Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (80 page)

“Ye didna look like ye needed help, but I said the prayer for ye, Uncle—for a warrior goin' out.”

The knot between Jamie's shoulder blades relaxed a bit. He found it oddly comforting to know that he had not in fact gone alone on that journey, even though he'd not known it at the time.

“I thank ye, Ian. It was a help, I'm sure.” The cold oppression of the shed had lifted with the advent of torchlights and the noise of the town, so they walked for a bit by silent consent, leaving the women time to settle themselves and put the bairn to bed.

The moon was well above the housetops of Salisbury, but there were still men abroad in the streets, and the place had a restless air about it.

They passed a group of men, twenty or so, faceless under the dark brims of their hats, but the moon lit a pale cloud of the dust kicked up by their boots, so it seemed they walked knee-deep through a rising fog. They were Scotch-Irish, talking loudly, noticeably drunk and arguing among themselves, and Jamie and Ian passed by unnoticed. Francis Locke had said there were a number of militia companies in the town; these men had the look of new militia—self-important and unsure at the same time, and wanting to show that they weren't.

They crossed through the square and the streets behind it and found silence again amid the calling of owls from the trees near Town Creek. Ian broke it, talking low, halfway to himself and halfway not.

“Last time I walked like this—at night, I mean, just walking, not huntin'—was just after Monmouth,” he said. “I'd been in the British camp, wi' his lordship, and he asked me to stay, because I'd an arrow in my arm—ye recall that, aye? Ye broke the shaft for me, earlier that day.”

“I'd forgot,” Jamie admitted.

“Well, it was a long day.”

“Aye. I remember bits and pieces—I lost my horse when he went off a bridge into one of those hellish morasses, and I'm never going to forget the sound o' that.” A deep shudder curdled his wame, recalling the taste of his own vomit. “And then I remember General Washington—were ye there, Ian, when he turned back the retreat after Lee made a collieshangie of it?”

“Aye,” Ian said, and laughed a little. “Though I didna take much notice. I had my own bit o' trouble to settle, with the Abenaki. And I did settle it, too,” he added, grimness coming into his voice. “Your men got one o' them, but I killed the other in the British camp that night, wi' his own tomahawk.”

“I hadna heard about that,” Jamie said, surprised. “Ye did it
in
the British camp? Ye never told me that. How did ye come to be there, for that matter? Last I saw ye was just before the battle, and the next I saw ye, your cousin William was bringin' what I thought was your corpse into Freehold on a mule.”

And the next time he'd seen William had been in Savannah, when his son had come to ask his help in saving Jane Pocock. They'd been too late. That failure had been neither of their faults, but his heart still hurt for the poor wee lassie…and for his poor lad.

“I dinna mind most o' that, myself,” Ian said. “I came in wi' Lord John—we got arrested together—but then I walked out o' the camp, meanin' to go find Rachel or you, but I was bad wi' the fever, the night goin' in and out around me like as if it was breathin' and I was walkin' along through the stars wi' my da beside me, just talkin' to him, as if…”

“As if he was there,” Jamie finished, smiling. “I expect he was. I feel him beside me, now and then.” He glanced automatically to his right as he said this, as though Ian Mòr might indeed be there now.

“We were talkin' o' the Indian I'd just killed—and I said it put me in mind o' that gobshite who tried to extort ye, Uncle—the one I killed there by the fire after Saratoga. I said something about how it seemed different, killing a man face-to-face, but I'd thought I ought to be used to such things by now, and I wasn't. And he said I maybe shouldn't be,” Ian said thoughtfully. “He said it couldna be good for my soul, bein' used to things like that.”

“Your da's a wise man.”

THEY WALKED BACK
into town, easy with each other, talking now and then, but not of anything that mattered.

“Ye've got all ye need, Ian?” Jamie asked. “For the journey?”

“If I don't, it's too late now,” Ian said, laughing.

Jamie smiled, but the words
“too late”
lingered in the back of his mind. He'd part with the travelers at daybreak, see them onto the Great Wagon Road, and then they'd be gone—God knew for how long.

They were nearly to the Widow Hambly's house when he stopped, a hand on Ian's arm.

“I wasna going to ask, and I'm not,” Jamie said abruptly. “Because ye must be free to do whatever ye need to. But I find I must say a thing to ye, before ye go.”

Ian didn't say anything, but made a slight adjustment of posture that gave Jamie his full attention.

“Ken, when Brianna brought us the books,” Jamie began carefully, “there was the strange one for the bairns, and a romance for me about…well, fanciful things, to say the least. And a medical book for your auntie.”

“Aye, I've maybe seen that one,” Ian said thoughtfully. “A big blue one, very thick? Ye could kill a rat wi' that one.”

“That's the one, aye. But the lass brought along a book for herself.” He hesitated; he'd never spoken to Ian about Claire's life away from him. “It was written by a man named Randall. A historian.”

Ian's head turned sharply toward him.

“Randall. Was his name
Frank
Randall?”

“Aye, it was.” Jamie felt as though Ian had rabbit-punched him, and shook his head to clear it. “How—did Bree
tell
ye about him? Her—her—”

“Her other father? Aye. Years ago.” He made a small motion with one hand, disturbing the dark. “Doesna matter.”

“Aye, it does.” He paused for a moment; he'd never talked about Randall with anyone save Claire. But he had to, so he did.

“I kent about him, from the first day I met Claire—though I thought he was dead, and in fact, he
was,
but…” He cleared his throat, and Ian reached into his pack and handed him a battered flask. Dark as it was, he felt the crude
fleur-de-lis
under his thumb. It was Ian Mòr's old soldier's flask, which his friend had kept from their time in France as young mercenaries, and the feel of it steadied him.

“The thing is,
a bhalaich,
he kent about me, too.” He uncorked the flask and drank from it; watered brandy, but it helped. “Claire told him, when she…went back. She thought I was dead at Culloden, and—”

Ian made a small noise that might have been amusement.

“Aye,” Jamie said dryly. “I meant to be. But ye dinna always get to choose what happens to ye, do you?”

“True enough. But Brianna told me her father was dead—so…he was, he
is…
really dead?”

“Well, I'd thought so. But the bugger wrote a damn book, didn't he? The one Brianna brought wi' her—to remember him by. I read it.”

Ian rubbed a thumb across his chin; Jamie could hear the scratch of the bristles, and it made his own chin itch.

“What the devil did he say in it?”

Jamie sighed and saw his breath, white for an instant in the dark. The moon had faded out of sight behind the clouds. They couldn't stay out here long; Ian needed sleep before the journey, and Jamie's bad hand was telling him that rain was coming.

“It's about Scots, ken? In America. What they—we—did, what we'll do, in the Revolution. The thing is…aye, well. There are a good many men named Jamie Fraser in Scotland, and I'm sure there are plenty here, too.”

“Och, ye're in his book?” Ian straightened up, and Jamie made a negative gesture.

“I dinna ken, that's the trouble. It
might
be me, and it bloody well might not be, too. He mentions my name fourteen times, but never makin' enough of it to be able to tell whether it's me or someone else. He never comes right out and says,
‘Jamie Fraser of Fraser's Ridge,'
or
‘Broch Tuarach,'
or anything o' that sort.”

“Why are ye worried, then, Uncle?”

“Because he says there's going to be a battle nearby us—at a place called Kings Mountain. And Jamie Fraser's killed in it. Will be, I mean.
A
Jamie Fraser.” Saying it aloud actually steadied him a little. It seemed ridiculous.

Ian wasn't taking it that way, though. He gripped Jamie's arm, close in the darkness.

“Ye think it's you he means?”

“Well, that's the devil of it, Ian. I canna say, at all. See—” His lips were dry, and he licked them briefly. “The man kent about me, and he had nay reason to love me. We—Claire and Bree and I—think Frank Randall knew that the lass would come back, to find her mother and me. And if he looked, in—in history—he'd maybe find us.”

Ian clicked his tongue in consternation—in just the way his father had, and Jamie smiled involuntarily.

“And if he did…”

“No man is objective about Claire,” Jamie said. “I mean—they're just not.”

Ian made a wee fizzing noise of assent.

“Which isna to say everyone loves her…”

“A lot of us do, Uncle,” his nephew assured him. “But aye, I ken what ye mean.”

“Aye. Well, what I mean is—and I ken this sounds as though I've lost my senses and maybe I
have
—but…I've read his book, and by God, I think the man is talkin' to me.”

Ian was silent for quite a while. The dim shape of a nightjar rose from the ground near their feet and shot off into the dark with a high, clear
zeeek
!

“And if he is talkin' to you?” Ian said at last.

That
scared him.

“If he is—and if the Jamie Fraser who dies at Kings Mountain is me…I just…I…” He couldn't ask it. And for God's sake, he was not afraid of dying, not so many times as he'd looked Death in the face. It was only—

Ian's hand slid into his and clasped it firmly.

“I'll be there with ye, Uncle. When does it happen? The battle, I mean.”

Relief coursed through him, and the breath he took went down to his feet.

“In about a year. October next, it will be. Or…so he says.”

“That'll be plenty time enough for me to do whatever needs to be done in the North,” Ian said, then squeezed his hand and let it go. “Dinna fash.”

Jamie nodded, his heart full. In the morning he would bid them all farewell, but he would take his leave of Ian Òg now.

“Turn about, Ian,” he said quietly, and Ian did, looking out at the house across the street, dark save for the glow of a smoored hearth, visible at the edge of the shutters. He put a hand on Ian's shoulder, and spoke for him the blessing for a warrior going out.

Fraser’s Ridge

IT WAS A BIG
house. Roger and Bree were gone, and now Jamie had left to see Ian and Rachel and Jenny safely on their road. The house seemed even bigger now, with only two people and a dog in it.

Fanny, deprived of companionship, clung to me like a small cocklebur, her footsteps echoing behind me—and the
tic-tic-tic
of Bluebell’s behind hers—as I went to and fro from surgery to kitchen to parlor and back to surgery, the three of us always conscious of the vacant bedrooms overhead and the distant, shadowy, empty third floor high above, its walls a ghostly forest of studs, its glassless windows still covered by laths to keep out rain and snow until the vanished master should return to finish the jobs he’d left undone.

I’d invited her to share my bedroom, and we’d hauled in the truckle bed from the children’s room. It was a comfort to hear each other’s breathing in the night, something warm and quick, almost drowning out the slow, chilled breathing of the house around us—almost imperceptible, but definitely there. Especially at dusk, when the shadows began to rise up the walls like a silent tide, spilling darkness into the room.

Now and then I’d wake at dawn to find Fanny in my bed, curled against me for warmth and sound asleep, Bluey lying in a nest of quilts at our feet. The dog would look up when I woke, gently thwapping her feathery tail against the bedding, but she wouldn’t move until Fanny did.

“They’ll come back,” I assured her, every day. “All of them. We just have to stay busy until they do.”

But Fanny had never lived alone a day in her life. She didn’t know how to deal with solitude, let alone a solitude filled with the menace of one’s own thoughts.

What if—?
was the constant refrain of her thoughts. The fact that it was also the refrain—if a silent one—of mine didn’t help.

“Do you think houses are alive?” Fanny blurted one day.

“Yes, I’m sure of it,” I said rather absently.

“You are?” Fanny’s round eyes jarred me back into the present. We were darning socks in front of the fire, having finished the morning chores and eaten lunch. We’d fed the pigs, forked dry hay for the other stock, and milked the cow and two goats—I’d have to churn butter tomorrow, leave aside a couple of buckets for cheese making, and send the rest of the extra milk downhill to Bobby Higgins for his boys.

“Well…yes,” I said slowly. “I think any place that people live for a long time probably absorbs a bit of them. Certainly houses affect the people who live in them—why shouldn’t it work both ways?”

“Both ways?” She looked dubious. “You mean that I left part of me at the brothel—and I brought part of the brothel with me?”

“Didn’t you?” I asked gently. Her face went blank for a moment, but then the life returned to her eyes.

“Yes,” she said, but she was wary now, and added nothing more.

“Who’s doing for Bobby and the boys this week, do you know?” I asked her. The neighbor women—and their daughters—who lived in easy walking distance had been taking it in turn to stop into the Higgins cabin every few days, to bring food, cook supper, and do small jobs of mending and housekeeping, lest the Higginses descend irretrievably into male slovenliness.

“Abigail Lachlan and her sister,” Fanny replied readily. “They always come together because they’re jealous of each other.”

“Jealous? Oh, over Bobby, you mean?” She nodded, squinting at the thread she was trying to put through the eye of her needle. The competition to become the next Mrs. Higgins was still discreet, civil, and unspoken, but becoming somewhat more defined. Bobby showed little sign so far of wanting to make a choice—or of seeming to notice the efforts made to ensnare his attention, though he always thanked the young women sincerely for their help.

“What you said about houses…” Fanny held her breath for a moment, then let it out with a small
ah!
of triumph when the thread went through the needle’s eye. “Do you think maybe Amy Higgins is still in the cabin? Haunting it, I mean, to keep other women away?”

That took me slightly aback—but the suggestion was made without any emotion beyond curiosity, and I answered it on the same terms. Right after Amy’s death, there had been occasional rumors about her being seen in the gorge where she was killed, or washing clothes in the creek—a very common occupation for Scottish or Irish female ghosts, and no wonder, as they’d likely spent most of their lives doing just that—but these had mostly ceased as the heavy work of autumn came on and people returned to their own preoccupations.

“I don’t know about the house itself. I’ve never felt anything of Amy when I’ve gone there since she died. But when someone dies, naturally the people they leave behind will still sense them. I don’t know whether you’d call that haunting, though; I think it’s maybe just memory and…longing.”

Fanny nodded, eyes intent on the heel of the stocking she was darning. I could hear the faint scrape of her needle on the wooden darning egg.

“I wish Jane would haunt me.” The words weren’t much above a whisper, but I heard it clearly enough, and my heart clenched.

The memory of that sort of wish—the bone-deep need to have contact of any sort, a longing that harrowed the soul, a hollowness that could never be filled—struck me so hard that I couldn’t speak.

Jamie
had
haunted me—in spite of all my efforts to forget, to immerse myself in the life I had. Would I have found the strength to come back, if he hadn’t remained as a constant presence in my heart, my dreams?

“You won’t forget her, Fanny,” I said, and squeezed her hand. “She won’t forget you, either.”

The wind had come up; I heard it rushing through the trees outside, and the glass window rattled in its frame.

“We’d better close the shutters,” I said, getting up to do so. The surgery window was the largest in the house and thus endowed with both external and internal shutters—both to protect the precious expanse of glass panes from bad weather and potential attack and to insulate the room against the creeping cold.

As I leaned out with the shutter hook in my hand, though, I saw a tall black figure hastening toward the house, skirts and cloak flying in the wind.

“You and your little dog, too,” I murmured, and risked a glance at the forest, in case of flying monkeys. A blast of cold air rushed past me into the surgery, rattling glassware and flipping the pages of the
Merck Manual
that I had left open on the counter. Luckily I’d taken the precaution of removing the copyright page…

“What did you say?” Fanny had followed me and stood now in the surgery door, Bluebell yawning behind her.

“Mrs. Cunningham’s coming,” I said, leaving the shutters open and closing the window. “Go and let her in, will you? Put her in the parlor and tell her I’ll be right there; perhaps she’s come for the slippery elm powder I promised her.”

So far as Fanny was concerned, Mrs. Cunningham probably
was
the Wicked Witch of the West, and her manner in inviting the lady inside reflected as much. To my surprise, I heard Mrs. Cunningham declining to sit in the parlor, and in seconds, she was in the door of the surgery, windblown as a bat, and pale as a pat of fresh butter.

“I need…” But she was sagging toward the floor as she spoke, and fell into my arms before she managed a whispered “help.”

Fanny gasped, but grabbed Mrs. Cunningham round the waist, and together we bundled her onto my surgery table. She was clutching her black shawl tight with one hand, holding on like grim death. She’d been gripping it against the wind so hard that her fingers had locked with cold, and it was a job to get the shawl loose.

“Bloody hell,” I said, but mildly, seeing what the trouble was. “How did you manage to do that? Fanny, get me the whisky.”

“Fell,” Mrs. Cunningham rasped, beginning to get her breath back. “Tripped over the scuttle, like a fool.” Her right shoulder was badly dislocated, the humerus humped and elbow drawn in against her ribs, the apparent deformity adding a lot to the witchy impression.

“Don’t worry,” I told her, looking for a way to ease her bodice off so I could reduce the dislocation without tearing the cloth. “I can fix it.”

“I wouldn’t have staggered two miles downhill through buggering brambles if I didn’t think you could,” she snapped, the warmth of the room beginning to revive her. I smiled and, taking the bottle from Fanny, uncorked it and handed it to Elspeth, who put it to her lips and took several slow, deep gulps, pausing to cough in between.

“Your husband…knows…his trade,” she said hoarsely, handing the bottle back to Fanny.

“Several of them,” I agreed. I’d got the bodice loose but couldn’t free the strap of her stays and instead severed it with a Gordian stroke of my scalpel. “Hold her tight round the chest, please, Fanny.”

Elspeth Cunningham knew exactly what I was trying to do, and gritting her teeth, she deliberately relaxed her muscles as far as she could—not all that far, under the circumstances, but every little bit helped. I supposed she must have seen it done on ships—that had to have been the source of the language she was using while I maneuvered the humerus into the correct angle. Fanny snorted with amusement at “grass-combing son of a buggering
sod
!” as I rotated the arm and the head of the humerus popped back into place.

“It’s been a long time since I heard language like that,” Fanny said, her lips twitching.

“If you have to do with sailors, young woman, you acquire both their virtues and their vices.” Elspeth’s face was still white and shone like polished bone under a layer of sweat, but her voice was steady and her breath was coming back. “And where, might I ask,
did
you hear language like that?”

Fanny glanced at me, but I nodded and she said simply, “I lived in a brothel for some time, ma’am.”

“Indeed.” Mrs. Cunningham drew her wrist out of my grasp and sat up, rather shaky, but bracing herself with her good hand on the table. “I suppose whores must also have both virtues and vices, then.”

“I don’t know about the virtues,” Fanny said dubiously. “Unless you count being able to milk a man in two minutes by the clock.”

I had taken a nip of the whisky myself, and choked on it.

“I think that would be classed as a skill rather than a virtue,” Mrs. Cunningham told Fanny. “Though a valuable one, I daresay.”

“Well, we all have our strong points,” I said, wanting to put a stop to the conversation before Fanny said anything else. My relationship with Elspeth Cunningham had warmed after Amy Higgins’s death—but only to a certain degree. We respected each other but could not quite be friends, owing to the mutual but unacknowledged realization that, at some point, political reality might oblige my husband and her son to try to kill each other.

WANTING TO AVOID
further revelations from Fanny, I sent her to the kitchen to deal with the quails Mrs. McAfee had brought by earlier, in payment for the garlic ointment I’d given her for pinworms.

“I’ve always wondered,” I remarked, tying Elspeth’s sling. “What, exactly, does ‘grass-combing’ mean? Is it actual bad language, or just descriptive?”

She’d been holding her breath as I made the final adjustments but now let it out with a small sigh, gingerly testing the sling.

“Thank you. As to ‘grass-combing,’ it usually means someone who is either idle or incompetent. Why combing grass should imply either attribute is unclear, but it’s not actually bad language as such, unless the term ‘bugger’—sometimes multiple buggers—is attached. Though I can’t say I’ve ever heard it
without
‘bugger,’ ” she added fairly.

“I daresay you’ve heard more than that, if you’ve been at sea. I think you may have shocked Fanny. Not the language itself, but that you don’t look like a whore.”

She snorted briefly.

“Women tend to be much freer in their speech when there are no men present, regardless of profession; surely you’ve noticed that?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Including nuns.”

“Do you know any nuns? On a personal basis?” she asked, with a trace of sarcasm. Her face was beginning to show a tinge of color, and her breathing was easier.