Drums of Autumn, Page 75

  the daylight, but the color had fled now; everything was black and gray—like the pictures she described.

  “It took hours, waiting. No one could say exactly how long it would take them to land and get out in their space suits—you know there isn’t any air on the moon?” She raised a questioning brow, and he nodded, attentive as a schoolboy.

  “Claire told me so,” he murmured.

  “The camera—the thing that made the pictures—was looking out of the side of the ship, so we could see the foot of the ship itself, settled in the dust, and the dust rising up over it like a horse’s hoof when it puts its foot down.

  “It was flat where the ship came down; covered with a soft, powdery kind of dust, with little rocks scattered on it here and there. Then the camera moved—or maybe another one started sending pictures—and you could see that there were rocky cliffs off in the distance. It’s barren—no plants, no water, no air—but sort of beautiful, in an eerie kind of way.”

  “It sounds like Scotland,” he said. She laughed at the joke, but thought she heard under the humor his longing for those barren mountains.

  Wanting to distract him, she waved upward at the stars, beginning to burn brighter in the velvet sky.

  “The stars are really suns, like ours. It’s only that they’re so far away from us, they look tiny. They’re so far away that it may take years and years for their light to reach us; in fact, sometimes a star has died and we still see its light.”

  “Claire told me that, long ago,” he said softly. He sat a moment, then got up with an air of decision.

  “Come then,” he said. “Let’s take the hive, and be off home.”

  * * *

  The night was warm enough that we had left the hide window-covering unpinned and rolled aside. Occasional moths and June bugs blundered in to drown themselves in the cauldron or commit fiery suicide on the hearth, but the cool leaf-scented air that washed over us was worth it.

  On the first night, Ian had gallantly given Brianna the trundle bed and gone off to sleep with Rollo on a pallet in the herb shed, assuring her that he liked the privacy. Leaving, his quilt over one arm, he had clapped Jamie solidly on the back and squeezed his shoulder in a surprisingly adult gesture of congratulation that made me smile.

  Jamie had smiled, too; in fact, he had scarcely stopped smiling in several days. He wasn’t smiling now, though his face bore a tender, inward look. There was a half-full moon riding the sky, and enough light came through the window for me to see him clearly as he lay on his back beside me.

  I was surprised that he wasn’t asleep yet. He had risen well before dawn and spent the day with Brianna on the mountain, returning long after dark with a plaid full of smoke-stunned bees, who were likely to be more than irritated when they woke in the morning and discovered the trick perpetrated on them. I made a mental note to keep away from the end of the garden where the row of bee gums sat; newly moved bees were inclined to sting first and ask questions afterward.

  Jamie gave a massive sigh, and I rolled toward him, curving myself to fit against him. The night wasn’t cold, but he wore a shirt to bed, in deference to Brianna’s modesty.

  “Can’t sleep?” I asked softly. “Does the moonlight bother you?”

  “No.” He was looking out at the moon, though; it rode high above the ridge, not yet full, but a luminous white that flooded the sky.

  “If it’s not the moon, it’s something.” I rubbed his stomach lightly, and let my fingers curve around the wide arch of his ribs.

  He sighed again, and squeezed my hand.

  “Och, it’s no more than a foolish regret, Sassenach.” He turned his head toward the trundle bed, where the dark spill of Brianna’s hair fell in a moon-polished mass across the pillow. “I am only sorry that we must lose her.”

  “Mm.” I let my hand rest flat on his chest. I had known it would come—both the realization and the parting itself—but I hadn’t wanted to speak of it, and break the temporary spell that had bound the three of us so closely.

  “You can’t really lose a child,” I said softly, one finger tracing the small, smooth hollow in the center of his chest.

  “She must go back, Sassenach—ye know it as well as I do.” He stirred impatiently but didn’t move away. “Look at her. She’s like Louis’s camel, no?”

  Despite my own regrets, I smiled at the thought. Louis of France kept a fine menagerie at Versailles, and on good days the keepers would exercise certain of the animals, leading them through the spreading gardens, to the edification of startled passersby.

  We had been walking in the gardens one day, and turned a corner to find the Bactrian camel advancing toward us down the path, splendid and stately in its gold and silver harness, towering in calm disdain above a crowd of gawking spectators—strikingly exotic, and utterly out of place among the formalized white statues.

  “Yes,” I said, though with a reluctance that squeezed my heart. “Yes, of course she’ll have to go back. She belongs there.”

  “I ken that well enough.” He put his own hand over mine, but kept his face turned away, looking at Brianna. “I shouldna grieve for it—but I do.”

  “So do I.” I put my forehead against his shoulder, breathing in the clean male scent of him. “It’s true, though—what I said. You can’t truly lose a child. Do you—do you remember Faith?”

  My voice trembled slightly as I asked it; we had not spoken in years of our first daughter, stillborn in France.

  His arm curled around me, pulling me against him.

  “Of course I do,” he said softly. “D’ye think I would ever forget?”

  “No.” The tears were flowing down my face, but I was not truly weeping; it was no more than the overflow of feeling. “That’s what I mean. I never told you—when we were in Paris, to see Jared—I went to the Hôpital des Anges; I saw her grave there. I—I brought her a pink tulip.”

  He was quiet for a moment.

  “I took her violets,” he said, so softly I almost didn’t hear him.

  I was quite still for a moment, tears forgotten.

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “Neither did you.” His fingers traced the bumps of my spine, brushing softly up and down the line of my back.

  “I was afraid you’d feel…” My voice trailed off. I had been afraid he would feel guilty, worry that I blamed him—I once had—for the loss. We were newly reunited, then; I had no wish to jeopardize the tender link between us.

  “So was I.”

  “I’m sorry that you never saw her,” I said at last, and felt him sigh. He turned toward me and put his arms around me, his lips brushing my forehead.

  “It doesna matter, does it? Aye, it’s true, what ye say, Sassenach. She was—and we will have her, always. And Brianna. If—when she goes—she will still be with us.”

  “Yes. It doesn’t matter what happens; no matter where a child goes—how far or how long. Even if it’s forever. You never lose them. You can’t.”

  He didn’t answer, but his arms tightened round me, and he sighed once more. The breeze stirred the air above us with the sound of angels’ wings, and we fell slowly asleep together, as the moonlight bathed us in its ageless peace.

  43

  WHISKY IN THE JAR

  I didn’t like Ronnie Sinclair. I never had liked him. I didn’t like his half-handsome face, his foxy smile, or the way his eyes met mine: so direct, so openly honest, that you knew he was hiding something even when he wasn’t. I particularly didn’t like the way he was looking at my daughter.

  I cleared my throat loudly, making him jump. He turned a sharp-toothed smile on me, idly turning a truss ring in his hands.

  “Jamie says he’ll need a dozen more of the small whisky casks by the end of the month, and I’ll need a large barrel of hickory wood for the smoked meat, as soon as you can manage.”

  He nodded and made a number of cryptic marks on a slab of pine that hung on the wall. Oddly for a Scot, Sinclair couldn’t write but had some sort of pr
ivate shorthand that enabled him to keep track of orders and accounts.

  “Right, Missus Fraser. Anything else?”

  I paused, trying to reckon up all the possible necessities for cooperage that might spring up before snowfall. There would be fish and meat to salt down, but those did better in stoneware jars; wooden casks left them tasting of turpentine. I had a good seasoned barrel for apples and another for squash already; the potatoes would be stored on shelves to keep from rotting.

  “No,” I decided. “That will be all.”

  “Aye, missus.” He hesitated, twirling the cask band faster. “Will Himself be coming down before the casks are ready?”

  “No; he has the barley to get in, and the slaughtering to do, as well as the distilling. Everything’s late, because of the trial.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Why, though? Do you have a message for him?”

  Sited at the foot of the cove nearest the wagon road, the cooper’s shop was the first building most visitors encountered, and thus a reception point for most gossip that came from outside Fraser’s Ridge.

  Sinclair tilted his gingerly head, considering.

  “Och, likely it’s nothing. Only that I’ve heard of a stranger in the district, asking questions about Jamie Fraser.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Brianna’s head snap round, distracted at once from her inspection of the spokeshavers, mallets, saws, and axes on the wall. She turned, skirt rustling in the wood shavings that littered the shop, ankle-deep.

  “Do you know the stranger’s name?” she asked anxiously. “Or what he looks like?”

  Sinclair shot her a look of surprise. He was oddly proportioned, with slender shoulders but muscular arms, and hands so huge that they might have belonged to a man twice his height. He looked at her, and his broad thumb unconsciously stroked the metal of the ring, slowly, over and over again.

  “Why, I couldna speak to his appearance, mistress,” he said, politely enough, but with a hungry look in his eyes that made me want to take the truss ring away from him and wrap it around his neck. “He gave his name as Hodgepile, though.”

  Brianna’s face lost its look of hope, though the muscle at the edge of her mouth curved slightly at the name.

  “I don’t suppose that could be Roger,” she murmured to me.

  “Likely not,” I agreed. “He wouldn’t have any reason to use a false name, anyway.” I turned back to Sinclair.

  “You won’t have heard of a man called Wakefield, will you? Roger Wakefield?”

  Sinclair shook his head decisively.

  “No, missus. Himself has put word about that if such a one should come, he’s to be taken to the Ridge at once. If yon Wakefield sets foot within the county, you’ll hear of it as soon as I do.”

  Brianna sighed, and I heard her swallow her disappointment. It was mid-October, and while she said nothing, she was clearly growing more anxious by the day. She wasn’t the only one, either; she had told us what Roger was trying to do, and the thought of the variety of disasters that might have befallen him in the attempt was enough to keep me wakeful at night.

  “—about the whisky,” Sinclair was saying, jerking my attention back to him.

  “The whisky? Hodgepile was asking about Jamie and whisky?”

  Sinclair nodded, and set down the truss ring.

  “In Cross Creek. No one would say a word to him, o’ course. But the one who told me did say as the one who spoke to the man thought him a soldier.” He grimaced briefly. “Hard for a lobsterback to wash the flour from his hair.”

  “He wasn’t dressed as a soldier, surely?” Foot soldiers wore their hair in a tight folded queue, wrapped round a core of lamb’s wool and powdered with rice flour—which, in this climate, rapidly turned to paste as the flour mixed with sweat. Still, I imagined Sinclair meant the man’s attitude rather than his appearance.

  “Och, no; he did claim to be a fur trader—but he walked wi’ a ramrod up his arse, and ye could hear the leather creak when he talked. So Geordie McClintock said.”

  “Likely one of Murchison’s men. I’ll tell Jamie—thank you.”

  I left the cooper’s shop with Brianna, wondering just how much trouble this Hodgepile might prove to be. Likely not much; the sheer distance from civilization and the inaccessibility of the Ridge was protection against most intrusions; one of Jamie’s purposes in choosing it. The multiple inconveniences of remoteness would be outweighed by its benefits, when it came to war. No battle would be fought on Fraser’s Ridge, I was sure of that.

  And no matter how virulent Murchison’s grudge might be, or how good his spies, I couldn’t see his superiors allowing him to mount an armed expedition more than a hundred miles into the mountains, for the sole purpose of extirpating an illegal distillery whose total output was less than a hundred gallons a year.

  Lizzie and Ian were waiting for us outside, occupied in gathering kindling from Sinclair’s rubbish heap. A cooper’s work generated immense quantities of shavings, splinters, and discarded chunks of wood and bark, and it was worth the labor of picking them up, to save splitting kindling by hand at home.

  “Can you and Ian load the barrels, honey?” I asked Brianna. “I want a look at Lizzie in the sunlight.”

  Brianna nodded, still looking abstracted, and went to help Ian heave the half-dozen small kegs outside the shop into the wagon. They were small, but heavy.

  It was the skill that went into these particular barrels that had earned Ronnie Sinclair his land and shop, in spite of his less than prepossessing personality; not every cooper knew the trick of charring the inside of an oak barrel so as to lend a beautiful amber color and deep smoky flavor to the whisky aging gently inside.

  “Come here, sweetie. Let me see your eyes.” Lizzie obediently widened her eyes, and let me pull down the lower lid to see the white sclera of the eyeball.

  The girl was still shockingly thin, but the nasty yellow tinge of jaundice was fading from her skin, and her eyes were nearly white again. I cupped my fingers gently under her jaw; lymph glands only slightly swollen—that was better, too.

  “Feeling all right?” I asked. She smiled shyly, and nodded. It was the first time she had been outside the cabin since her arrival with Ian three weeks before; she was still wobbly as a new calf. Frequent infusions of Jesuit bark had helped, though; she had had no fresh attacks of fever in the last week, and I had hopes of clearing up the liver involvement in short order.

  “Mrs. Fraser?” she said, and I jumped, startled to hear her talk. She was so shy that she could seldom bring herself to say anything to me or to Jamie directly; she murmured her needs to Brianna, who conveyed them to me.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I—I couldna help hearing what yon cooper said—about how Mr. Fraser’s asked word of Miss Brianna’s man. I did wonder—” Her words trailed off in a spasm of shyness, and a faint rose-pink blush showed in her transparent cheeks.

  “Yes?”

  “Could he ask for my father, do ye think?” The words came out in a rush, and she blushed still harder.

  “Oh, Lizzie! I’m sorry.” Brianna, finished with the barrels, came and hugged her little maid. “I hadn’t forgotten, but I hadn’t thought, either. Just a minute, I’ll go and tell Mr. Sinclair.” With a whiff of skirts, she vanished into the cool dimness of the cooper’s shop.

  “Your father?” I asked. “Have you lost him?”

  The girl nodded, pressing her lips together to prevent their quivering.

  “He’ll ha’ gone as a bondsman, but I dinna ken where; only it would be to the southern colonies.”

  Well, that limited the search to several hundred thousand square miles, I thought. Still, it could do no harm to ask Ronnie Sinclair to put out word. Newspapers and other printed matter were scarce in the South; most real news still passed by word of mouth, handed on in shops and taverns, or carried by slaves and servants between far-flung plantations.

  The thought of newspapers gave me a small nasty jolt of remembrance. Still, seven years see
med comfortingly far away—and Brianna must be right; whether the house was doomed to burn on January 21 or not, surely it would be possible for us not to be in it on that date?

  Brianna appeared, rather red in the face, swung aboard the wagon, and picked up the reins, waiting impatiently for the rest of us.

  Ian, seeing her flushed face, frowned and glanced toward the cooper’s shop.

  “What is it, Coz? Did yon wee mannie say aught amiss to ye?” He flexed his hands, nearly as large as Sinclair’s.

  “No,” she said tersely. “Not a word. Are we ready to go?”

  Ian picked Lizzie up and swung her into the wagon bed, then put out a hand and helped me up on the seat by Brianna. He glanced at the reins in Brianna’s hands; he had taught her to drive the mules, and took professional pride in her skill.

  “Watch the bugger on the gee side,” he advised her. “He’ll no be pullin’ his share o’ the load, unless ye touch him up now and again wi’ a slap across the rump.”

  He subsided into the wagon bed with Lizzie as we set off up the road. I could hear him telling her outlandish stories, and her faint giggle in reply. The baby of his own family, Ian was charmed by Lizzie and treated her like a younger sister, by turns nuisance and pet.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the receding cooper’s shop, then at Brianna.

  “What did he do?” I asked, quietly.

  “Nothing. I interrupted him.” The flush across her wide cheekbones grew deeper.

  “What on earth was he doing?”

  “Drawing pictures on a piece of wood,” she said, and bit the inside of her cheek. “Of naked women.”

  I laughed, as much from shock as from amusement.

  “Well, he hasn’t got a wife, and not likely to get one soon; women are very scarce in the colony generally, and even more so up here. I suppose one can’t blame him.”

  I felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for Ronnie Sinclair. He’d been alone for a very long time, after all. His wife had died in the terrible days after Culloden, and he himself had spent more than ten years in prison before being transported to the Colonies. If he had made connections here, they had not endured; he was a solitary man, and suddenly I saw his avid questing for gossip, his stealthy watching—even his use of Brianna for artistic inspiration—in a different light. I knew what it was like to be lonely.

  Brianna’s embarrassment had faded, and she was whistling softly under her breath, hunched casually over the reins—a Beatles’ tune, I thought, though I never could keep pop groups straight.

  The idle thought floated insidiously through my mind; if Roger didn’t come, she wouldn’t be left alone for long, either here or when she returned to the future. But that was ridiculous. He would come. And if not…

  A thought I had been trying to keep at bay sneaked past my defenses and appeared in my mind, full-blown. What if he had chosen not to come? I knew they had had some sort of argument, though Brianna had been tight-lipped about it. Had he been so infuriated that he would go back without her?

  I rather thought the possibility had occurred to her, too; she had stopped speaking much of Roger, but I saw the anxious light spring up in her eyes whenever Clarence announced a visitor, and saw it die each time the visitor proved to be one of Jamie’s tenants, or some of Ian’s Tuscaroran friends.

  “Hurry up, you blighter,” I muttered under my breath. Brianna caught it, and smartly snapped the reins over the left mule’s rump.

  “Gee up!” she shouted, and the wagon rattled faster, jolting over the narrow track toward home.

  * * *

  “It’s a far cry from the still-cellar at Leoch,” Jamie said, ruefully poking at the makeshift pot still at the edge of the small clearing. “It does make whisky, though—of a sort.”

  In spite of his diffidence, Brianna could see that he was proud of his infant distillery. It was nearly two miles from the cabin, located—as he explained—close to Fergus’s place, so that Marsali could come up several times a day to keep an eye on the operation. In return for this service, she and Fergus had a slightly larger share in the resulting whisky than did the other farmers on the Ridge, who supplied the raw barley and helped in the distribution of the liquor.

  “No, darlin’, ye dinna want to be eating that nasty wee thing,” Marsali said firmly. She grasped her son’s wrist and began prying open his fingers, one by one, in an effort to free the large and madly wriggling insect that—in open contradiction of his mother’s adjuration—he very obviously did want to be eating.

  “Feh!” Marsali dropped the cockroach on the ground and stamped on it.

  Germaine, a stoic, stubby child, didn’t cry at the loss of his treat, but glowered balefully under his blond fringe. The cockroach, nothing daunted by rough treatment, rose out of the leaf mold and walked off, staggering only slightly.

  “Oh, I shouldna think it would do him harm,” Ian said, amused. “I’ve eaten