Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (135 page)

JAMIE INVITED “CAPTAIN STEVENS”
to come in, with the sort of exquisite courtesy that meant he was doing a mental rundown of the location of all weapons inside the house. I saw him usher Ulysses before him to the laird’s study and glance at the rifle that was standing behind the front door as he followed, nodding to the round-eyed boys—and an equally round-eyed Fanny, who had appeared from the springhouse—as he went.

“Fanny,” I said, “go to the kitchen, please, and get a pitcher of milk and a plate of biscuits—”

“We ate all the biscuits for breakfast, ma’am,” Fanny said helpfully. “There’s half a pie in the pie safe, though.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. You and Agnes take the pie and milk out to the two men on the porch, please. Oh—Aidan. Take this back to my surgery, will you?” I handed him the amputation knife, which he received as one being given Excalibur, and bore it off, gingerly balanced across his palms.

I slipped into the study and closed the door behind me. I’d last seen Ulysses at River Run plantation, near Cross Creek, where he had been butler to Jamie’s aunt Jocasta. He had left under what might politely be called strained circumstances, it having been revealed that he’d been not only Jocasta’s butler for twenty years but also her lover—and had killed at least one man and—just possibly—Hector Cameron, Jocasta’s third husband. I didn’t know what he’d been doing for the last seven or eight years, but the fact that he’d come anywhere near Jamie now—and accompanied by an armed escort—was deeply unsettling.

“Mrs. Fraser.” He’d turned when I came in, and now bowed to me, looking me over with a deliberately appraising, un-butler-like gaze. “I’m pleased to see you well.”

“Thank you. You’re looking quite…well, yourself. Captain Stevens.” He was. Tall and imposing in a well-tailored uniform, broad-shouldered and fit. Despite his apparent health, though, his face showed the marks of hard living—and his eyes were different. No longer the courteous blankness of a servant. These eyes were deep-lined, fierce, and, quite frankly, made me want to take a step backward.

He saw that, and his lips drew in a little in amusement, but he looked away.

Jamie was reaching into his cupboard for whisky. He nodded Ulysses to the visitor’s chair across the desk and set the battered pewter tray with bottle and glasses on the desk before taking his own chair.

“May I?” I said, and at Ulysses’s nod I poured him a respectable dram, and the same for Jamie. And for me. I wasn’t going anywhere until I found out what “Captain Stevens” was doing here. I took my glass and sat down on a stool, a little behind Jamie.

“Slàinte.”
Jamie lifted his glass briefly, and Ulysses smiled slightly.

“Slàinte mhath,”
he said.

“Ye’ll have kept your
Gàidhlig,
then,” Jamie said, a deliberate reference, I thought, to River Run, where most of the servants had had at least a passing acquaintance with the language of the Highlands.

“Not surprising,” Ulysses replied, not at all discomposed. He took a sip of the whisky, paused to let it spread through his mouth, and shook his head with a small “mm” of approval. “I joined Lord Dunmore’s company in ’74. You’ll know his lordship, of course.”

Jamie stiffened slightly.

“I do,” he said politely. “Though I’ve not had the pleasure of his acquaintance since the days before Culloden.”

“What?” I said. “I don’t recall a Lord Dunmore.”

“Well, he hadna got the title then.” Jamie glanced back at me and smiled a little, a rueful sharing of the memory of those fraught days. “But ye kent him, too, Sassenach—John Murray, he was then; just a lad, a page to Charles Stuart.”

“Oh. Yes.” I did recall him, just barely—a homely boy with receding chin, a large nose, and red hair that stuck out in tufts. “So now he’s Lord Dunmore…?”

“Yes. Of late, governor of the Colony of Virginia,” Ulysses said. “And more recently, commander of a major force against the Shawnee Indians in Ohio. A successful venture in which I was privileged to take part.” He did smile then, and I felt a small qualm in the pit of my stomach at the look of it. Indian wars were a messy business.

“Aye,” Jamie said, dismissively. “But surely the army has nay business of that kind wi’ the Cherokee. Though perhaps ye’ve come wi’ their allowance of powder and bullets from the government?”

“I have no army business with the Cherokee, no,” Ulysses replied politely. “In fact, I think of retiring from the army soon. Perhaps I shall follow your example, Mr. Fraser, and set up for a landlord. But for the moment, sir, my business is with you—though this visit is a personal one, rather than an official call. As yet.”

“A personal visit,” Jamie repeated, and leaned back a little in his chair, tilting his head. “And what might your personal business be with me?”

“Your aunt,” Ulysses said, and leaned forward, eyes fixed on Jamie’s face. “Does she still live?”

I was taken aback but at the same time realized that I wasn’t really surprised at all. Neither was Jamie, who didn’t change his expression but took a long, slow breath before replying.

“She does,” he said. “Though I canna tell ye a great deal more than that.”

Ulysses’s expression had certainly changed. His face was vivid, charged with urgency. “You can tell me where she is.”

I couldn’t always tell what Jamie was thinking, but in this instance, I was reasonably sure we were thinking the same thing.

Jocasta had married one of Jamie’s friends, Duncan Innes—while still carrying on her long-term affair with Ulysses, as we learned much later. In the chaotic aftermath of events at River Run and the subsequent dramatic revelations, Ulysses had fled, Jocasta had sold River Run, and she and Duncan had moved to Nova Scotia, and thence to a small farm on St. John’s Island.

I knew that the British army offered freedom to slaves who would join their ranks, and obviously that was the path Ulysses had chosen with Lord Dunmore. Jocasta had secretly manumitted him years before, but officially recognized freedom was a much safer path, especially in North Carolina, where a slave freed by his or her master must leave the colony within ten days or be subject to recapture and sale.

So now he was a free man, by the goodwill of the British government. Completely and permanently free—so long as he wasn’t captured by Americans with other ideas. While that knowledge made me happy for him, I had a great many reservations.

Behind the bland mask of servitude, this man had lived for twenty years as the unknown master of River Run, and had killed without compunction. He had, very plainly, loved Jocasta Cameron passionately—and she, him. And now he had come looking for her again…Very romantic. And very unsettling. I recalled vividly the skeletal remains of Daniel Rawlings, sprawled on the floor of the mausoleum at River Run, and a ripple of gooseflesh ran up my back.

I glanced quickly at Jamie, who carefully didn’t look at me. He sighed, rubbed a hand over his face, then dropped it, meeting Ulysses’s eyes.

“I havena heard from my aunt anytime these five years past,” he said. “And I’ve heard little more about her save that she
is
still alive. And well. Or at least she was when I heard it from my cousin Hamish, when I met him at Saratoga. That will be three years past. And that’s the last I’ve heard.”

All of that was mostly true. On the other hand, we did know a bit more than that, as Jocasta now and then wrote to her old friend, Farquard Campbell, who lived in Cross Creek. But I could see why Jamie didn’t mean to set Captain Ulysses Stevens on a dangerous path toward an unwarned and literally unarmed—the poor man had only one—Duncan Innes.

Ulysses looked hard into Jamie’s eyes for a long minute; I could hear the ticking of Jenny’s tiny silver watch on the shelf behind me; she’d left it when she’d come down to lend a hand with combing and carding several fleeces the week before. At last, Ulysses gave a small grunt, which might have been either amusement or disgust, and sat back.

“I thought it might be like that,” he said mildly.

“Aye. I’m sorry not to have a better answer for ye, Captain.” Jamie pushed back his chair and made to rise, but Ulysses raised a pink-palmed hand to stop him.

“Not so fast, Mr. Fraser—or no, I beg your pardon; it’s
General
Fraser now, is it not?”

“No, it’s not,” Jamie replied shortly. “I resigned my commission in the Continental army and I’ve no connection with it anymore.”

Ulysses nodded, urbane as always. “Of course, forgive me. But there are some things harder to renounce than a commission, are there not?”

“If ye’ve more to say,” Jamie said, an edge in his voice, “say it, then go wi’ God. There’s nothing for ye here.”

Ulysses’s smile showed a missing pre-molar on one side, and a gray dead tooth beside it. “I do apologize, Mr. Fraser, but I think you’ll find you’re mistaken. I do have business here. With you.”

I let my breath out, then lost it altogether when he reached into his coat and produced a very official-looking document, sealed with red wax. Red wax, in my experience, was usually a bad sign.

“Read that, sir, if you will,” Ulysses said, and unfolding it, placed it carefully on the desk in front of Jamie.

Jamie raised his brows and looked at Ulysses for a moment, but then picked up the letter with a shrug and popped the seal off with the tip of the skinning knife he used as a letter opener. His spectacles were sitting on the desk, and he put them on with deliberate slowness, smoothing out the creases in the letter.

I could hear voices in the house; the girls had come back from the springhouse with the cheese for supper and the crock of butter we’d need for tomorrow’s baking. I caught a whiff of raspberries as Fanny’s footsteps passed the door, and the soft clank of her tin bucket, brushing the wall as she turned to call to Agnes. We’d make a fresh pie, then…if the berries survived a kitchen full of hungry boys…

Jamie said something very terrible in Gaelic, took off his spectacles, and gave Ulysses a look meant to set his wig on fire. I plunged a hand into my pocket for my own spectacles and took the letter from him.

It was sent from one Lord George Germain, secretary of state for the American Department. I’d heard quite a bit about Lord George Germain; John Grey had worked under him briefly as a diplomat and held a low opinion of the man. But that didn’t matter just now.

What
did
matter was that it had come to the attention of Lord George Germain, secretary of state, et cetera, that one James Fraser (known erstwhile in Scotland as Lord Brok Turch, a convicted and pardoned Jacobite) had, in the Year of Our Lord 1767, fraudulently obtained a grant of land in the Colony of North Carolina, by misrepresenting and disguising to Governor William Tryon his identity as a Catholic, such persons being prohibited by law from holding such grants.

I felt as though I were being suffocated.

It was true. Not that Jamie had misrepresented himself to Governor Tryon; the governor had known all about Jamie’s Catholicism but had turned a deliberately blind eye to it for the sake of getting Jamie’s help in settling—in more ways than one—the tumultuous North Carolina backcountry during the War of the Regulation. But it was undeniably true that Catholics were by law not allowed to receive land grants. And so…

I forced a breath and read on:

There being at present no duly-appointed Governor for the Colony of North Carolina, the Secretary of State for the Colonies now orders the aforesaid James Fraser to surrender the Grant of Lands thus fraudulently obtained, to Captain Ulysses Stevens of His Majesty’s Company of Black Pioneers, acting as Agent of the Crown, and vacate the Premises of the Grant (Location and Dimensions being described in the attached Document). Any Tenants presently living on the Grant may remain for the Space of one Year. After such Time, Tenants must leave or make Arrangement to deliver Rent as may be determined by the new Holder of this Grant.

The words blurred into spots before my eyes, and I dropped the letter back on the desk.

“You bloody
reptile
!” I said, looking at Ulysses. He ignored me.

“I would take prompt notice of that, if I were you, Mr. Fraser.” He nodded at the paper. “You see that there is no mention of prosecution, of fines or imprisonment. There might have been. I have the original agreement, signed by you, in the course of which it is stated that you are not a Catholic. And should you choose to ignore—”

The door opened, and Fanny’s neat capped head poked in.

“Sir, Agnes says are these men staying for supper?”

There was a moment of profound silence, and then Jamie rose slowly to his feet.

“They are not,
a leannan.
Go and say so, aye?”

He waited, still standing, until the door had closed again. I was now breathing so fast that white spots showed at the edge of my vision, but I saw his face very clearly.

“Leave my house,” he said quietly. “And do not come back.”

Ulysses stayed where he was, a faint smile on his face, and then rose too, very slowly.

“As I was saying,
sir,
I should obey that order promptly. For if you choose to ignore it, the army will have more than sufficient justification to come and burn this house over your head.” He paused, and turned to look deliberately at the door where Fanny had vanished. “Over all your heads.”