A Breath of Snow and Ashes (116 page)

“Didn’t hear you come out,” I said, turning up my face to be kissed as he came to me. “Has the Major gone?”

“No,” he said, and kissed my brow, one of the few clean spots left. “I’ve left him wi’ Sinclair for a bit. He’s exercised about the Committee of Safety, aye?” He grimaced, then turned to Roger.

“Aye, ye’ve the right of it,” he said. “Killing’s never a pleasant business, but it’s needful. If ye must spill blood, though, it’s right to take it wi’ thanks.”

Roger nodded, glancing at the mixture I was working, up to my elbows in spilled blood.

“Ye’ll tell me the proper words for the next time, then?”

“Not too late for this time, is it?” I said. Both men looked slightly startled. I raised an eyebrow at Jamie, then Roger. “I did say it wasn’t for the pig.”

Jamie’s eyes met mine with a glint of humor, but he nodded gravely.

“Well enough.”

At my direction, he took up the heavy jar of spices: the ground mixture of mace and marjoram, sage and pepper, parsley and thyme. Roger held out his hands, cupped, and Jamie poured them full. Then Roger rubbed the herbs slowly between his palms, showering the dusty, greenish crumbs into the barrel, their pungent scent mingling with the smell of the blood, as Jamie spoke the words slowly, in an ancient tongue come down from the days of the Norsemen.

“Say it in English,” I said, seeing from Roger’s face that while he spoke the words, he did not recognize them all.

“O Lord, bless the blood and the flesh of this the creature that You gave me,”
Jamie said softly. He scooped a pinch of the herbs himself, and rubbed them between thumb and forefinger, in a rain of fragrant dust.

“Created by Your hand as You created man,

 Life given for life.

 That me and mine may eat with thanks for the gift,

 That me and mine may give thanks for Your own sacrifice of blood and flesh,

 Life given for life.”

The last crumbs of green and gray disappeared into the mixture under my hands, and the ritual of the sausage was complete.

“THAT WAS GOOD OF YE, Sassenach,” Jamie said, drying my clean, wet hands and arms with the towel afterward. He nodded toward the corner of the house, where Roger had disappeared to help with the rest of the butchering, looking somewhat more peaceful. “I did think to tell him before, but I couldna see how to do it.”

I smiled and moved close to him. It was a cold, windy day, and now that I had stopped working, the chill drove me closer to seek his warmth. He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt both the reassuring heat of his embrace, and the soft crackle of paper inside his shirt.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, a bittie letter Sinclair’s brought,” he said, drawing back a bit to reach into his shirt. “I didna want to open it while Donald was there, and didna trust him not to be reading it when I went out.”

“It’s not your letter, anyway,” I said, taking the smudged wad of paper from him. “It’s mine.”

“Oh, is it? Sinclair didna say, just handed it to me.”

“He would!” Not unusually, Ronnie Sinclair viewed me—all women, for that matter—as simply a minor appendage of a husband. I rather pitied the woman he might eventually induce to marry him.

I unfolded the note with some difficulty; it had been worn so long next to sweaty skin that the edges had frayed and stuck together.

The message inside was brief and cryptic, but unsettling. It had been scratched into the paper with something like a sharpened stick, using an ink that looked disturbingly like dried blood, though it was more likely berry juice.

“What does it say, Sassenach?” Seeing me frowning at the paper, Jamie moved to the side to look. I held it out to him.

Far down, in one corner, scratched in faint and tiny letters, as though the sender had hoped by this means to escape notice, was the word “Faydree.” Above, in bolder scratchings, the message read

YU

CUM

“IT MUST BE HER,” I said, shivering as I drew my shawl closer. It was cold in the surgery, despite the small brazier glowing in the corner, but Ronnie Sinclair and MacDonald were in the kitchen, drinking cider and waiting while the sausages boiled. I spread the note open on my surgery table, its minatory summons dark and peremptory above the timid signature. “Look. Who else could it be?”

“She canna write, surely?” Jamie objected. “Though I suppose it might be that someone wrote it for her,” he amended, frowning.

“No, she could have written this, I think.” Brianna and Roger had come into the surgery, too; Bree reached out and touched the ragged paper, one long finger gently tracing the staggered letters. “I taught her.”

“You did?” Jamie looked surprised. “When?”

“When I stayed at River Run. When you and Mama went to find Roger.” Her wide mouth pressed thin for a moment; it wasn’t an occasion she wished much to remember.

“I taught her the alphabet; I meant to teach her to read and write. We did all the letters—she knew how they sounded, and she could draw them. But then one day she said she couldn’t anymore, and she wouldn’t sit down with me.” She glanced up, a troubled frown between her thick, red brows. “I thought maybe Aunt Jocasta found out, and stopped her.”

“More likely Ulysses. Jocasta would have stopped
you,
lass.” Jamie’s frown matched hers as he glanced at me. “Ye do think it’s Phaedre, then? My aunt’s body slave?”

I shook my head, and bit one corner of my lip in doubt.

“The slaves at River Run do say her name like that—Faydree. And I certainly don’t know anyone else by that name.”

Jamie had questioned Ronnie Sinclair—casually, to give no occasion for alarm or gossip—but the cooper knew no more than he had told me: the note had been handed to him by a tinker, with the simple direction that it was “for the healer.”

I leaned over the table, lifting a candle high to look at the note once more. The “F” of the signature had been made with a hesitant, repeated stroke—more than one try before the writer had committed herself to signing it. The more evidence, I thought, of its origin. I didn’t know whether it was against the law in North Carolina to teach a slave to read or write, but it was certainly discouraged. While there were marked exceptions—slaves educated to their owners’ ends, like Ulysses himself—it was on the whole a dangerous skill, and one a slave would go some way to conceal.

“She wouldn’t have risked sending word like this, unless it was a serious matter,” Roger said. He stood behind Bree, one hand on her shoulder, looking down at the note she held flattened on the table. “But what?”

“Have you heard from your aunt lately?” I asked Jamie, but I knew the answer before he shook his head. Any word from River Run that reached the Ridge would have been a matter of public knowledge within hours.

We had not gone to the Gathering at Mt. Helicon this year; there was too much to do on the Ridge and Jamie wished to avoid the heated politics involved. Still, Jocasta and Duncan had meant to be there. Anything wrong would surely have been a matter of general gossip, which would have reached us long since.

“So it is not only serious, but a private matter to the slave, too,” Jamie said. “Otherwise, my aunt would have written, or Duncan sent word.” His two stiff fingers tapped once, softly, against his thigh.

We stood around the table, staring at the note as though it were a small white slab of dynamite. The scent of boiling sausages filled the cold air, warm and comforting.

“Why you?” Roger asked, looking up at me. “Do you think it might be a medical matter? If she were ill, say—or pregnant?”

“Not illness,” I said. “Too urgent.” It was a week’s ride to River Run at least—in good weather, and barring accident. Heaven knew how long it had taken the note to make its way up to Fraser’s Ridge.

“But if she was pregnant? Maybe.” Brianna pursed her lips, still frowning at the paper. “I think she thinks of Mama as a friend. She’d tell you before she’d tell Aunt Jocasta, I think.”

I nodded, but reluctantly. Friendship was too strong a word; people situated as Phaedre and I could not be friends. Liking was constrained by too many things—suspicion, mistrust, the vast chasm of difference that slavery imposed.

And yet there was a certain feeling of sympathy between us, that much was true. I had worked with her, side by side, planting herbs and harvesting them, making simples for the stillroom, explaining their uses. We had buried a dead girl together and plotted to protect a runaway slave accused of her murder. She had a certain talent with the sick, did Phaedre, and some knowledge of herbs. Any minor matter, she could deal with herself. But something like an unexpected pregnancy . . .

“What does she think I could do, though, I wonder?” I was thinking out loud, and my fingertips felt cold in contemplation. An unexpected child born to a slave would be of no concern to an owner—to the contrary, it would be welcomed as additional property; but I had heard stories of slave women who killed a child at birth, rather than have the babe brought up in slavery. Phaedre was a house slave, though, well-treated, and Jocasta did not separate slave families, I knew that. If it were that, Phaedre’s situation was surely not so dire—and yet, who was I to judge?

I blew out a cloud of smoky breath, uncertain.

“I just can’t see why—I mean, she couldn’t possibly expect that I’d help her to get rid of a child. And for anything else . . . why me? There are midwives and healers much closer. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“What if—” Brianna said, and stopped. She pursed her lips in speculation, looking from me to Jamie and back. “What if,” she said carefully, “she was pregnant, but the father was . . . someone it shouldn’t be?”

A wary but humorous speculation sprang up in Jamie’s eyes, increasing the resemblance between him and Brianna.

“Who, lass?” he said. “Farquard Campbell?”

I laughed out loud at the thought, and Brianna snorted with mirth, white wisps of breath floating round her head. The notion of the very upright—and quite elderly—Farquard Campbell seducing a house slave was . . .

“Well, no,” Brianna said. “Though he
does
have all those children. But I just thought suddenly—what if it was Duncan?”

Jamie cleared his throat, and avoided catching my eye. I bit my lip, feeling my face start to go red. Duncan had confessed his chronic impotence to Jamie before Duncan’s wedding to Jocasta—but Brianna didn’t know.

“Oh, I shouldna think it likely,” Jamie said, sounding a trifle choked. He coughed, and fanned smoke from the brazier away from his face. “What gives ye that notion, lass?”

“Nothing about Duncan,” she assured him. “But Aunt Jocasta
is
—well, old. And you know what men can be like.”

“No, what?” asked Roger blandly, making me cough with the effort to suppress a laugh.

Jamie eyed her with a certain amount of cynicism.

“A good deal better than you do,
a nighean.
And while I wouldna wager much on some men, I think I should feel safe in laying odds that Duncan Innes isna the man to be breaking his marriage vows with his wife’s black slave.”

I made a small noise, and Roger lifted one eyebrow at me.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I said, sounding strangled. “Just—fine.” I put a corner of the shawl over my no-doubt purple face and coughed ostentatiously. “It’s . . . smoky in here, isn’t it?”

“Maybe so,” Brianna conceded, addressing Jamie. “It might not be that at all. It’s just that Phaedre sent the note to ‘the healer,’ probably because she didn’t want to use Mama’s name, in case anybody saw the note before it got here. I just thought, maybe it wasn’t really Mama she wants—maybe it’s you.”

That sobered both Jamie and me, and we glanced at each other. It was a definite possibility, and one that hadn’t occurred to either of us.

“She couldn’t send a note direct to you without rousing all kinds of curiosity,” Bree went on, frowning at the note. “But she could say ‘the healer’ without putting a name on it. And she’d know that if Mama came, you’d probably come with her, at this time of year. Or if you didn’t, Mama could send for you openly.”