in my ear and leaving me to carry the touch and scent of him back into dreams.

He hadn’t wakened me this morning.

That job had been left to the tender offices of the junior Chisholms and MacLeods, several of whom had held a pitched battle directly under my window, just after dawn.

I had sprung into wakefulness, momentarily confused by the shouts and screams, my hands reaching automatically for sponge and oxygen, syringe and alcohol, visions of a hospital emergency room vivid around me. Then I drew breath, and smelled woodsmoke, not ethanol. I shook my head, blinking at the sight of a rumpled blue and yellow quilt, the peaceful row of clothes on their pegs, and the wash of pure, pale light streaming through half-opened shutters. Home. I was home, on the Ridge.

A door banged open below, and the racket died abruptly, succeeded by a scuffle of flight, accompanied by muffled giggling.

“Mmmphm!” said Mrs. Bug’s voice, grimly satisfied at having routed the rioters. The door closed, and the clank of wood and clang of metal from below announced the commencement of the day’s activities.

When I went down a few moments later, I found that good lady engaged simultaneously in toasting bread, boiling coffee, making parritch, and complaining as she tidied up the men’s leavings. Not about the untidiness—what else could be expected of men?—but rather that Jamie had not waked her to provide a proper breakfast for them.

“And how’s Himself to manage, then?” she demanded, brandishing the toasting-fork at me in reproach. “A fine, big man like that, and him out and doing wi’ no more to line his wame than a wee sup of milk and a stale bannock?”

Casting a bleary eye over the assorted crumbs and dirty crockery, it appeared to me that Himself and his companions had probably accounted for at least two dozen corn muffins and an entire loaf of salt-rising bread, accompanied by a pound or so of fresh butter, a jar of honey, a bowl of raisins, and all of the first milking.

“I don’t think he’ll starve,” I murmured, dabbing up a crumb with a moistened forefinger. “Is the coffee ready?”

The older Chisholm and MacLeod children had mostly been sleeping by the kitchen hearth at night, rolled in rags or blankets. They were up and out now, their coverings heaped behind the settle. As the smell of food began to permeate the house, murmurous sounds of rising began to come through the walls and down the stairs, as the women dressed and tended the babies and toddlers. Small faces began to reappear from outside, peeking hungrily round the edge of the door.

“Have ye washed your filthy paws, wee heathens?” Mrs. Bug demanded, seeing them. She waved a porridge spoon at the benches along the table. “If ye have, come in and set yourselves doon. Mind ye wipe your muddy feet!”

Within moments, the benches and stools were filled, Mrs. Chisholm, Mrs. MacLeod, and Mrs. Aberfeldy yawning and blinking among their offspring, nodding and murmuring “Good morn” to me and each other, straightening a kerchief here and a shirttail there, using a thumb wet with spittle to plaster down the spiked hair on a little boy’s head or wipe a smudge from a little girl’s cheek.

Faced with a dozen gaping mouths to feed, Mrs. Bug was in her element, hopping back and forth between hearth and table. Watching her bustle to and fro, I thought she must have been a chickadee in a former life.

“Did you see Jamie when he left?” I asked, as she paused momentarily to refill all the coffee cups, a large uncooked sausage in her other hand.

“No, indeed.” She shook her head, neat white in its kerch. “I didna ken a thing about it. I heard my auld lad up and stirring before dawn, but I thought it was only him out to the privy, he not liking to trouble me with the noise o’ the pot. He didna come back, though, and by the time I waked myself, they’d all gone off. Ah! None of that, now!”

Catching a movement from the corner of her eye, she dotted a six-year-old MacLeod smartly on the head with her sausage, causing him to snatch his fingers back from the jam jar.

“Perhaps they’ve gone hunting,” Mrs. Aberfeldy suggested timidly, spooning porridge into the little girl she held on her knee. Barely nineteen, she seldom said much, shy of the older women.

“Better they be hunting homesteads, and timber for houses,” Mrs. MacLeod said, hoisting a baby onto her shoulder and patting its back. She pushed a strand of graying hair out of her face and gave me a wry smile. “It’s nay reflection upon your hospitality, Mrs. Fraser, but I’d as soon not spend the winter under your feet. Geordie! Leave your sister’s plaits alone, or ye’ll wish ye had!”

Not at my best so early in the day, I smiled and murmured something politely incomprehensible. I would as soon not have five or ten extra people in my house for the winter, either, but I wasn’t sure it could be avoided.

The Governor’s letter had been quite specific; all able-bodied men in the backcountry were to be mustered as militia troops and to report to Salisbury by mid-December. That left very little time for house-building. Still, I hoped Jamie had some plan for relieving the congestion; Adso the kitten had taken up semipermanent residence in a cupboard in my surgery, and the scene in the kitchen was quickly assuming its usual daily resemblance to one of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

At least the kitchen had lost its early morning chill with so many bodies crowded into it, and was now comfortably warm and noisy. What with the mob scene, though, it was several moments before I noticed that there were four young mothers present, rather than three.

“Where did you come from?” I asked, startled at sight of my daughter, huddled frowsily under a rug in a corner of the settle.

Bree blinked sleepily and shifted Jemmy, who was nursing with single-minded concentration, oblivious of the crowd.

“The Muellers showed up in the middle of the night and pounded on our door,” she said, yawning. “Eight of them. They didn’t speak much English, but I
think
they said Da sent for them.”

“Really?” I reached for a slice of raisin cake, narrowly beating a young Chisholm to it. “Are they still there?”

“Uh-huh. Thanks, Mama.” She stretched out a hand for the bit of cake I offered her. “Yes. Da came and hauled Roger out of bed while it was still dark, but he didn’t seem to think he needed the Muellers yet. When Roger left, a big old Mueller got up off the floor, said,
‘Bitte, Maedle,’
and lay down next to me.” A delicate pink flushed her cheeks. “So I thought maybe I’d get up and come up here.”

“Oh,” I said, suppressing a smile. “That would be Gerhard.” Eminently practical, the old farmer would see no reason why he should lay his old bones on a hard plank floor, if there was bed space available.

“I suppose so,” she said indistinctly, through a mouthful of cake. “I guess he’s harmless, but even so …”

“Well, he’d be no danger to
you
,” I agreed. Gerhard Mueller was the patriarch of a large German family who lived between the Ridge and the Moravian settlement at Salem. He was somewhere in his late seventies, but by no means harmless.

I chewed slowly, remembering how Jamie had described to me the scalps nailed to the door of Gerhard’s barn. Women’s scalps, long hair dark and silken, ends lifting in the wind.
Like live things
, he’d said, his face troubled at the memory,
like birds, pinned to the wood
. And the white one Gerhard had brought to me, wrapped in linen and flecked with blood. No, not harmless. I swallowed, the cake feeling dry in my throat.

“Harmless or not, they’ll be hungry,” said Mrs. Chisholm practically. She bent and gathered up a corn-dolly, a soggy diaper, and a squirming toddler, contriving somehow to leave a hand free for her coffee. “Best we clear this lot awa, before the Germans smell food and come hammering at the door.”

“Is there anything left to feed them?” I said, uneasily trying to remember how many hams were left in the smokeshed. After two weeks of hospitality, our stores were dwindling at an alarming rate.

“Of course there is,” Mrs. Bug said briskly, slicing sausage and flipping the slices onto the sizzling griddle. “Let me just ha’ done with this lot, and ye can send them along for their breakfasts. You,
a muirninn
—” She tapped a girl of eight or so on the head with her spatula. “Run ye doon the root cellar and fetch me up an apronful of potatoes. Germans like potatoes.”

By the time I had finished my porridge and begun to collect up bowls to wash, Mrs. Bug, broom in hand, was sweeping children and debris out of the back door with ruthless efficiency, while issuing a stream of orders to Lizzie and Mrs. Aberfeldy—Ruth, that was her name—who seemed to have been dragooned as assistant cooks.

“Shall I help …” I began, rather feebly, but Mrs. Bug shook her head and made small shooing motions with the broom.

“Dinna think of it, Mrs. Fraser!” she said. “You’ll have enough to do, I’m sure, and—here now, ye’ll no be comin’ intae my nice, clean kitchen wi’ those mucky boots! Out, out and wipe them off before ye think of setting foot in here!”

Gerhard Mueller, followed by his sons and nephews, stood in the doorway, nonplussed. Mrs. Bug, undeterred either by the fact that he towered over her by more than a foot, or that he spoke no English, screwed up her face and poked fiercely at his boots with her broom.

I waved welcomingly to the Muellers, then seized the chance of escape, and fled.

Seeking to avoid the crowd in the house, I washed at the well outside, then went to the sheds and occupied myself in taking inventory. The situation was not as bad as I’d feared; we had enough, with careful management, to last out the winter, though I could see that Mrs. Bug’s lavish hand might have to be constrained a bit.

Besides six hams in the smokeshed, there were four sides of bacon and half another, plus a rack of dried venison and half of a relatively recent carcass. Looking up, I could see the low roof beams, black with soot and thick with clusters of smoked, dried fish, split and bound stiffly in bunches, like the petals of large ugly flowers. There were ten casks of salt fish, as well, and four of salt pork. A stone crock of lard, a smaller one of the fine leaf lard, another of headcheese … I had my doubts about that.

I had made it according to the instructions of one of the Mueller women, as translated by Jamie, but I had never seen headcheese myself, and was not quite sure it was meant to look like
that
. I lifted the lid and sniffed cautiously, but it smelled all right; mildly spiced with garlic and peppercorn, and no scent at all of putrefaction. Perhaps we wouldn’t die of ptomaine poisoning, though I had it in mind to invite Gerhard Mueller to try it first.

“How can ye bide the auld fiend in your house?” Marsali had demanded, when Gerhard and one of his sons had ridden up to the Ridge a few months earlier. She had heard the story of the Indian women from Fergus, and viewed the Germans with horrified revulsion.

“And what would ye have me do?” Jamie had demanded in return, spoon lifted halfway from his bowl. “Kill the Muellers—all of them, for if I did for Gerhard, I’d have to do for the lot—and nail their hair to
my
barn?” His mouth quirked slightly. “I should think it would put the cow off her milk. It would put me off the milkin’, to be sure.”

Marsali’s brow puckered, but she wasn’t one to be joked out of an argument.

“Not that, maybe,” she said. “But ye let them into your house, and treat them as friends!” She glanced from Jamie to me, frowning. “The women he killed—
they
were your friends, no?”

I exchanged a look with Jamie, and gave a slight shrug. He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts, as he slowly stirred his soup. Then he laid down the spoon and looked at her.

“It was a fearful thing that Gerhard did,” he said simply. “But it was a matter of vengeance to him; thinking as he did, he couldna have done otherwise. Would it make matters better for me to take vengeance on him?”

“Non,”
Fergus said positively. He laid a hand on Marsali’s arm, putting a stop to whatever she might have said next. He grinned up at her. “Of course, Frenchmen do not believe in vengeance.”

“Well, perhaps some Frenchmen,” I murmured, thinking of the Comte St. Germain.

Marsali wasn’t to be put off so easily, though.

“Hmph,” she said. “What ye mean is, they weren’t
yours
, isn’t it?” Seeing Jamie’s brow flick up in startlement, she pressed the point. “The women who were murdered. But if it were your family? If it had been me and Lizzie and Brianna, say?”

“That,” said Jamie evenly, “is my point. It
was
Gerhard’s family.” He pushed back from the table and stood up, leaving half his soup unfinished. “Are ye done, Fergus?”