An Echo in the Bone, Page 29

  of, with regard to Captain Richardson’s errands, and that he would see for himself, tonight?

  William was quite accustomed both to his own height and to people’s automatic responses to it; he quite liked being looked up to. But on his first errand for Captain Richardson, it had never struck him for a moment that folk might recall him on account of it—or that they could describe him with the greatest of ease. Hulking brute was no compliment, but it was unmistakable.

  With a sense of incredulity, he heard Hale not only reveal his own name and the fact that he held rebel sympathies, but also confide that he was making observations regarding the strength of the British presence—this followed by an earnest inquiry as to whether the fellows he spoke with might have noticed any redcoated soldiers in the vicinity?

  William was so shocked by this recklessness that he put his eye to the edge of the window frame, in time to see Rogers glance round the room in exaggerated caution before leaning in confidentially, tapping Hale upon the forearm, and saying, “Why, now, sir, I have, indeed I have, but you must be more wary of what you say in a public place. Why, anyone at all might hear you!”

  “Pshaw,” said Hale, laughing. “I am among friends here. Have we not all just drunk to General Washington and to the King’s confusion?” Sobering, but still eager, he pushed his hat aside and waved to the landlord for more beer. “Come, have another, sir, and tell me what you have seen.”

  William had a sudden overwhelming impulse to shout, “Shut your mouth, you ninnyhammer!” or to throw something at Hale through the window. But it was far too late, even could he actually have done it. The chicken leg he had been eating was still in his hand; noticing, he tossed it away. His stomach was knotted, and there was a taste of sick at the back of his throat, though his blood still boiled with excitement.

  Hale was making still more damaging admissions, to the admiring encouragements and patriotic shouts of Rogers’s men, all of whom were playing out their parts admirably, he had to admit. How long would Rogers let it go on? Would they take him here, in the tavern? Probably not—some others of those present were doubtless rebel sympathizers, who might be moved to intervene on Hale’s behalf, did Rogers go to arrest him in their midst.

  Rogers appeared in no hurry. Nearly half an hour of tedious raillery followed, Rogers giving what appeared to be small admissions, Hale making much larger ones in return, his slab-sided cheeks glowing with beer and excitement over the information he was gaining. William’s legs, feet, hands, and face were numb, and his shoulders ached with tension. A crunching sound nearby distracted him from his close attendance on the scene within, and he glanced down, suddenly aware of a penetrating aroma that had somehow insinuated itself without his cognizance.

  “Christ!” He jerked back, nearly putting his elbow through the window, and fell into the wall of the tavern with a heavy thump. The skunk, disturbed in its enjoyment of the discarded chicken leg, instantly elevated its tail, the white stripe making the movement clearly visible. William froze.

  “What was that?” someone said inside, and he heard the scrape of a bench being pushed back. Holding his breath, he edged one foot to the side, only to be frozen in place again by a faint thumping noise and the quivering of the white stripe. Damn, the thing was stamping its feet. An indication of imminent attack, he’d been told—and told by people whose sorry condition made it apparent that they spoke from experience.

  Feet were coming toward the door, someone coming to investigate. Christ, if they found him eavesdropping outside … He gritted his teeth, nerving himself to what duty told him must be a self-sacrificial lunge out of sight—but if he did, what then? He could not rejoin Rogers and the others, reeking of skunk. But if—

  The opening of the door put paid to all speculations. William lunged for the corner of the building by simple reflex. The skunk also acted by reflex—but, startled by the opening of the door, apparently adjusted its aim in consequence. William tripped over a branch and sprawled at full length into a heap of discarded rubbish, hearing a full-throated shriek behind him as the night was made hideous.

  William coughed, choked, and tried to stop breathing long enough to get out of range. He gasped from necessity, though, and his lungs were filled with a substance that went so far beyond the concept of smell as to require a completely new sensory description. Gagging and spluttering, eyes burning and watering from the assault, he stumbled into the darkness on the other side of the road, from which vantage point he witnessed the skunk making off in a huff and the skunk’s victim collapsed in a heap on the tavern’s step, making noises of extreme distress.

  William hoped it wasn’t Hale. Beyond the practical difficulties involved in arresting and transporting a man who had suffered such an assault, simple humanity compelled one to think that hanging the victim would be adding insult to injury.

  It wasn’t Hale. He saw the flaxen hair shining in the torchlight among the heads that were thrust out in inquiry, only to be drawn hastily back again.

  Voices reached him, discussing how best to proceed. Vinegar, it was agreed, was needed, and in quantity. The victim had by now sufficiently recovered himself as to crawl off into the weeds, from which the sounds of violent retching proceeded. This, added to the mephitis still tainting the atmosphere, caused a number of other gentlemen to vomit, as well, and William felt his own gorge rise, but controlled it by vicious nose-pinching.

  He was nearly chilled through, though thankfully aired out, by the time the victim’s friends saw him off—driving him like a cow along the road, as no one would touch him—and the tavern emptied, no one having further appetite for either food or drink in such an atmosphere. He could hear the landlord cursing to himself as he leaned out to take down the torch that burned beside the hanging sign and plunge it, sizzling, into the rain barrel.

  Hale bade a general good night, his educated voice distinctive in the dark, and set off along the road toward Flushing, where doubtless he meant to seek a bed. Rogers—William knew him by the fur waistcoat, identifiable even by starlight—lingered near the road, silently collecting his men about him as the crowd departed. Only when everyone was out of sight did William venture to join them.

  “Yes?” Rogers said, seeing him. “All present, then. Let’s go.” And they moved off, a silent pack coursing down the road, intent upon the track of their unknowing prey.

  THEY SAW THE FLAMES from the water. The city was burning, mostly the district near the East River, but the wind was up, and the fire was spreading. There was much excited speculation among Rogers’s men; had rebel sympathizers fired the city?

  “Just as likely drunken soldiers,” Rogers said, his voice grimly dispassionate. William felt queasy, seeing the red glow in the sky. The prisoner was silent.

  They found General Howe—eventually—in his headquarters at Beekman House outside the city, red-eyed from smoke, lack of sleep, and a rage that was buried bone-deep. It stayed buried, though, for the moment. He summoned Rogers and the prisoner into the library where he had his office, and—after one brief, astonished look at William’s attire—sent him to his bed.

  Fortnum was in the attic, watching the city burn from the window. There was nothing to be done about it. William came to stand beside him. He felt strangely empty, somehow unreal. Chilled, though the floor was warm under his bare feet.

  An occasional fountain of sparks shot up now and then, as the flames struck something particularly flammable, but from such a distance there was really little to be seen but the bloody glow against the sky.

  “They’ll blame us, you know,” Fortnum said after a bit.

  THE AIR WAS STILL THICK with smoke at noon the next day.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off Hale’s hands. They had clenched involuntarily as a private soldier tied them, though he had put them behind his back with no protest. Now his fingers were clasped tight together, so hard that the knuckles had gone white.

  Surely the flesh protested, William thought, even if the mind had resigned itself.
His own flesh was protesting simply being here, his skin twitching like a horse plagued by flies, his bowels cramping and loosening in horrid sympathy—they said a hanged man’s bowels gave way; would Hale’s? Blood washed through his face at the thought, and he looked at the ground.

  Voices made him look up again. Captain Moore had just asked Hale whether he wished to make any remarks. Hale nodded; evidently he had been prepared for this.

  William felt that he should himself have been prepared by now; Hale had spent the last two hours in Captain Moore’s tent, writing notes to be delivered to his family, while the men assembled for the hasty execution shifted their weight from foot to foot, waiting. He wasn’t prepared at all.

  Why was it different? He’d seen men die, some horribly. But this preliminary courtesy, this formality, this … obscene civility, all conducted with the certain knowledge of imminent and shameful death. Deliberation. The awful deliberation, that was it.

  “At last!” Clarewell muttered in his ear. “Bloody get on with it; I’m starving.”

  A young black man named Billy Richmond, a private soldier whom William knew casually, was sent up the ladder to tie the rope to the tree. He came down now, nodding to the officer.

  Now Hale was mounting the ladder, the sergeant major steadying him. The noose was round his neck, a thick rope, new-looking. Didn’t they say new ropes stretched? But it was a high ladder …

  William was sweating like a pig, though the day was mild. He mustn’t close his eyes or look away. Not with Clarewell watching.

  He tightened the muscles of his throat and concentrated again on Hale’s hands. The fingers were twisting, helplessly, though the man’s face was calm. They were leaving faint damp marks on the skirt of his coat.

  A grunt of effort and a grating noise; the ladder was pulled away, and there was a startled whoof! from Hale as he dropped. Whether it was the newness of the rope or something else, his neck did not break cleanly.

  He’d refused the hood, and so the spectators were obliged to watch his face for the quarter of an hour it took him to die. William stifled a horrific urge to laugh from pure nerves, seeing the pale blue eyes bulge to bursting point, the tongue thrust out. So surprised. He looked so surprised.

  There was only a small group of men assembled for the execution. He saw Richardson a little way away, watching with a look of remote abstraction. As though aware of his glance, Richardson looked sharply up at him. William looked away.

  THE MINISTER’S CAT

  Lallybroch

  October 1980

  SHE WAS UP EARLY, before the children, though she knew this was foolish—whatever Roger had gone to Oxford for, it would take him a good four or five hours to drive there, and the same back. Even if he had left at dawn—and he might not be able to, if he hadn’t arrived in time to do whatever it was the day before—he couldn’t be home before midday at the earliest. But she’d slept restlessly, dreaming one of those monotonous and inescapably unpleasant dreams, this one featuring the sight and sound of the tide coming in, lapping wave by lapping wave by lapping … and wakened at first light feeling dizzy and unwell.

  It had occurred to her for one nightmare instant that she might be pregnant—but she’d sat up abruptly in bed, and the world had settled at once into place around her. None of that sense of having shoved one foot through the looking glass that early pregnancy entails. She set one foot cautiously out of bed, and the world—and her stomach—stayed steady. Good, then.

  Still, the feeling of unease—whether from the dream, Roger’s absence, or the specter of pregnancy—stayed with her, and she went about the daily business of the household with a distracted mind.

  She was sorting socks toward midday when she became aware that things were quiet. Quiet in a way that made the hair rise on the back of her neck.

  “Jem?” she called. “Mandy?”

  Total silence. She stepped out of the laundry, listening for the usual thumps, bangings, and screeches from above, but there was not the slightest sound of trampling feet, toppling blocks, or the high-pitched voices of sibling warfare.

  “Jem!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

  No reply. The last time this had happened, two days before, she’d discovered her alarm clock in the bottom of the bathtub, neatly disassembled into its component parts, and both children at the far end of the garden, glowing with unnatural innocence.

  “I didn’t do it!” Jem had declared virtuously, hauled into the house and faced with the evidence. “And Mandy’s too little.”

  “Too widdle,” Mandy had agreed, nodding her mop of black curls so ferociously as to obscure her face.

  “Well, I don’t think Daddy did it,” Bree said, raising a stern brow. “And I’m sure it wasn’t Annie Mac. Which doesn’t leave very many suspects, does it?”

  “Shussspects, shussspects,” Mandy said happily, enchanted by the new word.

  Jem shook his head in resigned fashion, viewing the scattered gears and dismembered hands.

  “We must have got piskies, Mama.”

  “Pishkies, pishkies,” Mandy chirped, pulling her skirt up over her head and yanking at her frilly underpants. “Needa go pishkie, Mama!”

  In the midst of the urgency occasioned by this statement, Jem had faded artfully, not to be seen again until dinner, by which time the affair of the alarm clock had been superseded by the usual fierce rush of daily events, not to be recalled until bedtime, when Roger remarked the absence of the alarm clock.

  “Jem doesn’t usually lie,” Roger had said thoughtfully, having been shown the small pottery bowl now containing the clock’s remains.

  Bree, brushing out her hair for bed, gave him a jaundiced look.

  “Oh, you think we have pixies, too?”

  “Piskies,” he said absently, stirring the small pile of gears in the bowl with a finger.

  “What? You mean they really are called ‘piskies’ here? I thought Jem was just mispronouncing it.”

  “Well, no—‘pisky’ is Cornish; they’re called pixies in other parts of the West Country, though.”

  “What are they called in Scotland?”

  “We haven’t really got any. Scotland’s got its fair share of the fairy folk,” he said, scooping up a handful of clock innards and letting them tinkle musically back into the bowl. “But Scots tend toward the grimmer manifestations of the supernatural—water horses, ban-sidhe, blue hags, and the Nuckelavee, aye? Piskies are a wee bit frivolous for Scotland. We have got brownies, mind,” he added, taking the brush from her hand, “but they’re more of a household help, not mischief-makers like piskies. Can ye put the clock back together?”

  “Sure—if the piskies didn’t lose any of the parts. What on earth is a Nuckelavee?”

  “It’s from the Orkneys. Nothing ye want to hear about just before bed,” he assured her. And, bending, breathed very softly on her neck, just below the earlobe.

  The faint tingle engendered by the memory of what had happened after that momentarily overlaid her suspicions of what the children might be up to, but the sensation faded, to be replaced by increasing worry.

  There was no sign of either Jem or Mandy anywhere in the house. Annie MacDonald didn’t come on Saturdays, and the kitchen … At first glance, it seemed undisturbed, but she was familiar with Jem’s methods.

  Sure enough, the packet of chocolate biscuits was missing, as was a bottle of lemon squash, though everything else in the cupboard was in perfect order—and the cupboard was six feet off the ground. Jem showed great promise as a cat burglar, she thought. At least he’d have a career if he got chucked out of school for good one of these days after telling his classmates something especially picturesque he’d picked up in the eighteenth century.

  The missing food allayed her uneasiness. If they’d taken a picnic, they were outside, and while they might be anywhere within a half mile of the house—Mandy wouldn’t walk farther than that—chances were they wouldn’t have gone far before sitting down to eat biscuits.

  I
t was a beautiful fall day, and despite the need to track down her miscreants, she was glad to be out in the sun and breeze. Socks could wait. And so could turning the vegetable beds. And speaking to the plumber about the geyser in the upstairs bath. And …

  “It doesna matter how many things ye do on a farm, there’s always more than ye can do. A wonder the place doesna rise up about my ears and swallow me, like Jonah and the whale.”

  For an instant, she heard her father’s voice, full of exasperated resignation at encountering another unexpected chore. She glanced round at him, smiling, then stopped, realization and longing sweeping over her in waves.

  “Oh, Da,” she said softly. She walked on, more slowly, suddenly seeing not the albatross of a big, semi-decayed house, but the living organism that was Lallybroch, and all those of her blood who had been part of it—who still were.

  The Frasers and Murrays who had put their own sweat and blood and tears into its buildings and soil, woven their lives into its land. Uncle Ian, Aunt Jenny—the swarm of cousins she had known so briefly. Young Ian. All of them dead now … but, curiously enough, not gone.

  “Not gone at all,” she said aloud, and found comfort in the words. She’d reached the back gate of the kailyard and paused, glancing up the hill toward the ancient broch that gave the place its name; the burying ground was up on that same hill, most of its stones so weathered that the names and their dates were indecipherable, the stones themselves mostly obliterated by creeping gorse and sweet broom. And amidst the splashes of gray, black-green, and brilliant yellow were two small moving splotches of red and blue.

  The pathway was badly overgrown; brambles ripped at her jeans. She found the children on hands and knees, following a trail of ants—who were in turn following a trail of cookie crumbs, carefully placed so as to lead the ants through an obstacle course of sticks and pebbles.

  “Look, Mama!” Jem barely glanced up at her, absorbed in the sight before him. He pointed at the ground, where he had sunk an old teacup into the dirt and filled it with water. A black glob of ants, lured to their doom by chocolate crumbs, were struggling in the midst of it.

  “Jem! That’s mean! You mustn’t drown ants—unless they’re in the house,” she added, with vivid memories of a recent infestation in the pantry.

  “They’re not drowning, Mama. Look—see what they do?”

  She crouched beside him, looking closer, and saw that, in fact, the ants weren’t drowning. Single ants that had fallen in struggled madly toward the center, where a large mass of ants clung together, making a ball that floated, barely denting the surface. The ants in the ball were moving, slowly, so that they changed places constantly, and while one or two near the edge of the mass were motionless, possibly dead, the majority were clearly in no immediate danger of drowning, supported by the bodies of their fellows. And the mass itself was gradually drawing closer to the rim of the cup, propelled by the movements of the ants in it.

  “That’s really cool,” she said, fascinated, and sat beside him for some time, watching the ants, before finally decreeing mercy and making him scoop the ball of ants out on a leaf, where once laid on the ground, they scattered and at once went back to their business.

  “Do you think they do it on purpose?” she asked Jem. “Cluster together like that, I mean. Or are they just looking for anything to hang on to?”

  “Dinna ken,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll look in my ant book and see does it say.”

  She gathered up the remnants of the picnic, leaving one or two biscuit fragments for the ants, who had, she felt, earned them. Mandy had wandered off while she and Jem watched the ants in the teacup, and was presently squatting in the shade of a bush some way uphill, engaged in animated conversation with an invisible companion.

  “Mandy wanted to talk to Grandda,” Jem said matter-of-factly. “That’s why we came up here.”

  “Oh?” she said slowly. “Why is here a good place to talk to him?”

  Jem looked surprised, and glanced toward the weathered, tipsy stones of the burying ground.

  “Isn’t he here?”

  Something much too powerful to be called a shiver shot up her spine. It was as much Jem’s matter-of-factness as the possibility that it might be true that took her breath away.

  “I—don’t know,” she said. “I suppose he could be.” While she tried not to think too much about the fact that her parents were now dead, she had somehow vaguely assumed that they would have been buried in North Carolina—or somewhere else in the Colonies, if war had taken them away from the Ridge.

  But she remembered the letters suddenly. He’d said he meant to come back to Scotland. And Jamie Fraser being a determined man, more than likely he’d done just that. Had he never left again? And if he hadn’t—was her mother here, too?

  Without really meaning to, she found herself making her way upward, past the foot of the old broch and through the stones of the burying ground. She’d come up here once, with her aunt Jenny. It had been early evening, with a breeze whispering in the grass, and an air of peace upon the hillside. Jenny had shown her the graves of her grandparents, Brian and Ellen, together under a marriage stone; yes, she could still make out the curve of it, overgrown and mossy as it was, the names weathered away. And the child who had died with Ellen was buried with her—her third son. Robert, Jenny said; her father, Brian, had insisted he be baptized, and her wee dead brother’s name was Robert.

  She was standing among the stones now; so many of them. A good many of the later ones were still readable, these with dates in the late 1800s. Murrays and McLachlan’s and McLean’s, for the most part. Here and there the odd Fraser or MacKenzie.

  The earlier ones, though, were all too weathered to read, no more than the shadows of letters showing through the black stains of lichen and the soft, obliterating moss. There, next to Ellen’s grave, was the tiny square stone for Caitlin Maisri Murray, Jenny and Ian’s sixth child, who had lived only a day or so. Jenny had shown Brianna the stone, stooping to run a gentle hand across the letters and laying a yellow rose from the path beside it. There had been a small cairn there, too—pebbles left by those who visited the grave. The cairn had been scattered long since, but Brianna stooped and found a pebble now and placed it by the little stone.

  There was another, she saw, beside it. Another small stone, as for a child. Not quite as weathered, but plainly almost as old. Only two words on it, she thought, and, closing her eyes, ran her fingers slowly over the stone, feeling out the shallow, broken lines. There was an “E” in the first line. A “Y,” she thought, in the second. And maybe a “K.”

  What sort of Highland name begins with “Y”? she thought, puzzled. There’s