Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (152 page)

Fraser’s Ridge

October 22, 1780

“I’M NO DYING IN
my sleep,” Jamie said stubbornly. “I mean—should the Lord choose to take me in my bed, I’ll go, of course. But if I’m going to die by
your
hand, I want to be awake.”

My hands were shaking; I folded them under my apron, both to hide the trembling and to control the urge to throttle him.

“You
have
to be asleep,” I said, as reasonably as I could manage, which wasn’t all that reasonably. “Your leg has to be completely immobile, and I can’t manage that if you’re awake. I don’t care
how
strong you think you are, you can’t keep still enough, and even tying you to the table—which I fully intend to
do
”—I glared at him—“wouldn’t be enough to completely immobilize you.

“So.” My hands had stilled, thank God, and I brought them out from under the apron, picked up the ether mask, and pointed a finger at him. “Either you lie flat right now and take it, or I get Roger and Ian to tie you down and
then
you take it. But you’re getting it, like it or not.”

He immediately sat up and swung his feet off the table, apparently intending to make a break for it, cracked kneecap or no.

“No, mate.” Roger grabbed him by an arm and a shoulder, and Ian, slithering behind the table like a water moccasin, grabbed Jamie’s other arm with one hand and forearmed him across the throat.

“Lie down, Uncle,” he said soothingly, tightening the choke hold and pulling Jamie back against him. “It will be all right. Auntie Claire willna kill ye, and if by accident she does, Roger Mac’s a proper minister now and he’ll give ye a fine funeral.”

Jamie made a noise somewhere between a gurgle and a growl, his face going a dark, congested red as he struggled. I was actually pleased to see that he had enough blood now to achieve such a color.

“Let him go.” I waved Roger and Ian off, and they reluctantly released him. He eyed me, his chest heaving, but didn’t try to get away as I came closer. I put my hand on his uninjured knee and leaned close to speak quietly to him.

“If you lie down by yourself, I’ll put you out before they tie you,” I said. “And I’ll untie you as soon as I’ve finished the surgery. I won’t let you wake up bound. I promise.”

He was getting enough air now, and his face lost the look of incipient seizure.

“Ye want to promise me I’ll wake up?”

He spoke gruffly, and not only because of the choking.

“I can’t promise that,” I said, as steadily as I could. I squeezed his knee. “But I’ll lay you odds of a hundred to one that you will.”

He looked at me searchingly for a long moment, then sighed.

“Aye, well. I’ve been a gambler since I was wee. I suppose this is no time to quit.”

Leaning back on his palms, he brought his legs back up on the table. The effort to move the wounded one made sweat spring out on his forehead, but he kept his lips tight pressed together and made no sound when Roger and Ian took his shoulders and eased him down.

A boiled napkin lay on the counter behind me, displaying four narrow strips of hammered gold. Bree had made them and had painstakingly bored the tiny holes I would use to screw them to the bone—the steel screws courtesy of Jenny’s watch, offered immediately when I asked.

This was going to be a tricky, painstaking bit of surgery, but I was smiling behind my mask as I soaped and shaved, then swabbed the skin of his knee with alcohol. The situation reminded me strongly of the day I had prepared to amputate his snakebitten leg—this leg; I could still see the narrow groove the bite had left, just above his ankle, nearly hidden by the furze of red-blond hair. Today, I wasn’t afraid for his life, and I rejoiced in the knowledge that what I was going to do to his knee wouldn’t hurt him while I was doing it. I glanced up the table at him; he met my eye, and scowled at me.

I wiggled my eyebrows at him and scowled, too, mocking him. He snorted and lay back, but his face relaxed. That was what I was happiest about; he’d fought me, and even though he’d been forced to give in, he wasn’t giving up his right to be cranky about it.

Over the years, I’d seen a lot of sweet, amiable, biddable patients, who succumbed within hours to their ailments. The angry, irascible, difficult sons of bitches (of either sex) almost always survived.

The cotton gauze of the mask had grown damp in my hand, and I wiped my hand on my apron. I nodded toward the ether bottle on the counter, and Bree handed it to me, troubled eyes fixed on her father, who had folded his hands across his belly and was staring doggedly at the ceiling, looking disturbingly like a medieval knight in the crypt of some cathedral.

“All you need is a sword clasped to your chest and a little dog under your feet,” she told him. “And maybe a suit of chain mail.”

He snorted slightly, but his face relaxed just a hair.

“Breathe slow and deep,” I said, in a low, soothing voice. The scent of ether had risen like a ghost when I uncapped the bottle, and I saw Ian hold his breath as it reached him.

Jamie’s eyes met mine and his muscles tensed as I fitted the mask over his nose and mouth.

“Just breathe. You’ll feel dizzy for a moment, but only a moment.” The clear drops fell one by one onto the gauze and disappeared. “Breathe in. Count for him, Bree, backward from ten.”

She looked startled, but obligingly began, “Ten…nine…eight…seven…” His eyelids fluttered and then popped open as he felt it.

“Breathe,”
I said firmly. “…six…five…”

“He’s gone,” Roger said quietly, then realized what he’d said. “I mean—he’s asleep.”

“…three, two, one.”

I handed Roger the bottle.

“Make sure he stays that way,” I said. “One drop every thirty seconds.”

I went to wash my hands in alcohol one final time and checked over the instruments and supplies I’d laid ready, while Ian and Bree tied him firmly to the table with rags and linen bandages. His fingers had relaxed and his hands hung limp when they laid his arms at his sides. The light was good; the fine hairs on his arms and legs glowed gold, and the seeping blood in his bandage was the color in the heart of a rose. My own breath had calmed and my heart beat slowly; I could feel it in my fingertips. Some saint was with me now. I wanted to smooth the soft hair back from his brow, but didn’t want to break what semblance of sterility I had, so left it.

Jamie was tied down as securely as a barrel of tobacco in a ship’s hold, but Brianna took hold of his leg and steadied it, just to be sure. I nodded at her, turned to my work, and spread the skin over Jamie’s kneecap as taut as I could.

I picked up a pledget, and the sharp sting of alcohol joined the musky ether, drowning the smell of the pines and chestnut mast from the window.

“Smells like a proper hospital, doesn’t it?” I said, and tied my own mask tight over my face.

I SAW JAMIE
safely awake, his knee bandaged and splinted, and a solid dose of laudanum administered for pain. Leaving him asleep in the surgery for now, I wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, feeling somewhat sharp-set, though with a deep feeling of satisfaction. The surgery had gone beautifully; he had good, dense bones that would knit well, and while recovery would undoubtedly be painful, I was sure that he would walk easily again, in time.

The house was quiet; my assistants had all scattered: Fanny was walking out somewhere with Cyrus, and the rest of them had all gone up to the Murrays’ cabin to drink apple cider and milk the goats. I was therefore somewhat surprised to see Jenny in the kitchen, sitting alone on the settle, gazing contemplatively at the big cauldron, steaming gently on the fire.

“Your brother’s doing well,” I said casually, and opened the pie safe to see what was available.

“Good,” she said, absently, but then sharpened into attention. “I mean—aye, that’s very good. Will he walk easy, d’ye think?”

“Not for some weeks, probably,” I said. “But he’ll certainly walk, and it will get easier, the more he does it.” I found three-quarters of a dried-peach pie and brought it back to the table. “Will you have a bit of this with me?”

“No,” she said automatically, but then noticed what it was. “Och. I will, thanks.”

I sliced the pie, fetched milk from the cooling cistern Bree had built in the corner of the kitchen floor, and set out the food. She rose slowly and came to sit opposite me.

“The Sachem came to my house this morning, to say it’s time for him to be away back north,” she said.

“Oh?” I took a forkful of the pie—delicious. Probably Fanny had made it; she was the best of the family bakers. Jenny said nothing, and while she had a fork in her hand, she hadn’t yet stuck it into the pie.

“And?” I said.

No answer. I took another bite and waited.

“Well,” she said at last. “He kissed me.”

I raised an eyebrow at her.

“Did you kiss him back?”

“Aye, I did,” she said, sounding astonished. She sat for a moment, contemplating, then looked at me sideways. “I didna mean to,” she said, and I smiled.

“Did you like it?”

“Well, I’ll no lie to ye, Claire. I did.” She let her head fall back and stared at the ceiling. “
Now
what?”

“You’re asking me?”

“No, I’m askin’
me,
” she said, adding a small Scottish snort for emphasis. “He’s goin’ north, back to his nephew. To tell him what-all he’s learnt about the war, so he can decide whether to stick wi’ the British or…” Her voice trailed off. “He’ll need to go before the weather turns.”

“Did he ask you to go with him?” I asked, gently.

She shook her head. “He didna need to ask and I didna need to answer. He wants me, and I…well, if it was only him and me, that would be one thing, but it’s not, and so it’s the other thing. I canna go and leave my family here, especially when I ken all the things that might happen to all of ye. And then there’s Ian…”

The softness in her voice told me that it was Ian Mòr she meant; her husband, rather than her son.

“I ken he wouldna mind,” she said, “and no just because the Sachem told me so,” she added, giving me a direct blue look. “But he sees Ian with me, and I didna need to hear it; I
know
he’s with me. He always will be,” she said, more softly. “One day, it may be different. Not that Ian will leave me, but…it may be different. I said so, and the Sachem says he’ll come back. When the war is over.”

When the war is over.
I felt a huge lump in my throat. I’d heard that before, long ago, caught in the jaws of another war. Spoken in that same tone of longing, of anticipation, of resignation. Knowledge that if the war should ever end—it never truly would end. Things would be different.

“I’m sure he will,” I said.

Fraser’s Ridge

February 11, 1781

I FELT JAMIE WAKE
beside me. He stretched, then made a horrible noise and froze. I yawned and rose up on one elbow.

“I don’t know why it should be the case,” I remarked, “but with injuries of the knee and foot, lying down actually makes them hurt more badly than standing up.”

“It hurts when I stand up, too,” he assured me, but he shrugged off my offer of a helping hand and gingerly swung his bad leg off the edge of the bed with no more than a hiss of pain and a muffled “Mother of
God.
” He used the chamber pot and sat gathering his strength before he pushed himself up with a hand on the bedside table and stood swaying like a flower in the breeze.

I hopped out of bed, fetched his stick from the corner where he’d thrown it last night, and put it into his hand, wondering just what life had been like for Mary and Martha after their brother, Lazarus, came back from the dead. Then—watching Jamie struggle into his clothes—I wondered what it had been like for Lazarus.

Whatever his state of mind when he died, the poor man would presumably have left his body with the notion that he was finished with the world. Being unceremoniously reinserted into said body was one thing—returning to a life that you never expected to lead again was something else.

Jamie cast a bleak glance at himself in the looking glass, rubbed a hand over his stubble, muttered something in Gaelic, rubbed the same hand through his hair, shook his head, and made his way downstairs for breakfast, his passage marked by the thump of his stick on every other step.

Beginning to dress myself, I thought that in fact such a thing happened to a hell of a lot of people, who perhaps hadn’t come as close to physical death as Jamie had but had still lost the life they were accustomed to. I realized, with a small shock, that I’d had exactly that experience myself—and more than once. When I’d come through the stones the first time, yanked away from Frank and a new life that we’d just begun, after the war—and then again when I’d had to leave Jamie before Culloden.

I hadn’t revisited
those
memories in a long time. I didn’t want them back now, either—but it was actually a small comfort to remember that they’d happened…and that I’d survived being uprooted, losing everything I’d known and loved—and yet, I’d bloomed anew.

That
was
a comfort, and I comforted myself further by considering Jenny, who’d lost the greater part of her life when Ian had died, and then courageously turned her back on what was left of it, to come to America with Jamie.

The Provincial prisoners from the battle had been disarmed, rounded up, and marched away; I didn’t know where. But the militias had all disbanded, essentially as soon as the shooting stopped, men making their ways home in small groups, looking for the pieces of their lives that they’d lost along the way.

How long would it be, I wondered, before we might be compelled to do it again? It was 1781. In October, the Battle of Yorktown would be fought—and won. The war would be over—or as over as wars ever are.

There would be more fighting between now and then. Much of it in the South, but not near us. Or so Frank’s book said.

“He’ll be all right, then,” I said to my reflection in the looking glass. Jamie had healed well, physically; his knee would improve with use—and he was back in the house he loved. Most of his militia had survived the battle with mostly minor injuries, though we had lost two men: Tom McHugh’s second-eldest son, Greg, and Balgair Finney, a single man in his fifties from Ullapool who had lived on the Ridge less than a year. If Jamie was inclined to sit in his study and stare pensively into the fire, or to set out for the still and turn back—he hadn’t yet gone all the way there, and I didn’t know whether he couldn’t bear to see it deserted and in disrepair, or couldn’t yet face the job of getting it back into production—I had faith that he would come all the way back.

Little Davy had been a great help. The tiny boy had brightened everyone’s heart, and Jamie loved to sit with him and say things in Gaelic to him that made Fanny laugh when she heard them.

Still…there was something missing in him. I glanced back at the unmade bed. He hadn’t felt up to making love for more than two months after we’d come home—little wonder—and while I had been able to rouse him physically as he healed…there
was
something missing.

“Patience, Beauchamp,” I said to the mirror, and picked up my hairbrush. “He’ll mend.” I normally brushed my hair by feel, but was still looking into the glass as I raised the brush—and stopped.

“Well, bloody hell,” I said. My hair was white. Jamie had told me my hair was the color of moonlight, once, but then it was no more than streaks of white around my face. It was not entirely white now; the mass of curls that foamed around my shoulders was still a mix of brown and blond and silver—but the newer growth above my ears was a pure and simple white that shimmered in the morning sun.

I set down the brush and looked at my hand, turning it back and forth. It looked quite as usual: thin and long-fingered, with strongly marked tendons and blue veins visible…

I remembered Nayawenne then, and what she’d said to me: “When your hair is white…that is when you will find your full power.” I hadn’t thought of it in some time and felt a tingle down my spine now. The memory of holding Jamie’s soul on that mountaintop, calling him back to his body…Roger had said to me, quietly, when no one was nearby to hear, that he thought he had seen a faint blue light come and go in my hands as I touched Jamie, flickering like swamp fire.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said, very quietly.

IN THE AFTERNOON,
I went up to my garden. The air was still chilly, but patches of bare earth were beginning to show through the melting snow, and it was time to prepare trenches for the early peas and bean vines. Jamie came with me, saying he could do with air, and we walked—slowly, to accommodate his knee—up the slope.

The two lieutenants, Gilbert and Oliver, had dug good trenches for me the year before—before all hell broke loose, and I said a brief prayer for them, and for Agnes (
which one did she marry?
I wondered), and for Elspeth and Charles Cunningham. Were they all back in England now?—for sweet peas and pole beans and edible peas, these all carefully saved from last year’s harvestings. Jamie obligingly dumped the manure into one trench and set about the job of shoveling earth in and mixing it well with the manure, merely hissing through his teeth when his bad knee twinged.

This trench ran behind the beehives. There were eleven hives now: One swarm had divided before Kings Mountain and I had been in time to catch a departing new queen and install her in a new hive with her followers, and Young Ian had found a wild swarm and gone with Rachel and Jenny to capture them and bring them back. All of them had survived the winter, and a few bees would now and then come out and cruise slowly round the garden before going back in. Jamie looked cautiously behind him, to make sure he wouldn’t knock against the hives with his spade, then glanced at me in surprise.

“I hear them!” he said. “Or at least I think I do…” He advanced cautiously, putting his ear close to the woven straw of the skep.

“Yes, you do,” I said, amused at his expression. “Honeybees don’t die in the winter and they don’t really hibernate, either—so long as they have enough honey stored up to last them ’til spring. They cluster together and shiver to generate warmth, but otherwise they just eat and…sleep, I suppose.”

“I can think o’ worse ways to pass the winter,” he said, and smiled. “Holdin’ your feet.”

The interesting question as to just what parts of him I would like to hold while sleeping was obliged to wait, as we heard the rustlings and shuffle of heavy footsteps coming up the path.

I wasn’t surprised to see John Quincy Myers—he routinely stopped at Fraser’s Ridge when he came back from the Cherokee villages where he usually spent the winter—but I was very pleased.

“How are you?” I asked, standing back to look up at him after greetings and embraces had been exchanged. He had apparently left his pack at the house and looked much as usual, but thin from the winter, like everyone else.

“Sprightly, Missus, sprightly,” he said, giving me a wide smile that had one or two fewer teeth than it had when last seen. “And I see your bees are thrivin’, too.”

“Yes, they seem to be—and thank you again for giving them to me. We were just talking about what bees do in the winter. Eat and sleep, I imagine.”

“Oh, I’m sure they do that,” he said, and reached delicately to put his hand on one of the hives. He smiled, feeling the faint hum on his skin. “But I think they pass the time much as we do in the cold, tellin’ each other stories through the long nights.”

Jamie laughed at that, but came cautiously closer, putting his hand on one of the hives as well. “What sorts of stories d’ye think bees tell,
a charaid
?”

“Tales of bears and flowers, I reckon. Though a queen maybe dreams of other things.”

“If you mean laying thousands of eggs, that sounds more like a nightmare,” I said. John Quincy laughed, but tilted his head to and fro in equivocation.

“It’s not for a man to say, but I think she maybe dreams of flyin’ free and high with a hundred drones in a cloud o’ mad desire. Oh—” He stopped, feeling in his pouch. “I ’most forgot, Missus. I’ve summat here for you.” He drew out a small package, wrapped in a piece of grimy pink calico.

“Who is it from?” I asked, taking it. It was light, no more than a few ounces, and something crackled faintly inside.

“That, I don’t rightly know, Missus Claire,” he said. “ ’Twas given me by a woman keeps a tavern down near Charlotte, in January. She said it was a black man left it, sayin’ it was for the conjure-woman what lived at Fraser’s Ridge, and would she kindly pass it on when someone was to be headin’ up this way. I do suppose he meant you,” he added with a smile. “Ain’t that many conjure-women in this neck o’ the woods.”

Puzzled, I opened the little parcel to find a sheet of thick paper, carefully folded around a hard object. I unfolded it and a rock the size of a hen’s egg—and roughly the same shape—fell out into my hand. It was a mottled gray in color, with white and green splotches. It was smooth and felt remarkably warm, considering the chilliness of the air. I handed it to Jamie and unfolded the large sheet of paper it had been wrapped in. The note was written with quill and ink, the writing a little straggly but quite legible.

I have left the army and returned to my home. My grandmother sends this for you, in thanks. It is a bluestone from an old place and she says it will heal sickness of spirit and of body.

I read this, astonished, and was about to tell Jamie that it must be from Corporal—evidently now
ex
-Corporal—Sipio Jackson, when he suddenly reached over and took the paper out of my hand.

“A Mhoire Mhàthair!”

John Quincy craned his neck to see, interested.

“I be damned,” he said. “That there’s your name, ain’t it, Jamie?”

It was substantially battered; it was torn at one corner, rubbed and dirty, some of the ink had evidently got wet and run, and the red wax seal had fallen off, leaving a round red stain behind—but there was no doubt at all what it was.

It was a copy—the original copy, signed by Governor William Tryon—of the grant of ten thousand acres of land in the Royal Colony of North Carolina, to one James Fraser, in recognition of his services to the Crown. And sewn to it with thick black pack-thread was the letter from Lord George Germain.