Drums of Autumn, Page 25

  “She would make me heir, but not owner in her place. She would use me to do those things she cannot—but I would be no more than her cat’s-paw. True, she would ask my opinion, listen to my advice; but nothing would be done, and she didna wish it so.”

  He shook his head.

  “Her husband is dead. Whether she was fond of him or no, she is mistress here now, with none to answer to. And she enjoys the taste of power too well to spit it out.”

  He was plainly correct in this assessment of Jocasta Cameron’s character, and therein lay the key to her plan. She needed a man; someone to go into those places she could not go, to deal with the Navy, to handle the chores of a large estate that she could not manage because of her blindness.

  At the same time, she patently did not want a husband; someone who would usurp her power and dictate to her. Had he not been a slave, Ulysses could have acted for her—but while he could be her eyes and ears, he could not be her hands.

  No, Jamie was the perfect choice; a strong, competent man, able to command respect among peers, compel obedience in subordinates. One knowledgeable in the management of land and men. Furthermore, a man bound to her by kinship and obligation, there to do her bidding—but essentially powerless. He would be held in thrall by dependence upon her bounty, and by the rich bribe of River Run itself; a debt that need not be paid until the matter was no longer of any earthly concern to Jocasta Cameron.

  There was an increasing lump in my throat as I sought for words. I couldn’t, I thought. I couldn’t manage it. But I couldn’t face the alternative, either; I couldn’t urge him to reject Jocasta’s offer, knowing it would send him to Scotland, to meet an unknown death.

  “I can’t say what you should do,” I finally said, my voice barely audible above the regular lap of the oars.

  There was an eddy pool, where a large tree had fallen into the water, its branches forming a trap for all the debris that drifted downstream. Jamie made for this, backing the rowboat neatly into quiet water. He let down the oars, and wiped a sleeve across his forehead, breathing heavily from exertion.

  The night was quiet around us, with little sound but the lapping of water, and the occasional scrape of submerged tree branches against the hull. At last he reached out and touched my chin.

  “Your face is my heart, Sassenach,” he said softly, “and love of you is my soul. But you’re right; ye canna be my conscience.”

  In spite of everything, I felt a lightening of spirit, as though some indefinable burden had dropped away.

  “Oh, I’m glad,” I said, adding impulsively, “it would be a terrible strain.”

  “Oh, aye?” He looked mildly startled. “Ye think me verra wicked, then?”

  “You’re the best man I’ve ever met,” I said. “I only meant…it’s such a strain, to try to live for two people. To try to make them fit your ideas of what’s right…you do it for a child, of course, you have to, but even then, it’s dreadfully hard work. I couldn’t do it for you—it would be wrong even to try.”

  I’d taken him back more than a little. He sat for some moments, his face half turned away.

  “Do ye really think me a good man?” he said at last. There was a queer note in his voice, that I couldn’t quite decipher.

  “Yes,” I said, with no hesitation. Then added, half jokingly, “Don’t you?”

  After a long pause, he said, quite seriously, “No, I shouldna think so.”

  I looked at him, speechless, no doubt with my mouth hanging open.

  “I am a violent man, and I ken it well,” he said quietly. He spread his hands out on his knees; big hands, which could wield sword and dagger with ease, or choke the life from a man. “So do you—or ye should.”

  “You’ve never done anything you weren’t forced to do!”

  “No?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, but even as I spoke, a shadow of doubt clouded my words. Even when done from the most urgent necessity, did such things not leave a mark on the soul?

  “Ye wouldna hold me in the same estimation as, say, a man like Stephen Bonnet? He might well say he acted from necessity.”

  “If you think you have the slightest thing in common with Stephen Bonnet, you’re dead wrong,” I said firmly.

  He shrugged, half impatient, and shifted restlessly on the narrow bench.

  “There’s nay much to choose between Bonnet and me, save that I have a sense of honor that he lacks. What else keeps me from turning thief?” he demanded. “From plundering those whom I might? It is in me to do it—my one grandsire built Leoch on the gold of those he robbed in the Highland passes; the other built his fortune on the bodies of women whom he forced for their wealth and titles.”

  He stretched himself, powerful shoulders rising dark against the shimmer of the water behind him. Then he suddenly took hold of the oars across his knees and flung them into the bottom of the boat, with a crash that made me jump.

  “I am more than five-and-forty!” he said. “A man should be settled at that age, no? He should have a house, and some land to grow his food, and a bit of money put away to see him through his auld age, at the least.”

  He took a deep breath; I could see the white bosom of his shirt rise with his swelling chest.

  “Well, I dinna have a house. Or land. Or money. Not a croft, not a tattie-plot, not a cow or a sheep or a pig or a goat! I havena got a rooftree or a bedstead, or a pot to piss in!”

  He slammed his fist down on the thwart, making the wooden seat vibrate under me.

  “I dinna own the clothes I stand up in!”

  There was a long silence, broken only by the thin song of crickets.

  “You have me,” I said, in a small voice. It didn’t seem a lot.

  He made a small sound in his throat that might have been either a laugh or a sob.

  “Aye, I have,” he said. His voice was quivering a bit, though whether with passion or amusement, I couldn’t tell. “That’s the hell of it, aye?”

  “It is?”

  He threw up his hand in a gesture of profound impatience.

  “If it was only me, what would it matter? I could live like Myers; go to the woods, hunt and fish for my living, and when I was too old, lie down under a peaceful tree and die, and let the foxes gnaw my bones. Who would care?”

  He shrugged his shoulders with irritable violence, as though his shirt was too tight.

  “But it’s not only me,” he said. “It’s you, and it’s Ian and it’s Duncan and it’s Fergus and it’s Marsali—God help me, there’s even Laoghaire to think of!”

  “Oh, let’s don’t,” I said.

  “Do ye not understand?” he said, in near desperation. “I would lay the world at your feet, Claire—and I have nothing to give ye!”

  He honestly thought it mattered.

  I sat looking at him, searching for words. He was half turned away, shoulders slumped in despair.

  Within an hour, I had gone from anguish at the thought of losing him in Scotland, to a strong desire to bed him in the herbaceous borders, and from that to a pronounced urge to hit him on the head with an oar. Now I was back to tenderness.

  At last I took one big, callused hand and slid forward so I knelt on the boards between his knees. I laid my head against his chest, and felt his breath stir my hair. I had no words, but I had made my choice.

  “ ‘Whither thou goest,’ ” I said, “ ‘I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.’ ” Be it Scottish hill or southern forest. “You do what you have to; I’ll be there.”

  * * *

  The water ran fast and shallow near the middle of the creek; I could see the boulders black just beneath the glinting surface. Jamie saw them, too, and pulled strongly for the far side, bringing us to rest against a shelving gravel bank, in a pool formed by the roots of a weeping willow. I leaned out and caught a branch of the willow, and wrapped the painter round it.

  I ha
d thought we would return to River Run, but evidently this expedition had some point beyond respite. We had continued upriver instead, Jamie pulling strongly against the slow current.

  Left alone with my thoughts, I could only listen to the faint hiss of his breath, and wonder what he would do. If he chose to stay…well, it might not be as difficult as he thought. I didn’t underrate Jocasta Cameron, but neither did I underestimate Jamie Fraser. Both Colum and Dougal MacKenzie had tried to bend him to their will—and both had failed.

  I had a moment’s qualm at the memory of my last sight of Dougal MacKenzie, mouthing soundless curses as he drowned in his own blood, Jamie’s dirk socketed at the base of his throat. I am a violent man, he’d said, you know it.

  But he was still wrong; there was a difference between this man and Stephen Bonnet, I thought, watching the flex of his body on the oars, the grace and power of the sweep of his arms. He had several things beyond the honor that he claimed: kindness, courage…and a conscience.

  I realized where we were going, as he backed with one oar, steering across the current toward the mouth of a wide creek, overhung with aspens. I had never approached by water before, but Jocasta had said it was not far.

  I should not have been surprised; if he had come out tonight to confront his demons, it was a most appropriate place.

  A little way above the creek mouth, the mill loomed dark and silent. There was a dim glow behind its bulk; light from the slave shanties near the woods. We were surrounded by the usual night noises, but the place seemed strangely quiet, in spite of the racket made by trees and frogs and water. Though it was night, the huge building seemed to cast a shadow—though this was plainly no more than my imagination.

  “Places that are very busy in the daytime always seem particularly spooky at night,” I said, in an effort to break the mill’s silence.

  “Do they?” Jamie sounded abstracted. “I didna much like that one in the daylight.”

  I shuddered at the memory.

  “Neither did I. I only meant—”

  “Byrnes is dead.” He didn’t look at me; his face was turned toward the mill, half-hidden by the willow’s shadow.

  I dropped the end of the tie rope.

  “The overseer? When?” I said, shocked more by the abruptness than the revelation. “And how?”

  “This afternoon. Campbell’s youngest lad brought the news just before sunset.”

  “How?” I asked again. I gripped my knees, a double handful of ivory silk twisted in my fingers.

  “It was the lockjaw.” His voice was casual, unemphatic. “A verra nasty way to die.”

  He was right about that. I had never actually seen anyone die of tetanus myself, but I knew the symptoms well enough: restlessness and difficulty swallowing, developing into a progressive stiffening as the muscles of arms and legs and neck began to spasm. The spasms increased in severity and duration until the patient’s body was hard as wood, arched in an agony that came on and receded, came on again, went off, and at last came on in an endless tetany that could not be relaxed by anything save death.

  “He died grinnin’, Ronnie Campbell said. But I shouldna think it was a happy death, forbye.” It was a grim joke, but there was little humor in his voice.

  I sat up quite straight, feeling cold all down my spine in spite of the warmth of the night.

  “It isn’t a quick death, either,” I said. Suspicion spread cold tentacles through my mind. “It takes days to die of tetanus.”

  “It took Davie Byrnes five days, first to last.” If there had been any trace of humor in his voice to start with, it was gone now.

  “You saw him,” I said, a small flicker of anger beginning to thaw the internal chill. “You saw him! And you didn’t tell me?”

  I had dressed Byrnes’s injury—hideous, but not life-threatening—and had been told that he would be kept somewhere “safe” until the disturbance over the lynching had died down. Heartsick as I was over the matter, I had made no effort to inquire further after the overseer’s whereabouts or welfare; it was my own guilt at this neglect that made me angry, and I knew it—but the knowledge didn’t help.

  “Could ye have done anything? I thought ye told me that the lockjaw was one of the things that couldna be helped, even in your time.” He wasn’t looking at me; I could see his profile turned toward the mill, head stamped in darker black against the lighter shadow of pale leaves.

  I forced myself to let go of my skirt. I smoothed the crumpled patches over my knee, thinking dimly that Phaedre would have a terrible time ironing it.

  “No,” I said, with a little effort. “No, I couldn’t have saved him. But I should have seen him; I might have eased him a little.”

  Now he did look at me; I saw his head turn, and felt the shifting of his weight in the boat.

  “You might,” he said evenly.

  “And you wouldn’t let me—” I stopped, remembering his absences this past week, and his evasive replies when I had asked him where he’d been. I could imagine the scene all too well; the tiny, stifling attic room in Farquard Campbell’s house where I had dressed Byrnes’s injury. The racked figure on the bed, dying by inches under the cold eyes of those the law had made his unwilling allies, knowing that he died despised. The sense of cold came back, raising gooseflesh on my arms.

  “No, I wouldna let Campbell send for you,” he said softly. “There’s the law, Sassenach—and there is justice. I ken the difference well enough.”

  “There’s such a thing as mercy, too.” And had anyone asked, I would have called Jamie Fraser a merciful man. He had been, once. But the years between now and then had been hard ones—and compassion was a soft emotion, easily eroded by circumstance. I had thought he still had his kindness, though; and felt a queer pain at the thought of its loss. I shouldna think so, no. Had that been no more than honesty?

  The boat had drifted halfway round, so that the drooping branch hung now between us. There was a small snort from the darkness behind the leaves.

  “Blessed are the merciful,” he said, “for they shall find mercy. Byrnes wasn’t, and he didn’t. And as for me, once God had made his opinion of the man known, I didna think it right to interfere.”

  “You think God gave him tetanus?”

  “I canna think anyone else would have the imagination for it. Besides,” he went on, logically, “where else would ye look for justice?”

  I searched for words, and failed to find any. Giving up, I returned to the only possible point of argument. I felt a little sick.

  “You ought to have told me. Even if you didn’t think I could help, it wasn’t your business to decide—”

  “I didna want ye to go.” His voice was still quiet, but there was a note of steel in it now.

  “I know you didn’t! But it doesn’t matter whether you thought Byrnes deserved to suffer or—”

  “Not for him!” The boat rocked suddenly as he moved, and I grasped the sides to keep my balance. He spoke violently.

  “I didna care a fig whether Byrnes died easy or hard, but I’m no a monster of cruelty! I didna keep you from him to make him suffer; I kept ye away to protect you.”

  I was relieved to hear this, but increasingly angry as the truth of what he’d done dawned on me.

  “It wasn’t your business to decide that. If I’m not your conscience, it isn’t up to you to be mine!” I brushed angrily at the screen of willow fronds between us, trying to see him.

  Suddenly a hand shot through the leaves and grabbed my wrist.

  “It’s up to me to keep ye safe!”

  I tried to jerk away, but he had a tight grip on me, and he wasn’t letting go.

  “I am not a young girl who needs protection, nor yet an idiot! If there’s some reason for me not to do something, then tell me and I’ll listen. But you can’t decide what I’m to do and where I’m to go without even consulting me—I won’t stand for that, and you bloody well know it!”

  The boat lurched, and with a huge rustling of leaves, he poppe
d his head through the willow, glaring.

  “I am not trying to say where ye’ll go!”

  “You decided where I mustn’t go, and that’s just as bad!” The willow leaves slid back over his shoulders as the boat moved, jarred by his violence, and we revolved slowly, coming out of the tree’s shadow.

  He loomed in front of me, massive as the mill, his head and shoulders blotting out a good bit of the scenery behind him. The long, straight nose was an inch from mine, and his eyes had gone narrow. They were a dark enough blue to be black in this light, and looking into them at close range was most unnerving.

  I blinked. He didn’t.

  He had let go of my wrist when he came through the leaves. Now he took hold of my upper arms. I could feel the heat of his grip through the cloth. His hands were very big and very hard, making me suddenly aware of the fragility of my own bones in contrast. I am a violent man.

  He’d shaken me a time or two before, and I hadn’t liked it. In case he had something of the sort in mind just now, I inserted a foot between his legs, and prepared to give him a swift knee where it would do most good.

  “I was wrong,” he said.

  Tensed for violence, I had actually started to jerk my foot up, when I heard what he had said. Before I could stop, he had clamped his legs tight together, trapping my knee between his thighs.

  “I said I was wrong, Sassenach,” he repeated, a touch of impatience in his voice. “D’ye mind?”

  “Ah…no,” I said, feeling a trifle sheepish. I wiggled my knee tentatively, but he kept his thighs squeezed tight together.

  “You wouldn’t consider letting go of me, would you?” I said politely. My heart was still pounding.

  “No, I wouldn’t. Are ye going to listen to me now?”

  “I suppose so,” I said, still polite. “It doesn’t look as though I’m very busy at the moment.”

  I was close enough to see his mouth twitch. His thighs squeezed tighter for a moment, then relaxed.

  “This is a verra foolish quarrel, and you know that as well as I do.”

  “No, I don’t.” My anger had faded somewhat, but I wasn’t about to let him dismiss it altogether. “It’s maybe not important to you, but it is to me. It isn’t foolish. And you know it, or you wouldn’t be admitting you’re wrong.”

  The twitch was more pronounced this time. He took a deep breath, and dropped his hands from my shoulders.

  “Well, then. I should maybe have told ye about Byrnes; I admit it. But if I had, ye would have gone to him, even if I’d said it was the lockjaw—and I kent it was, I’ve seen it before. Even if there was nothing ye could do, you’d still go? No?”

  “Yes. Even if—yes, I would have gone.”

  In fact, there was nothing I could have done for Byrnes. Myers’s anesthetic wouldn’t have helped a case of tetanus. Nothing short of injectable curare would ease those spasms. I could have given him nothing more than the comfort of my presence, and it was doubtful that he would have appreciated that—or even noticed it. Still, I would have felt bound to offer it.

  “I would have had to go,” I said, more gently. “I’m a doctor. Don’t you see?”

  “Of course I do,” he said gruffly. “D’ye think I dinna ken ye at all, Sassenach?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he went on.

  “There was talk about what happened at the mill—there would be, aye? But with the man dying under your hands as he did—well, no one’s said straight out that ye might have killed him on purpose…but it’s easy to see folk thinkin’ it. Not thinkin’ that ye killed him, even—but only that ye might have thought to let him die on purpose, so as to save him from the rope.”

  I stared at my hands, spread out on my knees, nearly as pale as the ivory satin under them.

  “I did think of it.”

  “I ken that fine, aye?” he said dryly. “I saw your face, Sassenach.”

  I drew a deep breath, if only to assure myself that the air was no longer thick with the smell of blood. There was nothing but the turpentine scent of the pine forest, clean and astringent in my nostrils. I had a sudden vivid memory of the hospital, of the smell of pine-scented disinfectant that hung in the air, that overlaid but could not banish the underlying smell of sickness.

  I took another cleansing breath, and raised my head to look at Jamie.

  “And did you wonder if I’d killed him?”

  He looked faintly surprised.