Drums of Autumn, Page 88

  Any movement here below would shake the leaves above, and pinpoint his movements to the watchers. That was a cold thought; they undoubtedly knew where he was now, and were simply waiting for his next move. The patches of sky were the deep blue of sapphires; it was still afternoon. He would wait till dark before he moved, then.

  Hands clasped together on his chest, he willed himself to rest, to think of something beyond his present situation. Brianna. Let him think of her. Without the rage or bewilderment, now; there was no time for that.

  Let him pretend that all was still between them as it had been on that night, their night. Warm against him in the dark. Her hands, so frank and curious, eager on his body. The generosity of her nakedness, freely given. And his momentary, mistaken conviction that all was forever right with the world. Gradually, the shivering eased, and he slept.

  He woke sometime after moonrise; he could see brightness suffusing the sky, though not the moon itself. He was stiff and cold, and very sore. Hungry, too, and with a desperate thirst. Well, if he got himself out of this bloody tangle, at least he could find water; streams were everywhere in these mountains. Feeling awkward as a turtle on its back, he turned slowly over.

  One direction was as good as another. On hands and knees, he started off, pushing through crevices, breaking branches, trying his best to go in a straight line. One fear haunted him more than thought of the Indians; he could so easily lose his bearings, moving blindly through this maze. He could end by going in endless circles, trapped forever. The stories of the hunting dogs had lost any element of exaggeration.

  Some small animal ran over his hand and he jerked, hitting his head on the branches overhead. He gritted his teeth and kept on, a few inches at a time. Crickets chirped all around him, and countless small rustlings let him know that the inhabitants of this particular hell didn’t appreciate his intrusion. He couldn’t see anything at all; it was almost pitch-black here below. There was the one good thing, though: The constant effort heated him; sweat stung the gouge in his scalp and dripped from his chin.

  Whenever he had to stop for breath, he listened for some clue—to either his location or his pursuers’—but he heard nothing beyond the occasional night bird’s call and the rustle of the leaves all around. He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve and pushed on.

  He didn’t know how long he had been going when he found the rock. Or not so much found it as ran headfirst into it. He reeled back, clutching his head and gritting his teeth to keep from crying out.

  Blinking from the pain, he put out a hand and found what he had struck. Not a boulder; a flat-faced rock. A tall one, too; the hard surface extended up as high as he could reach.

  He groped to the side, and made his way around the rock. There was a thick stem growing near it; his shoulders stuck in the narrow space between. He wrenched and heaved, squirming, and finally shot forward, losing his balance and landing on his face.

  Doggedly, he rose up onto his hands again—and realized that he could see his hands. He looked up, and around, in complete amazement.

  His head and shoulders protruded into a clear space. Not merely clear, but empty. Eagerly, he wriggled forward, out of the claustrophobic grip of the rhododendrons.

  He was standing in an open space, facing a cliff wall that rose on the far side of a small clearing. It really was a clearing, too; nothing at all grew in the soft dirt beneath his feet. Astonished, he turned slowly round, gulping great lungfuls of cold, sharp air.

  “My God in heaven,” he said softly, aloud. The clearing was roughly oval in shape, ringed by standing stones, with one end of the oval closed by the cliff face. The stones were evenly spaced around the ring, a few of them fallen, a couple more dislodged from their places by the press of roots and stems behind them. He could see the dense black mass of the rhododendrons, showing between and above the stones—but not one plant grew within the perimeter of the ring.

  Feeling gooseflesh ripple over his body, he walked softly toward the center of the ring. It couldn’t be—but it was. And why not, after all? If Geillis Duncan had been right…he turned and saw in the moonlight the scratchings on the cliff face.

  He walked closer to look at them. There were several petroglyphs, some the size of his hand, others nearly as tall as he was; spiral shapes, and what might be a bent man, dancing—or dying. A nearly closed circle, that looked like a snake chasing its tail. Warning signs.

  He shuddered again, and his hand went to the seam of his breeches. They were still there: the two gems he had risked his life to get, tiny passports to safety—he hoped—for him and for Brianna.

  He could hear nothing; no humming, no buzzing. The autumn air was cold, a light wind stirring the rhododendron leaves. Damn, what was the date? He didn’t know, had lost track long since. He thought it had been near the beginning of September, though, when he left Brianna in Wilmington. It had taken much longer than he’d thought, to track Bonnet and find an opportunity to steal the gems. It must be nearly the end of October now—the feast of Samhain, the Eve of All Hallows, was nearly come, or only recently past.

  Would this ring follow the same dates, though? He supposed that it would; if the Earth’s lines of force shifted with its revolution around the sun, then all the passages should stand open or closed with the shift.

  He stepped closer to the cliff and saw it; an opening near the base of the cliff, a split in the rock, perhaps a cave. A chill ran over him that had nothing to do with the cold night wind. His fingers closed tightly over the small round hardness of the gems. He heard nothing; was it open? If so…

  Escape. It would be that. Escape to when, though? And how? The words of Geilie’s spell chanted in his mind. Garnets rest in love about my neck; I will be faithful.

  Faithful. To try that avenue of escape was to abandon Brianna. And hasn’t she abandoned you?

  “No, I’m damned if she has!” he whispered to himself. There was some reason for what she’d done, he knew it.

  She’s found her parents; she’ll be safe enough. “And for this reason, a woman shall leave her parents, and cleave to her husband.” Safety wasn’t what mattered; love was. If he’d cared for safety, he wouldn’t have crossed that desperate void to begin with.

  His hands were sweating; he could feel the damp grain of the rough cloth under his fingers, and his torn fingertips burned and throbbed. He took one more step toward the split in the cliff face, his eyes fixed on the pitch-black inside. If he didn’t step inside…there were only two things to do. Go back to the suffocating grip of the rhododendrons, or try to scale the cliff before him.

  He tilted his head back to gauge its height. A face was looking down at him, featureless in the dark, silhouetted against the moon-bright sky. He hadn’t time to move or think before the rope noose settled gently over his head and tightened, pressing his arms against his body.

  52

  DESERTION

  River Run, December 1769

  It had been raining, and soon would be again. Drops of water hung trembling under the petals of the marble Jacobite roses on Hector Cameron’s tomb, and the brick walk was dark with wet.

  Semper Fidelis, it said, beneath his name and dates. Semper Fi. She had dated a Marine cadet once; he’d had it carved on the ring he had tried to give her. Always faithful. And who had Hector Cameron been faithful to? His wife? His prince?

  She hadn’t spoken to Jamie Fraser since that night. Nor he to her. Not since the final moment, when in a fury of fear and outrage, she had screamed at him, “My father would never have said such a thing!”

  She could still see what his face had looked like when she spoke her final words to him; she wished she could forget. He had turned without a word and left the cabin. Ian had risen, and quietly gone after him; neither of them had come back that night.

  Her mother had stayed with her, comforting, petting, stroking her head and murmuring small soothing things as she alternately raged and sobbed. But even as her mother held Brianna’s head in her lap and wiped her f
ace with cool cloths, Bree could feel a part of her yearning toward that man, wanting to follow him, wanting to comfort him. And she blamed him for that as well.

  Her head throbbed with the effort of staying stone-faced. She didn’t dare relax the muscles of eyes and jaw until she was sure they had left; it would be too easy to break down.

  She hadn’t; not since that night. Once she had pulled herself together, she had assured her mother that she was all right, insisted that Claire go to bed. She had herself sat up till dawn, eyes burning from rage and woodsmoke, with the drawing of Roger on the table before her.

  He had come back at dawn, called her mother to him, not looking at Brianna. Murmured a bit in the dooryard, and sent her mother back, face hollow-eyed with worry, to pack her things.

  He had brought her here, down the mountain to River Run. She had wanted to go with them, had wanted to go at once to find Roger, without a moment’s delay. But he had been obdurate, and so had her mother.

  It was late December, and the winter snows lay thick on the mountainside. She was nearly four months gone; the taut curve of her belly was tightly rounded now. There was no telling how long the journey might take, and she was reluctantly compelled to admit that she didn’t want to give birth on a raw mountainside. She might have overridden her mother’s opinion, but not when it was buttressed by his stubbornness.

  She leaned her forehead against the cool marble of the mausoleum; it was a cold day, spitting rain, but her face felt hot and swollen, as though she were coming down with a fever.

  She couldn’t stop hearing him, seeing him. His face, congested with rage, sharp-edged as a devil’s mask. His voice, rough with fury and contempt, reproaching her—reproaching her!—for the loss of his bloody honor!

  “Your honor?” she had said incredulously. “Your honor? Your fucking notion of honor is what’s caused all the trouble in the first place!”

  “Ye willna use that sort of language to me! Though if it’s fucking we’re speaking of—”

  “I’ll fucking well say anything I want!” she bellowed, and slammed a fist on the table, rattling the dishes.

  She had, too. So had he. Her mother had tried once or twice to stop them—Brianna flinched at the belated memory of the distress in Claire’s deep golden eyes—but neither of them had paid a moment’s notice, too intent on the savagery of their mutual betrayal.

  Her mother had told her once that she had a Scottish temper—slow-fused, but long-burning. Now she knew where it came from, but the knowing didn’t help.

  She put her folded arms against the tomb and rested her face on them, breathing in the faint sheep-smell of the wool. It reminded her of the hand-knit sweaters her father—her real father, she thought, with a fresh burst of desolation—had liked to wear.

  “Why did you have to die?” she whispered to the hollow of damp wool. “Oh, why?” If Frank Randall hadn’t died, none of this would have happened. He and Claire would still be there, in the house in Boston, her family and her life would be intact.

  But her father was gone, replaced by a violent stranger; a man who had her face, but could not understand her heart, a man who had taken both family and home from her, and not satisfied with that, had taken love and safety, too, leaving her bereft in this strange, harsh land.

  She pulled the shawl closer around her shoulders, shivering at the wind that cut through the loose weave. She should have brought a cloak. She had kissed her white-lipped mother goodbye and then left, running through the dead garden, not looking at him. She’d wait here until she was sure they were gone, no matter if she froze.

  She heard a step on the brick path above her and stiffened, though she didn’t turn around. Perhaps it was a servant, or Jocasta come to persuade her inside.

  But it was a stride too long and a footfall too strong for any but one man. She blinked hard, and gritted her teeth. She wouldn’t turn around, she wouldn’t.

  “Brianna,” he said quietly behind her. She didn’t answer, didn’t move.

  He made a small snorting noise—anger, impatience?

  “I have a thing to say to ye.”

  “Say it,” she said, and the words hurt her throat, as though she’d swallowed some jagged object.

  It was beginning to rain again; fresh spatters slicked the marble in front of her, and she could feel the icy pat! of drops that struck through her hair.

  “I will bring him home to you,” Jamie Fraser said, still quiet, “or I will not come back myself.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to turn around. There was a small sound, a click on the pavement behind her, and then the sound of his footsteps, going away. Before her tear-blurred eyes, the drops on the marble roses gathered weight and began to fall.

  When at last she turned around, the brick-lined walk was empty. At her feet was a folded paper, damp with rain, weighted with a stone. She picked it up, and held it crumpled in her hand, afraid to open it.

  February 1770

  In spite of worry and anger, she found herself easily absorbed into the flow of daily life at River Run. Her great-aunt, delighted at her company, encouraged her to find distraction; finding that she had some skill in drawing, Jocasta had brought out her own painting equipment, urging Brianna to make use of it.

  By comparison with the cabin on the ridge, life at River Run was so luxurious as to be almost decadent. Still, Brianna woke at dawn, out of habit. She stretched langourously, wallowing in the physical delight of a feather bed that embraced and yielded to her every move—a definite contrast to lumpy quilts spread over a chilly straw tick.

  There was a fire burning on the hearth, and a large copper can on the washstand, its burnished sides glowing. Hot water for washing; she could see the tiny shimmers of heat wavering over the metal. There was still a chill in the room, and the light outside was winter-blue with cold; the servant who had come and gone in silence must have risen in the black predawn and broken ice to get the water.

  She ought to feel guilty at being waited on by slaves, she thought drowsily. She must remember to, later. There were a lot of things she didn’t mean to think about until later; one more wouldn’t hurt.

  For now, she was warm. Far away, she could hear small noises in the house; a comforting scuffle of domesticity. The room itself was wrapped in silence, the occasional pop of kindling from the fire the only sound.

  She rolled onto her back and, mind still half afloat in sleep, began to reacquaint herself with her body. This was a morning ritual; something she had begun to do half consciously as a teenager, and found necessary to do on purpose now—to find and make peace with the small changes of the night, lest she look suddenly during the day and find herself a stranger in her own body.

  One stranger in her body was enough, she thought. She pushed the bedclothes down, running her hands slowly over the dormant swell of her stomach. A tiny ripple ran across her flesh as the inhabitant stretched, turning slowly as she had turned in the bed a few minutes before, enclosed and embraced.

  “Hi, there,” she said softly. The bulge flexed briefly against her hand and then fell still, the occupant returned to its mysterious dreams.

  Slowly, she ruffled up the nightgown—it was Jocasta’s, warm soft flannel—registering the smooth long muscle at the top of each thigh, the soft hollow curving in at the top. Then up and down and over, bare skin to bare skin, palms to legs and belly and breasts. Smooth and soft, round and hard; muscle and bone…but now not all her muscle and bone.

  Her skin felt different in the morning, like a snake’s skin, newly shed, all tender and light-lucent. Later, when she rose, when the air got at it, it would be harder, a duller but more serviceable envelope.

  She lay back against the pillow, watching the light fill the room. The house was awake beyond her. She could hear the myriad faint noises of people at work, and felt soothed. When she was small, she would wake on summer mornings to hear the chatter of her father’s lawnmower underneath her window; his voice calling out in greeting to a neighbor. She had felt saf
e, protected, knowing he was there.

  More recently, she had waked at dawn and heard Jamie Fraser’s voice, speaking in soft Gaelic to his horses outside, and had felt that same feeling return with a rush. No more, though.

  It had been true, what her mother said. She was removed, changed, altered without consent or knowledge, learning only after the fact. She threw aside the quilts and got up. She couldn’t lie in bed mourning what was lost; it was no longer anyone’s job to protect her. The job of protector was hers, now.

  The baby was a constant presence—and, oddly enough, a constant reassurance. For the first time she felt blessing in it, and an odd reconciliation; her body had known this long before her mind. So that was true, too—her mother had said it often—“Listen to your body.”

  She leaned against the window frame, looking out on the patchy snow that lay on the kitchen garden. A slave, muffled in cloak and scarf, was kneeling on the path, digging overwintered carrots from one of the beds. Tall elms bordered the walled garden; somewhere beyond those stark bare branches lay the mountains.

  She stayed still, listening to the rhythms of her body. The intruder in her flesh stirred a little, the tides of its movement merging with the pulsing of her blood—their blood. In the beating of her heart, she thought she heard the echo of that other, smaller heart, and in the sound found at last the courage to think clearly, with the assurance that if the worst happened—she pressed hard against the window frame, and felt it creak under the force of her urgency—if the worst happened, still she would not be totally alone.

  53

  BLAME

  Jamie spoke barely a word to anyone, between our departure from Fraser’s Ridge, and our arrival at the Tuscaroran village of Tennago. I rode in a state of misery, torn between guilt at leaving Brianna, fear for Roger, and pain at Jamie’s silence. He was short with Ian, and had said no more than absolutely necessary to Jocasta at Cross Creek. To me, he said nothing.

  Plainly, he blamed me for not telling him at once about Stephen Bonnet. In retrospect, I blamed myself bitterly, seeing what had come of it. He had kept the gold ring I had thrown at him; I had no idea what he had done with it.

  The weather was intermittently bad, the clouds hanging so low to the mountains that on the higher ridges, we traveled for days on end through a thick, cold fog, water droplets condensing on the horses’ coats, so that a constant rain dripped from their manes and moisture shone on their flanks. We slept at night in whatever shelter we could find, each rolled in a damp cocoon of blankets, lying separately around a smoldering fire.

  Some of the Indians who had known us at Anna Ooka made us welcome when we reached Tennago. I saw several men eye the casks of whisky as we unloaded our pack mules, but no one made any move to molest them. There were two mule-loads of whisky; a dozen small casks, all of the Fraser share of the year’s distilling—most of our income for the year. A king’s ransom, in terms of trade. Enough to ransom one young Scotsman, I hoped.

  It was the best—and the only—thing we had to trade with, but it was also a dangerous one. Jamie presented one cask to the sachem of the village, and he and Ian disappeared into one of the longhouses to confer. Ian had given Roger to some of his friends among the Tuscarora, but did not know where they had taken him. I hoped against hope that it was Tennago. If so, we could be back at River Run within a month.

  This was a faint hope, though. In the midst of the bitter quarrel with Brianna, Jamie had admitted telling Ian to make sure that Roger didn’t come back again. Tennago was about ten days journey from the Ridge; much too close for the purposes of an enraged father.

  I wanted to ask the women who entertained me about Roger, but no one in the house had any French or English, and I had only enough words of Tuscaroran to allow for basic politeness. Better to let Ian and Jamie handle the diplomatic negotiations. Jamie, with his gift for languages, was competent in Tuscaroran; Ian, who spent half his time hunting with the Indians, was thoroughly fluent.

  One of the women offered me a platter containing steaming mounds of grain cooked with fish. I leaned to scoop up a bit with the flat piece of wood provided for the purpose, and felt the amulet swing forward under my shirt, its small weight both a reminder of grief and a comfort to it.

  I had brought both Nayawenne’s amulet, and the carved opal I had found under the red cedar tree. I had brought the former, intending to give it back—to whom, I had no idea. The latter might augment the whisky, if additional bargaining power was needed. For the same reason, Jamie had brought every small valuable he possessed—not many—with the exception of his father’s ruby ring, which Brianna had brought to him from Scotland.

  We had left the ruby with Brianna, just in case we did not return—the possibility had to be faced. There was no telling whether Geillis Duncan had been right or wrong in her theories regarding the use of gemstones, but at least Brianna would have one.

  She had hugged me fiercely and kissed me when we left River Run. I hadn’t wanted to go. Nor had I wanted to stay. I was torn between them once more; between the necessity to stay and look after Brianna, and the equally urgent necessity to go with Jamie.

  “You have to go,” Brianna had said firmly. “I’ll be fine; you said yourself I’m healthy as a horse. You’ll be back a long time before I need you.”

  She had glanced at her father’s back; he stood in the stableyard, supervising the loading of the horses and mules. She turned back to me, expressionless.

  “You have to go, Mama. I trust you to find Roger.” There was an uncomfortable emphasis on the you, and I hoped very much that Jamie couldn’t hear her.

  “Surely you don’t think Jamie would—”

  “I don’t know,” she interrupted. “I don’t know what he’d do.” Her jaw was set in a way I recognized all too well. Argument was futile, but I tried anyway.

  “Well, I know,” I said firmly. “He’d do anything for you, Brianna. Anything. And even if it weren’t you, he’d do everything he possibly could to get Roger back. His sense of honor—” Her face shut up like a trap, and I realized my mistake.

  “His honor,” she said flatly. “That’s what matters. I guess it’s all right, though; as long as it makes him get Roger back.” She turned away, bending her head against the wind.

  “Brianna!” I said, but she only hunched her shoulders, pulling the shawl tight around them.

  “Auntie Claire? We’re ready now.” Ian had appeared nearby, glancing from me to Brianna, his face troubled. I looked from him to Brianna, hesitating, not wanting to leave her like this.

  “Bree?” I said again.