Drums of Autumn

  this? It’s got your name on it.”

  I thought a sudden shadow crossed her face, but then she smiled again.

  “The view o’ the mountains? Aye, I always loved the sight of them. I’d go with Hector, when he went up into the backcountry to trade for hides. We’d camp in the mountains, and set up a great blaze of a bonfire, wi’ the servants keeping it going day and night, as a signal. And within a few days, the red savages would come down through the forest, and sit by the fire to talk and to drink whisky and trade—and I, I would sit by the hour wi’ my sketchbook and my charcoals, drawing everything I could see.”

  She turned, nodding toward the far end of the room.

  “Go and look at that one in the corner, laddie. See can ye find the Indian I put in it, hiding in the trees.”

  Jocasta finished her whisky and set down her glass. The butler offered to refill it, but she waved him away without looking at him. He set down the decanter and vanished quietly into the hall.

  “Aye, I loved the sight o’ the mountains,” Jocasta said again, softly. “They’re none so black and barren as Scotland, but the sun on the rocks and the mist in the trees did remind me of Leoch, now and then.”

  She shook her head then, and smiled a bit too brightly at Jamie.

  “But this has been home for a long time now, nephew—and I hope ye will consider it yours as well.”

  We had little other choice, but Jamie bobbed his head, murmuring something dutifully appreciative in reply. He was interrupted, though, by Rollo, who raised his head with a startled Wuff!

  “What is it, dog?” said Ian, coming to stand by the big wolf-dog. “D’ye smell something?” Rollo was whining, staring out into the shadowy flower border and twitching his thick ruff with unease.

  Jocasta turned her head toward the open door and sniffed audibly, fine nostrils flaring.

  “It’s a skunk,” she said.

  “A skunk!” Ian whirled to stare at her, appalled. “They come so close to the house?”

  Jamie had got up in a hurry, and gone to peer out into the evening.

  “I dinna see it yet,” he said. His hand groped automatically at his belt, but of course he wasn’t wearing a dirk with his good suit. He turned to Jocasta. “Have ye any weapons in the house, Aunt?”

  Jocasta’s mouth hung open.

  “Aye,” she said. “Plenty. But—”

  “Jamie,” I said. “A skunk isn’t—”

  Before either of us could finish, there was a sudden disturbance among the snapdragons in the herbaceous border, the tall stalks waving back and forth. Rollo snarled, and the hackles stood up on his neck.

  “Rollo!” Ian glanced round for a makeshift weapon, seized the poker from the fireplace, and brandishing it above his head, made for the door.

  “Wait, Ian!” Jamie grabbed his nephew’s upraised arm. “Look.” A wide grin spread across his face, and he pointed to the border. The snapdragons parted, and a fine, fat skunk strolled into view, handsomely striped in black and white, and obviously feeling that all was right with his personal world.

  “That’s a skunk?” Ian asked incredulously. “Why, that’s no but a bittie wee stinkard like a polecat!” He wrinkled his nose, with a expression between amusement and disgust. “Phew! And here I thought it was a dangerous huge beastie!”

  The skunk’s satisfied insouciance was too much for Rollo, who pounced forward, uttering a short, sharp bark. He feinted to and fro on the terrace, growling and making short lunges at the skunk, who looked annoyed at the racket.

  “Ian,” I said, taking refuge behind Jamie. “Call off your dog. Skunks are dangerous.”

  “They are?” Jamie turned a look of puzzlement on me. “But what—”

  “Polecats only stink,” I explained. “Skunks—Ian, no! Let it alone, and come inside!” Ian, curious, had reached out and prodded the skunk with his poker. The skunk, offended at this unwarranted intimacy, stamped its feet and elevated its tail.

  I heard the noise of a chair sliding back, and glanced behind me. Jocasta had stood up and was looking alarmed, but made no move to come to the door.

  “What is it?” she said. “What are they doing?” To my surprise, she was staring into the room, turning her head from one side to the other, as though trying to locate someone in the dark.

  Suddenly, the truth dawned on me: her hand on the butler’s arm, her touching Jamie’s face in greeting, the glass put ready for her grasp, and the shadow on her face when Ian talked of her painting. Jocasta Cameron was blind.

  A strangled cry and a piercing yelp jerked me back to more pressing issues on the terrace. A tidal wave of acrid scent cascaded into the room, hit the floor, and boiled up around me like a mushroom cloud.

  Choking and gasping, eyes watering from the reek, I groped blindly for Jamie, who was making breathless remarks in Gaelic. Above the cacophony of groaning and piteous yowling outside, I barely heard the small ting! of Jocasta’s bell behind me.

  “Ulysses?” she said, sounding resigned. “Ye’d best tell Cook the dinner will be late.”

  * * *

  “It was luck that it’s summer, at least,” Jocasta said at breakfast next day. “Think if it had been winter and we had to keep the doors closed!” She laughed, showing teeth in surprisingly good condition for her age.

  “Oh, aye,” Ian murmured. “Please, may I have more toast, ma’am?”

  He and Rollo had been first soused in the river, then rubbed with tomatoes from the burgeoning vines that overgrew the necessary house out back. The odor-reducing properties of these fruits worked as well on skunk oil as on the lesser stinks of human waste, but in neither case was the neutralizing effect complete. Ian sat by himself at one end of the long table, next to an open French door, but I saw the maid who brought his toast to him wrinkle her nose unobtrusively as she set the plate before him.

  Perhaps inspired by Ian’s proximity and a desire for open air, Jocasta suggested that we might ride out to the turpentine works in the forest above River Run.

  “It’s a day’s journey there and back, but I think the weather will keep fine.” She turned toward the open French window, where bees hummed over a herbaceous border of goldenrod and phlox. “Hear them?” she said, turning her slightly off-kilter smile toward Jamie. “The bees do say it will be hot and fair.”

  “You have keen ears, Madame Cameron,” Fergus said politely. “If I may be permitted to borrow a horse from your stable, though, I should prefer to go into the town, myself.” I knew he was dying to send word to Marsali in Jamaica; I had helped him to write a long letter the night before, describing our adventures and safe arrival. Rather than wait for a slave to take it with the week’s mail, he would much rather post it with his own hands.

  “Indeed and ye may, Mr. Fergus,” Jocasta said graciously. She smiled round the table generally. “As I said, ye must all consider River Run as ye would your own home.”

  Jocasta plainly meant to accompany us on the ride; she came down dressed in a habit of dark green muslin, the girl named Phaedre coming behind, carrying a hat trimmed to match with velvet ribbon. She paused in the hall, but instead of putting on the hat at once, she stood while Phaedre tied a strip of white linen firmly round her head, covering her eyes.

  “I can see nothing but light,” she explained. “I canna make out objects at all. Still, the light of the sun causes me pain, so I must shield my eyes when venturing out. Are you ready, my dears?”

  That answered some of my speculations concerning her blindness, though didn’t entirely assuage them. Retinitis pigmentosum? I wondered with interest, as I followed her down the wide front hall. Or perhaps macular degeneration, though glaucoma was perhaps the most likely possibility. Not for the first time—or the last, I was sure—my fingers curved around the handle of an invisible ophthalmoscope, itching to see what could not be seen with eyes alone.

  To my surprise, when we went out to the stable block, a mare was standing ready saddled for Jocasta, rather than the carriage I had expected.
The gift of charming horses ran strong in the MacKenzie line; the mare lifted her head and whickered at sight of her mistress, and Jocasta went to the horse at once, her face alight with pleasure.

  “Ciamar a tha tu?” she said, stroking the soft Roman nose. “This will be my sweet Corinna. Is she not a dear lassie?” Reaching in her pocket, she pulled out a small green apple, which the horse accepted with delicate pleasure.

  “And have they seen to your knee, mo chridhe?” Stooping, Jocasta ran a hand down the horse’s shoulder and leg to just inside the knee, finding and exploring a healing scar with expert fingers. “What say ye, nephew? Is she sound? Can she stand a day’s ride?”

  Jamie clicked his tongue, and Corinna obligingly took a step toward him, clearly recognizing someone who spoke her language. He took a look at her leg, took her bridle in hand and with a word or two in soft Gaelic, urged her to walk. Then he pulled her to a halt, swung into the saddle, and trotted gently twice round the stableyard, coming to a stop by the waiting Jocasta.

  “Aye,” he said, stepping down. “She’s canty enough, Aunt. What did her the injury?”

  “Happen as it was a snake, sir,” said the groom, a young black man who had stood back, intently watching Jamie with the horse.

  “Not a snakebite, surely?” I said, surprised. “It looks like a tear—as though she’d caught her leg on something.”

  He looked at me with raised brows, but nodded with respect.

  “Aye, mum, that it was. ’Twas a month past, I heard the lass let out a rare skelloch, and such a kebbie-lebbie o’ bangin’ and crashin’, as ye’d think the whole stable was comin’ doon aboot my head. When I rushed to see the trouble, I found the bloody corpse of a great poison snake lyin’ crushed in the straw beneath the manger. The manger was dashit all to pieces, and the wee lassie quiverin’ in the corner, the blood streamin’ doon her leg from a splinter where she’d caught herself.” He glanced at the horse with obvious pride. “Och, such a brave wee creature as ye are, lass!”

  “The ‘great poison snake’ was perhaps a foot long,” Jocasta said to me in an dry undertone. “And a simple green gardensnake, forbye. But the foolish thing’s got a morbid dread o’ snakes. Let her see one, and she loses her head entirely.” She cocked her head in the direction of the young groom and smiled. “Wee Josh is none so fond o’ them, either, is he?”

  The groom grinned in answer.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I canna thole the creatures, nay more than my lassie.”

  Ian, who had been listening to this exchange, couldn’t hold back his curiosity any longer.

  “Where d’ye come from, man?” he asked the groom, peering at the young man in fascination.

  Josh wrinkled his brow.

  “Come from? I dinna come—oh, aye, I tak’ your meaning now. I was born upriver, on Mr. George Burnett’s place. Miss Jo bought me twa year past, at Eastertide.”

  “And I think we may assume that Mr. Burnett himself was conceived within crow’s flight of Aberdeen,” Jamie said softly to me. “Aye?”

  River Run took in quite a large territory, including not only its prime riverfront acreage but a substantial chunk of the longleaf pine forest that covered a third of the colony. In addition, Hector Cameron had cannily acquired land containing a wide creek, one of many that flowed into Cape Fear.

  Thus provided not only with the valuable commodities of timber, pitch, and turpentine but with a convenient means of getting them to market, it was little wonder that River Run had prospered, even though it produced only modest quantities of tobacco and indigo—though the fragrant fields of green tobacco through which we rode looked more than modest to me.

  “There’s a wee mill,” Jocasta was explaining, as we rode. “Just above the joining of the creek and the river. The sawing and shaping are done there, and then the boards and barrels are sent downriver by barge to Wilmington. It’s no great distance from the house to the mill by water, if ye choose to row upstream, but I thought to show ye a bit of the country instead.” She breathed the pine-scented air with pleasure. “It’s been a time since I was out, myself.”

  It was pleasant country. Once in the pine forest, it was much cooler, the sun blocked out by the clustered needles overhead. Far overhead the trunks of the trees soared upward for twenty or thirty feet before branching out—no great surprise to hear that the largest part of the mill’s output was masts and spars, made for the Royal Navy.

  River Run did a great deal of business with the navy, it seemed, judging from Jocasta’s conversation; masts, spars, laths, timbers, pitch, turpentine, and tar. Jamie rode close by her side, listening intently as she explained everything in detail, leaving me and Ian to trail behind. Evidently, she had worked closely with her husband in building River Run; I wondered how she managed the place by herself, now that he was gone.

  “Look!” Ian said, pointing. “What’s that?”

  I pulled up and walked my horse, along with his, to the tree he had pointed out. A great slab of bark had been taken off, exposing the inner wood for a stretch of four feet or more on one side. Within this area, the yellow-white wood was crosshatched in a sort of herringbone pattern, as though it had been slashed back and forth with a knife.

  “We’re near,” Jocasta said. Jamie had seen us stop, and they had ridden back to join us. “That will be a turpentine tree you’re seeing; I smell it.”

  We all could; the scent of cut wood and pungent resin was so strong that even I could have found the tree blindfolded. Now that we had stopped, I could hear noises in the distance; the rumblings and thumps of men at work, the chunk of an ax and voices calling back and forth. Breathing in, I also caught a whiff of something burning.

  Jocasta edged Corinna close to the cut tree.

  “Here,” she said, touching the bottom of the cut, where a rough hollow had been chiseled out of the wood. “We call it the box; that’s where the sap and the raw turpentine drip down and collect. This one is nearly full; there’ll be a slave along soon to dip it out.”

  No sooner had she spoken than a man appeared through the trees; a slave dressed in no more than a loincloth, leading a large white mule with a broad strap slung across its back, a barrel suspended on either side. The mule stopped dead when he saw us, flung back his head, and brayed hysterically.

  “That will be Clarence,” Jocasta said, loudly enough to be heard above the noise. “He likes to see folk. And who is that with him? Is it you, Pompey?”

  “Yah’m. S’me.” The slave gripped the mule by the upper lip and gave it a vicious twist. “Lea’f, vassar!” As I made the mental translation of this expression into “Leave off, you bastard!” the man turned toward us, and I saw that his slurred speech was caused by the fact that the lower left half of his jaw was gone; his face below the cheekbone simply fell away into a deep depression filled with white scar tissue.

  Jocasta must have heard my gasp of shock—or only have expected such a response—for she turned her blindfold toward me.

  “It was a pitch explosion—fortunate he was not killed. Come, we’re near the works.” Without waiting for her groom, she turned her horse’s head expertly, and made off through the trees, toward the scent of burning.

  The contrast of the turpentine works with the quiet of the forest was amazing; a large clearing full of people, all in a hum of activity. Most were slaves, dressed in the minimum of clothing, limbs and bodies smudged with charcoal.

  “Is anyone at the sheds?” Jocasta turned her head toward me.

  I rose in my stirrups to look; at the far side of the clearing, near a row of ramshackle sheds, I caught a flash of color; three men in the uniform of the British Navy, and another in a bottle-green coat.

  “That will be my particular friend,” Jocasta said, smiling in satisfaction at my description. “Mr. Farquard Campbell. Come, Nephew; I should like ye to meet him.”

  Seen up close, Campbell proved to be a man of sixty or so, no more than middle height, but with that particular brand of leathery toughness
that some Scotsmen exhibit as they age—not so much a weathering as a tanning process that results in a surface like a leather targe, capable of turning the sharpest blade.

  Campbell greeted Jocasta with pleasure, bowed courteously to me, acknowledged Ian with the flick of a brow, then turned the full force of his shrewd gray eyes on Jamie.

  “It’s verra pleased I am that you’re here, Mr. Fraser,” he said, extending his hand. “Verra pleased, indeed. I’ve heard a deal about ye, ever since your aunt learned of your intentions to visit River Run.”

  He appeared sincerely delighted to meet Jamie, which struck me as odd. Not that most people weren’t happy to meet Jamie—he was quite a prepossessing man, if I did say so—but there was an air almost of relief in Campbell’s effusive greeting, which seemed unusual for someone whose outward appearance was entirely one of reserve and taciturnity.

  If Jamie noticed anything odd, he hid his puzzlement behind a facade of courtesy.

  “I’m flattered that ye should have spared a moment’s thought to me, Mr. Campbell.” Jamie smiled pleasantly, and bowed toward the naval officers. “Gentlemen? I am pleased to make your acquaintance, as well.”

  Thus given an opening, a chubby, frowning little person named Lieutenant Wolff and his two ensigns made their introductions, and after perfunctory bows, dismissed me and Jocasta from mind and conversation, turning their attention at once to a discussion of board feet and gallons.

  Jamie lifted one eyebrow at me, with a slight nod toward Jocasta, suggesting in marital shorthand that I take his aunt and bugger off while business was conducted.

  Jocasta, however, showed not the slightest inclination to remove herself.

  “Do go on, my dear,” she urged me. “Josh will show ye everything. I’ll just wait in the shade whilst the gentlemen conduct their business; the heat’s a bit much for me, I’m afraid.”

  The men had sat down to discuss business inside an open-fronted shed that boasted a crude table with a number of stools; presumably this was where the slaves took their meals, suffering the blackflies for the sake of air. Another shed served for storage; the third, which was enclosed, I deduced must be the sleeping quarters.

  Beyond the sheds, toward the center of the clearing, were two or three large fires, over which huge kettles steamed in the sunshine, suspended from tripods.

  “They’ll be cookin’ doon the turpentine, a-boilin’ it intae pitch,” Josh explained, taking me within eyeshot of one of the kettles. “Some is put intae the barrels as is”—he nodded toward the sheds, where a wagon was parked, piled high with barrels—“but the rest is made intae pitch. The naval gentlemen will be sayin’ how much they’ll be needin’, so as we’ll know.”

  A small boy of seven or eight was perched on a high, rickety stool, stirring the pot with a long stick; a taller youth stood by with an enormous ladle, with which he removed the lighter layer of purified turpentine at the top of the kettle, depositing this in a barrel to one side.

  As I watched them, a slave came out of the forest, leading a mule, and headed for the kettle. Another man came to help, and together they unloaded the barrels—plainly heavy—from the mule, and upended them into the kettle, one at a time, with a great whoosh of pungent yellowish pinesap.

  “Och, ye’ll want to stand back a bit, mum,” Josh said, taking my arm to draw me away from the fire. “The stuff does splash a bit, and happen it should take fire, ye wouldna want to be burnt.”

  Having seen the man in the forest, I most certainly didn’t want to be burned. I drew away, and glanced back at the sheds. Jamie, Mr. Campbell, and the naval men were sitting on stools around a table inside one hut, sharing something from a bottle and poking at a sheaf of papers on the table.

  Standing pressed against the shed wall, out of sight of the men within, was Jocasta Cameron. Having abandoned her pretense of exhaustion, she was plainly listening for all she was worth.

  Josh caught the expression of surprise on my face, and turned to see what I was looking at.

  “Miss Jo does hate not to have the charge o’ things,” he murmured regretfully. “I havena haird her myself, but yon lass Phaedre did say as how Mistress takes on when she canna manage something—a’rantin’ dreadful, she says, and stampin’ something fierce.”

  “That must be quite a remarkable spectacle,” I murmured. “What is she not able to manage, though?” From all appearances, Jocasta Cameron had her house, fields, and people well in hand, blind or not.

  Now it was his turn to look surprised.

  “Och, it’s the bluidy Navy. Did she not say why we came today?”

  Before I could go into the fascinating question of why Jocasta Cameron should wish to manage the British Navy, today or any other day, we were interrupted by a cry of alarm from the far side of the clearing. I turned to look, and was nearly trampled by several half-naked men running in panic toward the sheds.

  At the far side of the clearing a peculiar sort of mound rose up out of the ground; I had noticed it earlier but had had no chance to ask about it yet. While the floor of the clearing was mostly dirt, the mound was covered with grass—but grass of a peculiar, patchy sort; part was green, part gone yellow, and here and there was an oblong of grass that was stark, dead brown.

  Just as I realized that this effect was the result of the mound’s being covered in cut turves, the whole thing blew up. There was no sound of explosion, just a sort of muffled noise like a huge sneeze, and a faint wave of concussion in the air that brushed my cheek.

  If it didn’t sound like an explosion, it certainly looked like one; pieces of turf and bits of burnt wood began to rain down all over the clearing. There was a lot of shouting, and Jamie and his companions came rocketing out of the shed like a flock of startled pheasants.

  “Are ye all right, Sassenach?” He grasped my arm, looking anxious.

  “Yes, fine,” I said, rather confused. “What on earth just happened?”

  “Damned if I ken,” he said briefly, already looking round the clearing. “Where’s Ian?”

  “I don’t know. You don’t think he had anything to do with this, do you?” I brushed at several floating specks of charcoal that had landed on my bosom. With black streaks ornamenting my décolletage, I followed Jamie into the small knot of