A Breath of Snow and Ashes (133 page)

83

DECLARATIONS

Charlotte, Mecklenberg County
May 20, 1775

T
HE ONE THING ROGER HAD NOT envisioned about the making of history was the sheer amount of alcohol involved. He should have, he thought; if there was anything a career in academia had taught him, it was that almost all worthwhile business was conducted in the pub.

The public houses, taverns, ordinaries, and pothouses in Charlotte were doing a roaring business, as delegates, spectators, and hangers-on seethed through them, men of Loyalist sentiments collecting in the King’s Arms, those of rabidly opposing views in the Blue Boar, with shifting currents of the unallied and undecided eddying to and fro, purling through the Goose and Oyster, Thomas’s ordinary, the Groats, Simon’s, Buchanan’s, Mueller’s, and two or three nameless places that barely qualified as shebeens.

Jamie visited all of them. And drank in all of them, sharing beer, ale, rum punch, shandy, cordial, porter, stout, cider, brandywine, persimmon beer, rhubarb wine, blackberry wine, cherry bounce, perry, merry brew, and scrumpy. Not all of them were alcoholic, but the great majority were.

Roger confined himself largely to beer, and found himself glad of his restraint, when he happened to meet with Davy Caldwell in the street, turning from a fruiterer’s stall with a handful of early apricots.

“Mr. MacKenzie!” Caldwell cried, his face lighting with welcome. “I had nay thought to meet you here, but what blessing that I have!”

“Blessing indeed,” Roger said, shaking the minister’s hand with cordial fervor. Caldwell had married him and Brianna, and had examined him at the Presbyterian Academy regarding his own calling, some months before. “How d’ye do, Mr. Caldwell?”

“Och, for myself, well enough—but my heart misgives me for the fate of my poor brethren!” Caldwell shook his head in dismay, gesturing at a group of men crowding into Simon’s ordinary, laughing and talking. “What is to come of this, I ask ye, Mr. MacKenzie—what’s to come?”

Roger was, for an unbalanced instant, tempted to tell him what was to come of it, exactly. As it was, though, he gestured to Jamie—who had been stopped by an acquaintance in the street—to go along without him, and turned away to walk a bit with Caldwell.

“Have ye come for the conference, then, Mr. Caldwell?” he asked.

“I have that, Mr. MacKenzie, I have that. Little hope have I that my words will make the slightest difference, but it is my duty to speak as I find, and so I shall.”

What Davy Caldwell found was a shocking condition of human slothfulness, for which he blamed the entire current situation, convinced that unreflective apathy and “a stupid concern with personal comfort” on the part of the colonists both tempted and provoked the exercise of tyrannical powers on the part of Crown and Parliament.

“It’s a point, sure,” Roger said, aware that Caldwell’s impassioned gestures were attracting a certain amount of notice, even amongst the crowds in the street, most of them reasonably argumentative themselves.

“A point!” Caldwell cried. “Aye, it is, and
the
point entirely. The ignorance, disregard of moral obligation, and the supreme love of ease of the groveling sluggard corresponds exactly—exactly!—with a tyrant’s appetite and cynicism.”

He glowered at one gentleman who had subsided against the side of a house, taking a brief respite from the noonday heat with his hat over his face.

“The spirit of God must redeem the slothful, fill the human frame with activity, poise, and libertarian consciousness!”

Roger wondered, rather, whether Caldwell would view the escalating war as the result of God’s intervention—but upon reflection, thought that he likely would. Caldwell was a thinker, but a staunch Presbyterian, and thus a believer in predestination.

“The slothful encourage and facilitate oppression,” Caldwell explained, with a scornful gesture toward a family of tinkers enjoying an alfresco luncheon in the yard of a house. “Their own shame and sinking spirits, their own pitiful compliance and submission—these become self-made chains of slavery!”

“Oh, aye,” Roger said, and coughed. Caldwell was a famous preacher, and rather inclined to want to keep in practice. “Will ye take a whet, Mr. Caldwell?” It was a warm day, and Caldwell’s rather round, cherubic face was becoming very red.

They went into Thomas’s ordinary, a fairly respectable house, and sat down with tankards of the house beer—for Caldwell, like most, did not regard beer as being in any way “drink,” like rum or whisky. What else, after all, would one drink? Milk?

Out of the sun, and with a cooling draught to hand, Davy Caldwell became less heated in his expressions, as well as his countenance.

“Praise God for the fortune of meeting ye here, Mr. MacKenzie,” he said, breathing deep after lowering his tankard. “I had sent a letter, but doubtless ye will have left home before it could come. I wished to inform ye of the gladsome news—there is to be a Presbytery.”

Roger felt a sudden leap of the heart.

“When? And where?”

“Edenton, early next month. The Reverend Doctor McCorkle is coming from Philadelphia. He’ll remain for a time, before departing on his further journey—he is going to the Indies, to encourage the efforts of the church there. I am, of course, presuming to know your mind—I apologize for the forwardness of my address, Mr. MacKenzie—but is it still your desire to seek ordination?”

“With all my heart.”

Caldwell beamed, and grasped him strongly by the hand.

“Give ye joy of it, dear man—great joy.”

He then plunged into a close description of McCorkle, whom he had met in Scotland, and speculations regarding the state of religion in the colony—he spoke of Methodism with some respect, but considered the New Light Baptists “somewhat unregulated” in their effusions of worship, though doubtless well-meaning—and surely sincere belief was an improvement over unbelief, whatever the form it might take. In due course, though, he came back round to their present circumstances.

“Ye’ve come with your father-in-law, have ye?” he asked. “I thought I saw him, in the road.”

“I have, and ye did,” Roger assured him, fumbling in his pocket for a coin. The pocket itself was full of coiled horsehair; with his academic experience as guide, he had made provision against possible boredom by bringing the makings of a new fishing line.

“Ah.” Caldwell looked at him keenly. “I’ve heard things of late—is it true, he’s turned Whig?”

“He is a firm friend to liberty,” Roger said, cautious, and took a breath. “As am I.” He’d not had occasion to say it out loud before; it gave him a small, breathless feeling, just under the breastbone.

“Aha, aha, very good! I had heard of it, as I say—and yet there are a great many who say otherwise: that he is a Tory, a Loyalist like his relations, and that this protestation of support for the independency movement is but a ruse.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, but Caldwell’s bushy eyebrow, cocked like a swell’s hat, made it clear that it was.

“Jamie Fraser is an honest man,” Roger said, and drained his tankard. “And an honorable one,” he added, setting it down. “And speaking of the same, I think I must go and find him.”

Caldwell glanced around; there was an air of restlessness around them, of men calling their accounts and settling up. The official meeting of the convention was to begin at two o’clock, at MacIntyre’s farmhouse. It was past noon now, delegates, speakers, and spectators would be slowly gathering, girding themselves for an afternoon of conflict and decision. The breathless feeling came back.

“Aye, then. Give him my regards, if ye will—though perhaps I may see him myself. And may the Holy Spirit penetrate the encrustations of habit and lethargy, and convert the souls and rouse the consciences of those who gather here today!”

“Amen,” said Roger, smiling in spite of the glances from the men—and not a few women—around them.

He found Jamie in the Blue Boar, in the company of a number of men in whom the Holy Spirit had already been hard at work on the encrustations, judging from the volume. The chatter near the door died away, though, as he made his way through the room—not in cause of his own presence, but because there was something more interesting going on near the center.

To wit: Jamie Fraser and Neil Forbes, both red with heat, passion, and a gallon or two of mixed spirits, head to head over a table, and hissing like snakes in the Gaelic.

Only a few of the spectators were Gaelic speakers; these were hastily translating the high points of the dialogue for the rest of the crowd.

Gaelic insult was an art, and one at which his father-in-law excelled, though Roger was obliged to admit that the lawyer was no slouch at it, himself. The translations rendered by the onlookers fell far short of the original; nonetheless, the taproom was rapt, with occasional admiring whistles or whoops from the spectators, or laughter as a particularly pungent point was made.

Having missed the beginning, Roger had no idea how the conflict had begun, but so far into it as they were, the exchange was focused on cowardice and arrogance, Jamie’s remarks aimed at Forbes’s leading the attack on Fogarty Simms as a low-minded and cowardly attempt to make himself look the big man at the price of a defenseless man’s life, Forbes—shifting into English here, as he realized that they had become the cynosure of the room—taking the view that Jamie’s presence here was an unwarrantable affront to those who truly held the ideals of liberty and justice, as everyone knew he was in truth the King’s man, but he, the puffed-up cock o’ the walk, thought that he could pull the wool over everyone’s eyes long enough to betray the whole boiling, but if he, Fraser, thought he, Forbes, was fool enough to be gulled by antic tricks in the public street and a lot of talk with nay more substance than the shrieking of gulls, he, Fraser, had best think again!

Jamie slapped a hand flat on the table, making it boom like a drum, and rattling the cups. He rose, glaring down at Forbes.

“Do ye libel my honor, sir?” he cried, also shifting to English. “For if ye do, let us go out, and we shall settle the matter at once, yea or nay!”

Sweat was streaming down Forbes’s broad, flushed face, and his eyes were gleaming with anger, but even overheated as he was, Roger saw belated caution pluck at his sleeve. Roger hadn’t seen the fight in Cross Creek, but Ian had told him the details, meanwhile laughing his head off. The last thing Neil Forbes could desire was a duel.

“Have ye honor to libel, sir?” Forbes demanded, standing in turn, and drawing himself up as though about to address the jury. “Ye come here acting the great one, carousing and showing away like a sailor come ashore with prize money in his pocket—but have we any evidence that your words are more than puffery? Puffery, I say, sir!”

Jamie stood, both hands braced on the tabletop, surveying Forbes through narrowed eyes. Roger had once seen that expression focused on himself. It had been followed rapidly by the sort of mayhem customary in a Glasgow pub on Saturday night—only more so. The only thing to be thankful for was that Forbes had clearly not heard any whiff of Malva Christie’s accusation, or there would be blood on the floor already.

Jamie straightened slowly, and his left hand went toward his waist. There were gasps, and Forbes paled. But Jamie had reached for his sporran, not his dirk, and plunged his hand inside.

“As to that . . .
sir
. . .” he said in a low, even voice that carried through the room, “I have made myself clear. I am for liberty, and to that end, I pledge my name, my fortune”—here he withdrew his hand from his sporran and slammed it on the table; a small purse, two golden guineas, and a jewel—“and my sacred honor.”

The room was silent, all eyes focused on the black diamond, which shimmered with a baleful light. Jamie paused for the space of three heartbeats, then drew breath.

“Is there any man here who gives me the lie?” he said. It was ostensibly addressed to the room at large, but his eyes were fixed on Forbes. The lawyer had gone a mottled red and gray, like a bad oyster, but said nothing.

Jamie paused again, looked once round the room, then picked up purse, money, and jewel, and stalked out the door. Outside, the town clock chimed two, the strokes slow and heavy in the humid air.