The Fiery Cross, Page 28

  The smile faded from Jamie's face.

  "Ye may have my sympathy, Hermon, and welcome. But if it comes to it ... I am Colonel of militia. I will have a duty to be carried out, whether that duty is to my liking or no."

  Husband flapped a hand, dismissing this.

  "I would not ask thee to forsake duty-if it comes. I pray it does not." He leaned forward a little, across the table. "I would ask something of thee, though. My wife, my children ... if I must leave hurriedly. . .

  "Send them here. They will be safe."

  Husband sat back then, shoulders slumping. He closed his eyes and breathed once, deeply, then opened them and set his hands on the table, as though to rise. "I thank thee. As to the mare-keep her. If my family should have need of

  her, someone will come. If not-I should greatly prefer that thee have the use of her, rather than some corrupt sheriff."

  I felt Jamie move, wanting to protest, and laid a hand on his leg to stop him. Hermon Husband needed reassurance, much more than he needed a horse he could not keep.

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  "We'll take good care of her," I said, smiling into his eyes. "And of your family, if the need comes. Tell me, what is her name?"

  "The mare?" Hermon rose to his feet, and a sudden smile split his face, lightening it amazingly. "Her name is Jerusha, but my wife calls her Mistress Piggy; I am afraid she does possess a great appetite," he added apologetically to Jamie, who had stiffened perceptibly at the word "pig."

  "No matter," Jamie said, dismissing pigs from his mind with an obvious effort. He rose, glancing at the window, where the rays of the afternoon sun were turning the polished pinewood of the sills and floors to molten gold. "It grows late, Hermon. Will ye not sup with us, and stop the night?"

  Husband shook his head, and stooped to retrieve his shoulder bag. "Nay, friend James, I thank thee. I have many places still to go."

  I insisted that he wait, though, while I made up a parcel of food for him, and he went with Jamie to saddle his mule while I did so. I heard them talking quietly together as they came back from the paddock, voices so low-pitched that I couldn't make out the words. As I came out onto the back porch with the package of sandwiches and beer, though, I heard Jamie say to him, with a sort of urgency, "Are ye sure, Hermon, that what ye do is Aise-or necessary?"

  Husband didn't answer immediately, but took the parcel from me with a nod of thanks. Then he turned to Jamie, the mule's bridle in his other hand.

  "I am minded," he said, glancing from Jamie to me, "of James Nayler. Thee will have heard of him?"

  Jamie looked as blank as I did, and Hermon smiled in his beard.

  "He was an early member of the Society of Friends, one of those who joined George Fox, who began the Society in England. James Nayler was a man of forceful conviction, though he was ... individual in his expression of it. Upon one famous occasion, he walked naked through the snow, whilst shouting doom to the city of Bristol. George Fox inquired of him then, 'Is thee sure the Lord told thee to do this?' "

  The smile widened, and he put his hat carefully back on his head.

  "He said that he was. And so am 1, friend James. God keep thee and thy family."

  SHOOTING LESSON$

  RIANNA GLANCED BACK over her shoulder, feeling guilty. The house below had disappeared beneath a yellow sea of chestnut Bleaves, but the cries of her child still rang in her ears.

  Roger saw her look back down the mountainside, and frowned a little, though his voice was light when he spoke.

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  "He'll be fine, hen. You know your mother and Lizzie will take good care of him."

  "Lizzie Nvill spoil him rotten," she agreed, but with a queer tug at her heart at ro all day, playthe admission. She could easily see Lizzie carrying Jemmy to and f

  ing with him, making faces at him, feeding him rice pudding with molasses ... Jemrny would love the attention, once he got over the distress of her leaving. She felt a sudden surge of territorial feeling regarding Jemmy's small pink toes; she hated the very idea of Lizzie playing Ten Wee Piggies with him.

  She hated leaving him, period. His shrieks of panic as she pried his grip from her shirt and handed him over to her mother echoed in her mind, magnified by imagination, and his tearstained look of outraged betrayal lingered in her mind.

  At the same time, her need to escape was urgent. She couldn't wait to peel Jem's sticky, clutching hands off her skin and speed away into the morning, free as one of the homing geese that honked their way south through the mountain passes.

  She supposed, reluctantly, that she wouldn't f

  eel nearly so guilty about leaving Jemmy, had she not secretly been so eager to do it.

  "I'm sure he'll be fine," she reassured herself, more than Roger. "It's just ... I've never really left him for very long before."

  "Mmphm." Roger made a noncommittal noise that might have been interpreted as sympathy. His expression, however, made it clear that he personally thought it well past time that she had left the baby.

  A momentary spurt of anger warmed her face, but she bit her tongue. He hadn't said anything, after all-had clearly made an effort not to say anything, in fact. She could make an effort, too-and she supposed that it was perhaps not fair to quarrel Aith someone on the basis of what you Ithought they were thinking.

  She choked off the acrimonious remark she'd had in mind, and instead smiled at him.

  "Nice day, isn't it?"

  The wary look faded from his face, and he smiled, too, his eyes warming to a green as deep and fresh as the moss that lay in thick beds at the shaded feet of the trees they passed.

  "Great day," he said. "Feels good to be out of the house, aye?"

  She shot a quick look at him, but it seemed to be a simple statement of fact, with no ulterior motives behind it.

  She didn't answer, but nodded in agreement, liffing her face to the errant breeze that wandered through the spruce and fir around them. A swirl of rusty aspen leaves blew down, clinging momentarily to the homespun of their breeches and the light wool of their stockings.

  "Wait a minute."

  On impulse, she stopped and pulled off her leather buskins and stockings, pushing them carelessly into the rucksack on her shoulder. She stood still, eyes closed in ecstasy, wiggling long bare toes in a patch of damp moss.

  "Oh, Roger, try it! This is wonderful!"

  He lifted one eyebrow, but obligingly set down the gun-he had taken it, when they left the house, and she had let him, despite a proprietorial urge to carry it herself-undid his own footgear, and cautiously slid one long-boned

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  foot into the moss beside hers. His eyes closed involuntarily, and his mouth rounded into a soundless "ooh."

  Moved by impulse, she leaned over and kissed him. His eyes flew open in startlement, but he had fast reflexes. He wrapped a long arm around her waist and kissed her back, thoroughly. It was an unusually warm day for late autumn, and he wore no coat, only a hunting shirt. His chest felt startlingly immediate through the woolen cloth of his shirt; she could feel the tiny bump of his nipple rising under the palm of her hand.

  God knew what might have happened next, but the wind changed. A faint cry drifted up from the sea of tossing yellow below, it might have been a baby's cry, or perhaps only a distant crow, but her head swiveled toward it, like a compass needle pointing to true north.

  it broke the mood, and he let go, stepping back"D'ye want to go back?" he asked, sounding resigned. She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  "No. Let's get a little farther away from the house, though. We don't want to bother them with the noise. of--of shooting, I mean."

  He grinned, and she felt the blood rise hot in her face. No, she couldn't pretend she hadn't realized there was more than one motive for this private expedition.

  "No, not that, either," he said. He stooped for his shoes and stockings. "Come on, then."

  She declined to put on her own footwear, but too
k the opportunity to reappropriate the gun - It wasn't that she didn't trust him with it, though he admitted he hadn't fired such a gun before. She just liked the feel of it, and felt secure with its weight balanced on her shoulder, even unloaded. A Land pattern musket, it was more than five feet long, and weighed a good ten pounds or so, but the butt of the polished walnut stock fitted snugly into her hand and the weight of the steel barrel felt right, laid in the hollow of her shoulder, muzzle to the sky.

  "You're going to go barefoot?" Roger cast a quizzical glance at her feet, then ahead, up the mountainside, where a faint path wove through blackberry brambles and fallen branches.

  "Just for a while," she assured him. "I used to go barefoot all the time when I was little. DadclyFrank-took us to the mountains every summer, to the White Mountains or the Adironclacks. After a week, the bottoms of my feet were like leather; I could have walked on hot coals and not felt a thing."

  "Aye, I did, too," he said, smiting, and tucked his shoes away as well. "Granted," he said, with a nod toward the faint path that wove its way through brush and half-buried granite outcrops, "the walking along the riverbank of the Ness or the shingle by the Firth was a bit easier going than this, stones notwithstanding."

  "That's a point," she said, frowning slightly at his feet. "Have you had a tetanus shot recently? In case you step on something sharp and get punctured?" He was already climbing ahead of her, choosing his footing cautiously.

  "I had injections for everything one could possibly have injections for, before I came through the stones," he assured her, over one shoulder. "Typhoid, cholera, dengue fever, the lot. I'm sure tetanus was in there."

  "Dengue fever? I thought I'd had shots for everything, too, but not that

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  one." Digging her toes into the cool mats of dead grass, she took a few long strides to catch him up.

  "Shouldn't need it up here." The path ambled round the curve of a steep bank overgrown with yellowing pawpaw and vanished under the overhang of a clump of black-green hemlock. He held the heavy branches back for her and she ducked under them into the pungent gloom, gun held carefully crosswise.

  "I wasn't sure where I might have to go, see." His voice came from behind her, casual, damped by the darkened air under the trees. "If it was the coastal towns, or the West Indies ... there were ... there are," he corrected himself, automatically, "any number of entertaining African diseases, brought in by the slave ships. Thought I'd best be prepared."

  She took advantage of the rough terrain not to answer, but was dismayedand at the same time, rather shamefully pleased-to discover the lengths to which he'd been prepared to go in order to follow and find her.

  The ground was covered with the mottled brown of shed needles, but so damp that there was neither crackle nor prick beneath her feet. It felt spongy, cool, and pleasant under her bare soles, with a give to it that made her think the mass of dead needles must be a foot thick, at least.

  "Ow!" Roger, not so lucky in his passage, had set his foot on a rotten persimmon and slid, barely catching himself by grabbing hold of a holly bush, which promptly stabbed him with its prickly leaves.

  "Shit," he said, sucking the wounded thumb. "Good thing about the tetanus, aye?"

  She laughed in agreement, but found herself worrying as they climbed. What about Jemmy, when he began to walk, and clamber over mountains barefoot? She'd seen enough of the small MacLeods and Chisholms-to say nothing of Germain-to realize that small boys punctured, scraped, lacerated, and fractured themselves on a weekly basis, at least. She and Roger were protected against things like diptheria and typhoid-Jernmy would have no such protection.

  She swallowed, remembering the night before. That murderous horse of her father's had bitten him in the arm, and Claire had made Jamie sit down shirtless before the fire while she cleaned and dressed the bite. Jemmy had poked a curious head up from his cradle, and his grandfather, smiling, had scooped him out and taken him upon his knee.

  "Gallopy trot, gallopy trot," he'd chanted, bouncing a delighted Jernmy gently up and down. " 'Tis a wicked horse that I have got!/Gallopy trot, gallopy trot/Let's send him to hell and then he'll be hot!"

  It wasn't the charming scene of the two redheads giggling at each other that stuck in her mind, though; it was the firelight glowing in her son's translucent, perfect, untouched skin-and shining silver on the webbed scars across her father's back, black-red on the bloody gash in his arm. It was a dangerous time for men.

  She couldn't keep Jem safe from harm; she knew that. But the thought of him-or Roger-being injured or ill made her stomach knot and cold sweat come out on the sides of her face.

  "Is your thumb all right?" She turned back toward Roger, who looked surprised, having forgotten all about his thumb.

  The Fiery Cross 199

  "What?" He looked at it, puzzled. "Aye, of course." Nonetheless, she took his hand, and kissed the wounded thumb. "You be careful," she said fiercely.

  He laughed, and looked surprised when she glared at him.

  "I will," he said, sobering a little. He nodded at the gun she carried. "Don't worry; I may not have fired one, but I know a wee bit about them. I won't blow my fingers off. Does this look all right for a bit of practice?"

  They had come out into a heath bald, a high meadow thick with grass and rhododendron. There was a stand of aspen at the far side, their pale branches aflutter with a few late tatters of gold and crimson leaves, vivid against the deep blue sky. A stream gurgled downhill, somewhere out of sight, and a red-tailed hawk circled high overhead. The sun was well up now, warm on her shoulders, and there was a pleasant, grassy bank nearby.

  "Just right," she said, and swung the gun down from her shoulder.

  IT WAS A beautiful gun, more than five feet long, but so perfectly balanced you could rest it across your outstretched arm without a wobble-which Brianna was doing, by way of demonstration.

  "See?" she said, pulling her arm in and sweeping the stock up to her shoulder in one fluid movement. "That's the balance point; you want to put your left hand right there, grab the stock by the trigger with your right, and butt it back into your shoulder. Snug it in, really solidly. There's some kick to it." She bumped the burled walnut stock gently into the socket of her buckskinned shoulder in illustration, then lowered the gun and handed it to Roger, with a somewhat more tender caution than she showed when handing him her infant child, he noted wryly. On the other hand, so far as he could tell, Jemmy was much more indestructible than the gun.

  She showed him, hesitant at first, reluctant to correct him. He bit his own tongue, though, and imitated her carefully, following the smooth flow of the steps from ripping the cartridge open with his teeth to priming, loading, ramming, and checking, annoyed at his own novice awkwardness, but secretly fascinated-and more than slightly aroused-by the casual ferocity of her movements.

  Her hands were nearly as large as his own, though finely boned; she handled the long gun with the familiarity other women showed with needle and broom. She wore breeks of homespun, and the long muscle of her thigh rose up tight and round against the cloth when she squatted beside him, head bent as she groped in her leather bag.

  "What, you packed a lunch?" he joked. "I thought we'd just shoot something and eat it."

  She ignored him. She pulled out a ragged white kerchief to use as a target, and shook it put, frowning critically. Once he had thought of her scent as jasmine and grass; now she smelled of gunpowder, leather, and sweat. He breathed it, his fingers unobtrusively stroking the wood of the gunstock.

  "Ready?" she said, g1 Iancing at him with a smile. "Oh, aye," he said.

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  "Check your flint and priming," she said, rising. "I'll pin up the target." Seen from the back, her ruddy hair clubbed tightly back, and clad in a loose buckskin hunting shirt that covered her from shoulder to thigh, her resemblance to her father was intensified to a startling degree. No mistaking the two, though, he thought. Breeks or no, Jamie Fraser had
never in fife had an arse like that. He watched her walk, congratulating himself on his choice of instructor.

  His father-in-law would have given him a lesson, willingly. Jamie was a fine shot, and a patient teacher; Roger had seen him taking the Chisholm boys out after supper, to practice blasting away at rocks and trees in the empty cornfield. It was one thing for Jamie to know that Roger was inexperienced with guns; it was another to suffer the humiliation of demonstrating just bow inexperienced, under that dispassionate blue gaze.

  Beyond the matter of pride, though, he had an ulterior motive in asking Brianna to come out shooting with him. Not that he thought said motive was in any way hidden; Claire had glanced from him to her daughter when he had suggested it, and looked amused in a particularly knowing way that had made Brianna frown and say, "Mother!" in an accusatory tone of voice.

  I Beyond the all-too-brief hours of their wedding night at the Gathering, this was the first-and only-time he'd had Brianna to himself, free from the insatiable demands of her offspring.

  He caught the gleam of sun off metal as she lowered her arm. She was wearing his bracelet, he realized with a deep feeling of pleasure. He had given it to her when he'd asked her to marry him-a lifetime ago, in the freezing mists of a winter night in Inverness. It was a simple circlet of silver, engraved with a series of phrases in French. Je taime, it said: I love you. Un peu, beaucoup, passionement, pas du tout. A little, a lot, passionately---not at all.

  "Passionement," he murmured, envisioning her wearing nothing but his bracelet and her wedding ring.

  First things first, though, he told himself, and picked up a fresh cartridge. After all, they had time.

  SATISFIED THAT HIS loading habits were on the way to being well estabfished, if not yet rapid, Brianna finally allowed him to practice sighting, and at last, to shoot.

  It took a dozen tries before he could hit the white square of the kerchief, but the sense of exultation he felt when a dark spot appeared suddenly near the edge of it had him reaching for a fresh cartridge before the smoke of the shot had dissipated. The sense of excited accomplishment took him through another dozen cartridges, scarcely noticing anything beyond the jerk and boom of the gun, the flash of powder, and the breathless instant of realization when he saw an occasional shot go home.

  The kerchief hung in tatters by this time, and small clouds of whitish smoke floated over the meadow. The hawk had decamped at the sound of the first shot, along with all the other birds of the neighborhood, though the ringing in his ears sounded like a whole chorus of distant titmice.

  The Fiery Cross 201

  He lowered the gun and looked at Brianna, grinning, whereupon she burst into laughter.

  "You look like the end man in a minstrel show," she said, the end of her nose going pink with amusement. "Here, clean up a little, and we'll try shooting from farther away."

  She took the gun and handed him a clean handkerchief in exchange. He wiped black soot from his face, watching as she swiftly swabbed the barrel and reloaded. She straightened, then heard something; her head rose suddenly, eyes fixing on an oak across the meadow.

  Ears still ringing from the roar of the gun, Roger had heard nothing. Swinging round, though, he caught a flicker of movement; a dark gray squirrel, poised on a pine branch at least thirty feet above the ground.

  Without the slightest hesitation, Brianna raised the gun to her shoulder and seemed to fire in the same motion. The branch directly under the squirrel exploded in a shower of wood chips, and the squirrel, blown off its feet, plunged to the ground, bouncing off the springy evergreen branches as it went.

  Roger ran across to the foot of the tree, but there was no need to hurry; the squirrel lay dead, limp as a furry rag.

  "Good shot," he said in congratulation, holding up the corpse as Brianna came to see. "But there's not a mark on him-you must have scared him to death."

  Brianna gave him a level look from beneath her brows.

  "If I'd meant to hit him, Roger, I'd have hit him," she said, with a slight edge of reproof. "And if I bad hit him, you'd be holding a handful of squirrel mush. You don't aim right at something that size; you aim to hit just under them and knock them down. It's called barking," she explained, like a kindly kindergarten teacher correcting a slow pupil.

  "Oh, aye?" He repressed a small sense of irritation. "Your father teach you that?"

  She gave him a slightly odd look before replying. "No, Ian did."

  He made a noncommittal noise in response to that. Ian was a point of awkwardness in the family. Brianna's cousin had been well-loved, and he knew the whole family missed him. Still, they hesitated to speak of Young Ian before Roger, out of delicacy.

  It hadn't exactly been Roger's fault that Ian Murray had remained with the Mohawk-but there was no denying that he had had a part in the matter. If he hadn't killed that Indian ...

  Not for the first time, he pushed aside the confused memories of that night in Snaketown, but felt nonetheless the physical echoes; the quicksilver rush of terror through his belly and the judder of impact through the muscles of his forearms, as he drove the broken end of a wooden pole with all his strength into a shadow that had sprung up before him out of the shrieking dark. A very solid