Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (120 page)

“I told him he couldn't—” Agnes began, scowling over her shoulder, but her stepfather pushed past her, only to be grasped by the arm by an irate Lieutenant Esterhazy.

“You stop right there, sir!”

“Leave go o' me, you shit-sucker! I have somethin' to tell the colonel.”

“Lieutenant!” I said, raising my own voice to command level. I didn't have occasion to use it often, but I remembered how, and the lieutenant stopped, mouth open as he looked at me. So did Agnes and Aaron Cloudtree.

“The colonel wants to speak to him,” I said mildly. “Agnes, take the lieutenant downstairs. Go and see how the captain is doing.”

He glared at me for a long moment, turned the glare on Cloudtree—who was elaborately brushing his rain-damp sleeve as though to remove finger marks—and left, followed by Agnes, who tossed her stepfather a glare of her own, though he didn't seem to notice.

“I seen Scotchee, Colonel,” Cloudtree began, advancing on the bed. Then he noticed the state of Jamie's chest and his eyes sprang wide. “Jesus Christ, man! What happened to you?”

“Quite a few things,” I said shortly. “Perhaps you—”

“And what did Scotchee say, then, Mr. Cloudtree?” Jamie was still sitting up, apparently oblivious of the slow drops of blood oozing down his ribs.

“Oh.” Aaron took a moment to recollect, but then nodded reassuringly at Jamie.

“He said to tell you, you owe him big for this, but he doesn't think you're gonna live long enough to pay him back, so dinna fash unless there's whisky.”

March 30, A.D. 1780

Fraser’s Ridge, North Carolina

From James Fraser, Proprietor of Fraser’s Ridge

As you have, each and all, conspired and acted to attack and arrest me, with the desired End of causing my Death, the Contract of Tenancy signed between us is, as of this Date, rendered Null and Void in its Entirety.

By such Actions as you have undertaken, you have broken my Trust and betrayed your sworn Word.

Therefore, you are, each and all, hereby Evicted from the Land you presently occupy, dispossessed of your Title to said Land, and are required to depart, with your Families, from Fraser’s Ridge within the Space of Ten Days.

You may carry away such Food, Clothing, Tools, Seedcorn, Livestock, and Personal Property as you possess. All of your Buildings, Outbuildings, Sheds, Corncribs, Pens, and other Structures are forfeit. Should these be burnt or damaged by way of Spite, you will be apprehended and your Belongings confiscated.

Should you seek to return privily to Fraser’s Ridge, you will be shot on Sight.

James Fraser, Proprietor

“CAN YE THINK OF
anything I’ve left out?” Jamie asked, watching as I read this.

“No. That’s…quite thorough.” I felt a cold heaviness in my stomach. These were all men I knew well. I’d greeted them and their wives as they’d come to the Ridge, many of them with nothing save the clothes on their backs, full of hope and gratitude for a place in this wild new world. I’d visited their cabins, delivered their children, tended their ills. And now…

I could see that Jamie felt the same heaviness of heart. These were men he’d trusted, accepted, given land and tools, encouragement and friendship. I set the letter down, my fingers cold.

“Would you really shoot them if they come back?” I asked quietly.

He looked at me sharply, and I saw that while he might be heavy of heart, that heart was also burning with a deep anger.

“Sassenach,” he said, “they betrayed me, and they hunted me like a wild animal, across my own land, for the sake of what they call the King’s justice. I have had enough of that justice. Should they come within my sight, on my land, again—aye. I will kill them.”

I bit my lip. He saw and put a hand on mine.

“It must be done so,” he said quietly, looking into my eyes to make sure I understood. “Not only because they’ll make trouble themselves—but these are not the only men on the Ridge and nearby whose minds turn in that direction, and I ken that well. Many have kept quiet so far, watching to see am I weak, will I fall or be taken? Will someone come here, like Major Ferguson? They’re afraid to declare themselves one way or the other, but was I to show these”—he flicked his other hand at the notice—“mercy, allow them to keep not only their lives but their land and weapons, it would give the timid ones confidence to join them.”

Not only their lives…

I felt the world shift, just slightly, under my feet. To this point, I’d been able to think that whatever might be happening in the world outside the Ridge, the Ridge itself was a solid refuge. And it wasn’t.

Not only their lives. Ours.

He didn’t need to say that he might not command sufficient men—or guns—to stand off a larger-scale insurrection on the Ridge by himself.

“Yes, I see that,” I said, and swallowing, picked up the paper gingerly, seeing not only the names of men but the faces of women. “It’s only—I can’t help feeling for the wives.” And the children, but mostly for the wives, caught between their homes, the needs of their families, and the danger of their husbands’ politics. Now to be evicted from their homes, with nothing but what they could carry away and nowhere to go.

I had no idea how many women might share their husbands’ opinions, but share them or not, they’d be forced to live or die by the outcome.

“Bell, book, and candle,” he said, his eyes still on my face, and not without sympathy.

“What?”

“Ring the bell, close the book, quench the candle,” he said quietly, and touched the paper on my knee. “It’s the rite of excommunication and anathema, Sassenach—and that’s what I have done.”

Before I could think of anything whatever to say, I heard solid male footsteps coming up the stairs, and a moment later there was a knock at the door.

“Come,” Jamie said, his voice neutral.

The door opened, revealing Lieutenant Esterhazy, his face twenty years older than his age.

“Sir,” he said formally, and stood ramrod-straight in front of the bed. “My—that is—Lieutenant Bembridge has not returned. May I have permission to go and look for him?”

I was startled at that, and looked at Jamie, who was not startled. It hadn’t occurred to me that the lieutenant was no longer a friend of the house but rather Jamie’s prisoner—but evidently they both thought so.

Jamie was completely able to hide what he was thinking, but he wasn’t bothering to do so at the moment. If he let Esterhazy go, who might he see, and what might he tell them? It was obvious that Jamie was in no condition to defend himself or his house, let alone police the Ridge. What if the lieutenant went out and came back with a small mob? Left altogether and went to join Ferguson, with intent to lead him back here?

I was sure nothing of the sort was in the boy’s mind; he hadn’t any thought but his friend at the moment. But that didn’t mean he mightn’t think of other things, once away from the house.

“You may,” Jamie said, as formal as the lieutenant. “Mrs. Fraser will go with you.”

“Y
E HAVE TO, SASSENACH.”

Those words wouldn’t leave my ear; they remained stubbornly trapped inside, a tiny, high-pitched echo that buzzed against my eardrum.

That’s what Jamie had said, when Oliver Esterhazy had left the room to go and take leave of his chief—or rather, of Elspeth—in the surgery.

“There’s nobody else,” Jamie said reasonably, making a slight gesture toward the empty corners of the bedroom. “I canna send Bobby or the Lindsays, because I need them here. Besides,” he added, leaning back on his pillow with a grimace as the movement pulled on his stitches, “if nothing’s happened to Mr. Bembridge, he’d be here now. Since he isn’t, it’s odds-on he’s hurt or dead. You’d be the best one to deal with him once he’s found, aye?”

I couldn’t argue with that, as a logical statement, but I argued anyway.

“I’m not going to leave you here alone. You’re in no shape to fight back, if anyone—”

“That’s
why
I need the Lindsays here,” he said patiently. “They’re guardin’ the door. Doors,” he corrected. “Kenny and Murdo are on the stoop and Evan’s round the back.”

“And where’s Bobby?”

“Gone to fetch a few more men and to spread the word that the captain is…” He hesitated.

“Hors de combat?”
I suggested.

“In no condition to be moved,” he said firmly. “I dinna want anyone thinkin’ they ought to come storm the house and try to get him back.”

I stared at him. He was slightly whiter than the sheet covering him, his eyes were shadowed and sunken with exhaustion, and his hand trembled where it lay on the coverlet.

“And just when did you make all these arrangements?” I demanded.

“When ye went to the privy. Go, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye have to.”

I went, perturbed in mind. It went against my grain to leave wounded men, even if they were all stable at the moment and unlikely to take a sudden turn for the worse. And Elspeth, Fanny, and Agnes were completely capable of handling any minor medical emergency that might arise, I told myself.

“…so I’m going out with Lieutenant Esterhazy to look for his friend,” I said to Elspeth, taking down my field kit from the hook where I kept it. She didn’t look much better than Jamie, but nodded, her eyes fixed on her son. He was beginning to twitch and moan.

“I’ll manage things here,” she said quietly, and glanced up at me, suddenly. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bagged with fatigue, but alert. “Be careful.”

I stopped, looking at her, and a faint pink rose in her cheeks.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said. “But things seem…very unsettled. To me.”

“Do you mean Nicodemus Partland?” I said bluntly. “And the men he’s meant to be bringing from Ninety-Six?”

The pink in her cheeks vanished like a frost-bitten flower.

“Hmph,” I said, and left.

Oliver was waiting for me on the porch, and at once offered to take the pack with the field kit.

“No, I’ll keep that. You take this one.” I handed him another pack, this one with water, honey-water, some food, a folded blanket, a jar of leeches, and a few other things that might come in handy. “All right, then—where shall we start?”

He looked off the porch, bewildered.

“I don’t know.” Nobody had slept last night, and neither had he. While a nice, cheerful young man, he was in fact not the brightest person I’d ever met. Now, between worry and exhaustion, he didn’t seem to have more than a few brain cells still working. I took a deep breath of morning air, summoning patience.

“Well, where did you see him last?” I asked.

This question invariably annoyed the members of my household searching for lost items, but Oliver Esterhazy blinked and then squinted in concentration, finally saying, “Near the Meeting House.”

“Then we’ll start there.”

“I already looked there.”

“We’ll
start
looking there.”

The rain had stopped, but the forest was dripping and my skirts were wet to the knee before we were halfway there. I didn’t mind. Birds were chirping, the air was alive with the sharp, fresh scents of red cedar and spruce, sprouting dogwood and rhododendron, and the mountainside was running with dozens of tiny rills and streams. Spring was in the air, and the peace of the morning wood was seeping into me, the anxiety of the night and the urgencies of the morning settling into something approaching perspective.

Jamie wasn’t dying or in any immediate danger of doing so. Everything else could be handled, and true to form, he was doing just that, even flat on his back and too weak to sit up by himself.

I still wanted to be with him, but he was right—there was no one else he could have sent, under the circumstances. Though his concern lest Lieutenant Esterhazy raise a mob of Loyalists seemed unnecessary at the moment. We saw and heard no one on the trail, and everyone seemed to be keeping deliberately out of sight. We knocked at two cabins on the way, to inquire after Lieutenant Bembridge, but were met with closed faces and negative shakes of the head.

The Meeting House itself was abandoned. The door had been left open, half the benches were overturned, beer was puddled on the floor, and two raccoons were inside, busily chewing on a Masonic apron that someone had dropped.

“Get out of here!” Oliver grabbed a broom that had also been knocked to the floor and drove the raccoons out with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, then tenderly retrieved the remnants of the apron. It was a luxurious one, of white leather, with a white silk pleated edging and canvas ties, somewhat gnawed. The Masonic compass had been painted on it, with considerable skill.

“The captain’s?” I asked, watching him fold the garment, and he nodded.

Small accoutrements, like the wooden bucket and dipper for the refreshment of long-winded speakers and a stack of paper fans that the children had made for the coming summer, were scattered over the room. We stood for a moment in silence, looking at the wreckage, but neither of us chose to mention the irony—if that was the word—of a meeting of Freemasons, theoretically dedicated to the ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, disintegrating into riot and mayhem. So much for not talking politics in Lodge…

We stepped outside and Oliver carefully closed the door. Then we walked to and fro in widening circles, shouting Gilbert Bembridge’s name.

“Would he perhaps have taken refuge with…one of the captain’s followers?” I asked delicately when we met again outside the Meeting House. “If he was wounded, perhaps?”

“I don’t know.” Oliver was growing agitated, glancing around as though expecting his friend to spring out from behind a tree. “I—I think maybe he was with the men who were, um…”

“Chasing my husband?” I said, rather acidly. “Which way did they go?”

He said he wasn’t sure, but set off downhill with a sudden burst of determination, me following more cautiously in order not to turn an ankle on the rocks and gravel the sudden freshets had left exposed on the trails.

I was beginning to think that there was something odd about Lieutenant Esterhazy’s behavior. He was sweating heavily, though the woods were still very cold, and though he cast aside from time to time, he did so in brief, erratic bursts before returning to a path of his own choosing. I rather thought he
knew
where he was going, and wasn’t really surprised when we suddenly came to a spot where the woods…weren’t.

We were standing at the edge of a copse of scraggy oak saplings, and below our feet, the ground fell away in a tumble of raw black earth, full of broken trees and shattered bushes, with great gray rocks that had been dislodged by the fall and now lay half buried in the dirt, their undersides exposed, stained and wet with mud and dislodged worms.

“Well,” I said, after a moment’s silence. “So this is the famous landslide. Were you here when it happened?”

He shook his head. His hair was coming out of its neat naval plait and straggled over his sweating face. He wiped it back, absently.

“No,” he said, then repeated, “No,” more definitely.

It wasn’t a huge landslide, though if one was standing at the bottom of it in the dark, it had probably been startling enough. About fifty feet of the mountainside had slipped, rumbling down a steep slope of granite and half blocking a small brook.

“Do you think—” the young man began, then stopped and swallowed, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Gilbert could be…in there?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said, eyeing the rubble dubiously. “If he is, though…” We were plainly not equipped to dig through a landslide with our bare hands, and I was on the point of saying so when the lieutenant grabbed my arm with a startled cry, pointing down.

“There! There!”

A smudge of navy blue, mud-smeared and nearly the color of the wet earth, was sticking out of the soil, about twenty feet from where we stood, and before I could say anything, Oliver was sliding and staggering through the wet clods, falling to one knee, then rising again and pushing onward.

I stumbled after him, gripping my emergency pack, though after the first convulsive leap, my heart had sunk like a stone. He couldn’t be alive.

Oliver had unearthed an arm and, leaping to his feet, heaved on it with all his might. I heard something crack and Gilbert’s head, with its dead-white face, burst from the ground in a shower of clods and gravel.

Oliver had let go Gilbert’s arm as though it were red-hot and was more or less gibbering in shock, but I didn’t have time to spare for him. I dropped to my knees and rubbed a hand hard over Gilbert’s face. I thought—but—no. I was right; I
had
seen a twitch of his eyelids—I saw it again now and my heart sprang into my throat.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ! Oliver! I think he’s alive—help me get him out!”

“He—wh-wh-what…he
can’t
be!”

I’d dropped my pack and was digging like a badger with my bare hands. Something warm touched my skin—a wisp of breath.

“Gilbert—Gilbert! Hang on, just hang on, we’re getting you out of there…”

“No,” said Oliver’s voice behind me. It was hoarse and high-pitched and I glanced over my shoulder, to see him pulling a torn-off branch out of the muck.

“No,” he said again, more strongly. “I don’t think so.”

JAMIE WOKE FROM
a feverish doze to see Frances standing beside his bed, looking grave.

“What’s happened?” he asked. His throat was dry as sand, and the words came out in a faint rasp. “Where’s my wife?”

“She hasn’t come back yet,” Frances said. “She and Lieutenant Esterhazy only left an hour ago, you know.”
“You know”
came out with a faint tone of question and he made an attempt at a smile. Not a good one; his face was as tired as the rest of him. Frances looked at him assessingly, then lifted the cup she was holding.

“You’re to drink this,” she said firmly. “One full cup each hour. She said so.” The
“She”
was spoken with the respect due to the local deity, and his smile got better.

He managed to raise his head enough to drink, though she had to hold the cup while he did so. It was only moderately horrible and Frances, the dear child, had evidently taken Claire’s direction “with a little whisky” not only literally but liberally. He laid his head back on the pillow, feeling slightly dizzy, though that might just be the lack of blood.

“I’m to check and see if you’re oozing pus,” Frances told him, in the same firm tone.

“I’m in no condition to stop ye, lass.”

He lay still, breathing deep and slow, as she untied the bandage and lifted the wet compress from his chest. He was interested to see that she handled his body without the slightest hesitation or compunction, pressing here and there beside the line of stitching, a small frown between her soft dark brows. He wanted to laugh, but didn’t; even such breathing as he was doing hurt quite a bit.

“What d’ye think,
a nighean
?” he asked. “Will I live?”

She made a small grimace meant to acknowledge that she understood he was jesting, but the frown remained.

“Yes,” she said, but stood for a moment, frowning at his patchworked chest. Then she seemed to make up her mind about something and replaced the compress and retied the bandage in a business-like way.