Drums of Autumn

  “Never came back? Did she find out what happened to him?”

  Jamie shook his head, batting away a small cloud of midges. The sun was sinking, painting the surface of the water gold and orange, and bugs were beginning to gather as the afternoon cooled into evening.

  “No. She went to the sheriff, and to the justice, and the constable searched high and low—but there was nay sign of the man. They looked for a week, and then gave up. He had never told his landlady which town it was in Virginia, so they couldna trace him further.”

  “How very odd.” I wiped a droplet of moisture off my chin. “When did the Doctor disappear?”

  “A year past, she said.” He looked at me, a little anxious. “Ye dinna mind? Using his things, I mean?”

  “No.” I closed the lid and stroked it gently, the dark wood warm and smooth under my fingers. “If it were me—I’d want someone to use them.”

  I remembered vividly the feel of my own doctor’s bag—cordovan leather, with my initials stamped in gilt on the handle. Originally stamped in gilt on the handle, that is; they had long since worn off, the leather gone smooth and shiny, rich with handling. Frank had given me the bag when I graduated from medical school; I had given it to my friend Joe Abernathy, wanting it to be used by someone who would treasure it as I had.

  He saw the shadow drift across my face—I saw the reflection of it darken his—but I took his hand and smiled as I squeezed it.

  “It’s a wonderful gift. However did you find it?”

  He smiled then, in return. The sun blazed low, a brilliant orange ball glimpsed briefly through dark treetops.

  “I’d seen the box when I went to the goldsmith’s shop—it was the goldsmith’s wife who’d kept it. Then I went back yesterday, meaning to buy ye a bit of jewelry—maybe a brooch—and whilst the goodwife was showing me the gauds, we happened to speak of this and that, and she told me of the Doctor, and—” He shrugged.

  “Why did you want to buy me jewelry?” I looked at him, puzzled. The sale of the ruby had left us with a bit of money, but extravagance was not at all like him, and under the circumstances—

  “Oh! To make up for sending all that money to Laoghaire? I didn’t mind; I said I didn’t.”

  He had—with some reluctance—arranged to send the bulk of the proceeds from the sale of the stone to Scotland, in payment of a promise made to Laoghaire MacKenzie—damn her eyes—Fraser, whom he had married at his sister’s persuasion while under the rather logical impression that if I was not dead, I was at least not coming back. My apparent resurrection from the dead had caused any amount of complications, Laoghaire not least among them.

  “Aye, ye said so,” he said, openly cynical.

  “I meant it—more or less,” I said, and laughed. “You couldn’t very well let the beastly woman starve to death, appealing as the idea is.”

  He smiled, faintly.

  “No. I shouldna like to have that on my conscience; there’s enough without. But that’s not why I wished to buy ye a present.”

  “Why, then?” The box was heavy; a gracious, substantial, satisfying weight across my legs, its wood a delight under my hands. He turned his head to look full at me, then, his hair fire-struck with the setting sun, face dark in silhouette.

  “Twenty-four years ago today, I married ye, Sassenach,” he said softly. “I hope ye willna have cause yet to regret it.”

  * * *

  The river’s edge was settled, rimmed with plantations from Wilmington to Cross Creek. Still, the banks were thickly forested, with only the occasional glimpse of fields where a break in the trees showed plantings, or every so often, a wooden dock, half-hidden in the foliage.

  We proceeded slowly upriver, following the tidal surge so long as it lasted, tying up for the night when it ran out. We ate dinner by a small fire on shore, but slept on the boat, Eutroclus having casually mentioned the prevalence of water moccasins, who—he said—inhabited dens beneath the riverbank but were much inclined to come and warm their cold blood next to the bodies of unwary sleepers.

  I awoke soon before dawn, stiff and sore from sleeping on boards, hearing the soft rush of a vessel passing on the river nearby, feeling the push of its wake against our hull. Jamie stirred in his sleep when he felt me move, turned over, and clasped me to his bosom.

  I could feel his body curled behind mine, in its paradoxical morning state of sleep and arousal. He made a drowsy noise and moved against me in inquiry, his hand fumbling at the hem of my rumpled shift.

  “Stop,” I said under my breath, batting his hand away. “Remember where we are, for God’s sake!”

  I could hear the shouts and barking of Ian and Rollo, galumphing to and fro on the shore, and small stirrings in the cabin, featuring hawking and spitting noises, indicating the imminent emergence of Captain Freeman.

  “Oh,” said Jamie, coming to the surface of consciousness. “Oh, aye. A pity, that.” He reached up, squeezed my breasts with both hands, and stretched his body with voluptuous slowness against me, giving me a detailed idea of what I was missing.

  “Ah, well,” he said, relaxing reluctantly, but not yet letting go. “Foeda est in coitu, um?”

  “It what?”

  “ ‘Foeda est in coitu et breois voluptas’ ” he recited obligingly. “ ‘Et taedat Veneiis statim peractae. Doing, a filthy pleasure is—and short. And done, we straight repent us of the sport.’ ”

  I glanced down at the stained boards under us. “Well, perhaps ‘filthy’ isn’t altogether the wrong word,” I began, “but—”

  “It’s not the filthiness that troubles me, Sassenach,” he interrupted, scowling at Ian, who was hanging over the side of the boat, shouting encouragement to Rollo as he swam. “It’s the short.”

  He glanced at me, scowl changing to a look of approval as he took in my state of dishevelment. “I mean to take my time about it, aye?”

  * * *

  This classical start to the day seemed to have had some lasting influence on Jamie’s mind. I could hear them at it as I sat in the afternoon sun, thumbing through Daniel Rawlings’s casebook—at once entertained, enlightened, and appalled at the things recorded there.

  I could hear Jamie’s voice in the ordered rise and fall of ancient Greek. I had heard that bit before— a passage from the Odyssey. He paused, with an expectant rise.

  “Ah…” said Ian.

  “What comes next, Ian?”

  “Er…”

  “Once more,” said Jamie, with a slight edge to his voice. “Pay attention, man. I’m no talkin’ for the pleasure of hearin’ myself, aye?” He began again, the elegant, formal verse warming to life as he spoke.

  He might not take pleasure in hearing himself, but I did. I had no Greek myself, but the rise and fall of syllables in that soft, deep voice was as soothing as the lap of water against the hull.

  Reluctantly accepting his nephew’s continued presence, Jamie took his guardianship of Ian with due seriousness, and had been tutoring the lad as we traveled, seizing odd moments of leisure to teach—or attempt to teach—the lad the rudiments of Greek and Latin grammar, and to improve his mathematics and conversational French.

  Fortunately, Ian had the same quick grasp of mathematical principles as his uncle; the side of the small cabin beside me was covered with elegant Euclidean proofs, carried out in burnt stick. When the subject turned to languages, though, they found less common ground.

  Jamie was a natural polygogue; he acquired languages and dialects with no visible effort, picking up idioms as a dog picks up foxtails in a romp through the fields. In addition, he had been schooled in the Classics at the Université in Paris, and—while disagreeing now and then with some of the Roman philosophers—regarded both Homer and Virgil as personal friends.

  Ian spoke the Gaelic and English with which he had been raised, and a sort of low French patois acquired from Fergus, and felt this quite sufficient to his needs. True, he had an impressive repertoire of swear words in six or seven other languages—acquired f
rom exposure to a number of disreputable influences in the recent past, not least of these being his uncle—but he had no more than a vague apprehension of the mysteries of Latin conjugation.

  Still less did he have an appreciation for the necessity of learning languages that to him were not only dead, but—he clearly thought—long decayed beyond any possibility of usefulness. Homer couldn’t compete with the excitement of this new country, adventure reaching out from both shores with beckoning green hands.

  Jamie finished his Greek passage, and with a sigh clearly audible to me where I sat, directed Ian to take out the Latin book he had borrowed from Governor Tryon’s library. With no recitation to distract me, I returned to my perusal of Dr. Rawlings’s casebook.

  Like myself, the Doctor had plainly had some Latin, but preferred English for the bulk of his notes, dropping into Latin only for an occasional formal entry.

  Bled Mr. Beddoes of a pt. Note distinct lessening of the bilious humor, his complexion much improved of the yellowness and pustules which have afflicted him. Administered black draught to assist purifying of the blood.

  “Ass,” I muttered—not for the first time. “Can’t you see the man’s got liver disease?” Probably a mild cirrhosis; Rawlings had noted a slight enlargement and hardening of the liver—though he attributed this to excessive production of bile. Most likely alcohol poisoning; the pustules on face and chest were characteristic of a nutritional deficiency that I saw commonly associated with excessive alcohol consumption—and God knew, that was epidemic.

  Beddoes, if he were still alive—a prospect I considered doubtful—was likely drinking anything up to a quart of mixed spirit daily and hadn’t so much as smelled a green vegetable in months. The pustules on whose disappearance Rawlings was congratulating himself had likely diminished because he had used turnip leaves as a coloring agent in his special receipt for “black draught.”

  Absorbed in my reading, I half heard Ian’s stumbling rendition of Plautus’s Vertue from the other side of the cabin, interrupted in every other line by Jamie’s deeper voice, prompting and correcting.

  “ ‘Virtus praemium est optimus…’ ”

  “Optimum.”

  “ ‘…est optimum. Virtus omnibus rebus’ and…ah…and…”

  “Anteit.”

  “Thank ye, Uncle. ‘Virtus omnibus rebus anteit…profectus’?”

  “Profecto.”

  “Oh, aye, profecto. Um…‘Virtus’?”

  “Libertas. ‘Libertas salus vita res et parentes, patria et prognati…’ d’ye recall what is meant by ‘vita,’ Ian?”

  “Life,” came Ian’s voice, seizing gratefully on this buoyant object in a flounderous sea.

  “Aye, that’s good, but it’s more than life. In Latin, it means not only being alive but it’s also a man’s substance, what he’s made of. See, then it goes on, ‘…libertas salus vita res et parentes, patria et prognati tutantur, servantur; virtus omnia in sese habet, omnia adsunt bona quem penest virtus.’ Now, what is he sayin’ there, d’ye think?”

  “Ah…virtue is a good thing?” Ian ventured.

  There was a momentary silence, during which I could almost hear Jamie’s blood pressure rising. A hiss of indrawn breath, then, as he thought better of whatever he had been about to say, a long-suffering exhalation.

  “Mmphm. Look ye, Ian. ‘Tutantur, servantur.’ What does he mean by using those two together, instead of putting it as…” My attention faded, drawn back to the book, wherein Dr. Rawlings now gave account of a duel and its consequences.

  May 15. Was called from my bed at dawn to attend a gentleman staying at the Red Dog. Found him in sad case, with a wound to his hand, occasioned by the misfire of a pistol, the thumb and index fingers of the hand being blown off altogether by the explosion, the middle finger badly mangled and two-thirds of the hand so lacerated that it was scarce recognizable as a human appendage.

  Determining that only prompt amputation would serve, I sent for the landlord and requested a pannikin of brandy, linen for bandages, and the help of two strong men. These being rapidly provided and the patient suitably restrained, I proceeded to take the hand—it was the right, to the misfortune of the patient—off just above the wrist. Successfully ligated two arteries, but the anterior interosseus escaped me, being retracted into the flesh after I sawed through the bones. Was forced to loosen the tourniquet in order to find it, so bleeding was considerable—a fortunate accident, as the copious outpouring of blood rendered the patient insensible and thus put an end for the moment to his agony, as well as to his struggles, which were greatly hampering my work.

  The amputation being successfully concluded, the gentleman was put to bed, but I stayed near at hand, lest he regain consciousness abruptly and in random movement do hurt to my stitching.

  This fascinating narrative was interrupted by a sudden outburst from Jamie, who had evidently reached the end of his patience.

  “Ian, your Latin would disgrace a dog! And as for the rest, ye havena got enough understanding of Greek to tell the difference between water and wine!”

  “If they’re drinkin’ it, it’s not water,” Ian muttered, sounding rebellious.

  I closed the book and got hastily to my feet. It sounded rather as though the services of a referee might shortly be called for. Ian was making small Scottish noises of discontent as I rounded the cabin.

  “Aye, mphm, but I dinna care so much—”

  “Aye, ye don’t care! That’s the true pity of it—that ye havena the grace even to feel shame for your ignorance!”

  There was a charged silence after this, broken only by the soft splash of Troklus’s pole in the bow. I peeked around the corner, to see Jamie glaring at his nephew, who looked abashed. Ian glanced at me, coughed and cleared his throat.

  “Well, I’ll tell ye, Uncle Jamie, if I thought shame would help, I wouldna scruple to blush.”

  He looked so apologetically hangdog that I couldn’t help laughing. Jamie turned, hearing me, and his scowl faded slightly.

  “Ye’re not a bit of help, Sassenach,” he said. “You’ve the Latin, have ye not? Being a physician, ye must. Perhaps I should leave his Latin schooling to you, aye?”

  I shook my head. While it was more or less true that I could read Latin—badly and laboriously—I didn’t fancy trying to cram the ragbag remnants of my education into Ian’s head.

  “All I remember is Arma virumque cano.” I glanced at Ian and translated, grinning. “My arm got bit off by a dog.”

  Ian burst into giggles, and Jamie gave me a look of profound disillusion.

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. While Jamie and Ian didn’t resemble each other in any physical respect beyond height, both had thick hair and the habit of running a hand through it when agitated or thoughtful. It looked to have been a stressful lesson—both of them looked as though they’d been pulled backward through a hedgerow.

  Jamie smiled wryly at me, then turned back to Ian, shaking his head.

  “Ah, well. I’m sorry to bark at ye, Ian, truly. But ye’ve a fine mind, and I shouldna like to see ye waste it. God, man, at your age, I was in Paris, already starting in to study at the Université!”

  Ian stood looking down into the water that swirled past the side of the ship in smooth brown riffles. His hands rested on the rail; big hands, broad-backed and browned by the sun.

  “Aye,” he said. “And at my age, my own father was in France, too. Fighting.”

  I was a bit startled to hear this. I had known that the elder Ian had soldiered in France for a time, but not that he had gone so early for a soldier—nor stayed so long. Young Ian was just fifteen. The elder Ian had served as a foreign mercenary from that age, then, until the age of twenty-two; when a cannon blast had left him with a leg so badly shattered by grapeshot that it had been amputated just below the knee—and he had come home for good.

  Jamie looked at his nephew for a moment, frowning slightly. Then he came to stand beside Ian, leaning backward, hands on the rail to b
alance himself.

  “I ken that, aye?” Jamie said quietly. “For I followed him, four years later, when I was outlawed.”

  Ian looked up at that, startled.

  “Ye were together there in France?”

  There was a slight breeze caused by our movement, but it was still a hot day. Perhaps the temperature decided him that it was better to let the subject of higher learning drop for a moment, for Jamie nodded, lifting the thick tail of his hair to cool his neck.

  “In Flanders. For more than a year, before Ian was wounded and sent home. We fought wi’ a regiment of Scots mercenaries then—under Fergus mac Leodhas.”

  Ian’s eyes were alight with interest.

  “Is that where Fergus—our Fergus—got his name, then?”

  His uncle smiled.

  “Aye, I named him for mac Leodhas; a bonny man, and a great soldier, forbye. He thought weel o’ Ian. Did your Da never speak to you of him?”

  Ian shook his head, his brow slightly clouded.

  “He’s never said a thing to me. I—I kent he’d lost his leg fighting in France—Mam told me that, when I asked—but he wouldna say a word about it, himself.”

  With Dr. Rawlings’s description of amputation vivid in my mind, I thought it likely that the elder Ian hadn’t wanted to recall the occasion.

  Jamie shrugged, plucking the sweat-damp shirt away from his chest.

  “Aye, well. I suppose he meant to put that time behind him, once he’d come home and settled at Lallybroch. And then…” He hesitated, but Ian was insistent.

  “And then what, Uncle Jamie?”

  Jamie glanced at his nephew, and one side of his mouth curled up.

  “Well, I think he didna want to tell too many tales of war and fighting, lest you lads get thinking on it and set yourselves to go for soldiers, too. He and your mother will ha’ wanted better for you, aye?”

  I thought the elder Ian had been wise; it was clear from the look on his face that the younger Ian couldn’t think of a much more exciting prospect than war and fighting.

  “That will ha’ been my Mam’s doing,” Ian said, with an air of disgust. “She’d have me wrapped in wool and tied to her apron strings, did I let her.”

  Jamie grinned.

  “Oh, let her, is it? And d’ye think she’d wrap ye in wool and smother ye wi’ kisses if ye were home this minute?”

  Ian dropped the pose of disdain.

  “Well, no,” he admitted. “I think she’d skelp me raw.”

  Jamie laughed.

  “Ye know a bit about women, Ian, if not so much as ye think.”

  Ian glanced skeptically from his uncle to me, and back.

  “And you’ll ken all about them, I suppose, Uncle?”

  I raised one eyebrow, inviting an answer to this, but Jamie merely laughed.

  “It’s a wise man who kens the limits of his knowledge, Ian.” He bent and kissed my damp forehead, then turned back to his nephew, adding, “Though I could wish your own limits went a bit further.”

  Ian shrugged, looking bored.

  “I dinna mean to set up for a gentleman,” he said. “After all, Young Jamie and Michael dinna read Greek; they do well enough!”

  Jamie rubbed his nose, considering his nephew thoughtfully.

  “Young Jamie has Lallybroch. And wee Michael does well wi’ Jared in Paris. They’ll be settled. We did as best we might for the two o’ them, but there was precious little money to pay for travel or schooling when they came to manhood. There wasna much choice for them, aye?”

  He pushed himself off the rail and stood upright.

  “But your parents dinna want that for you, Ian, if better might be managed. They’d have ye grow to be a man of learning and influence; duine uasal, perhaps.” It was a Gaelic expression I had heard before, literally “a man of worth.” It was the term for tacksmen and lairds, the men of property and followers who ranked only below chieftains in the Highland clans.

  Such a man as Jamie himself had been, before the Rising. But not now.

  “Mmphm. And did ye do as your parents wanted for ye, then, Uncle Jamie?” Ian looked blandly at his uncle, with only a wary twitch of the eye to show he knew he was treading on shaky ground. Jamie had been meant to be duine uasal, indeed; Lallybroch had been his by right. It was only in an effort to save the property from confiscation by the Crown that he had made it over legally to Young Jamie, instead.

  Jamie stared at him for a moment, then rubbed a knuckle across his upper lip before replying.