The Fiery Cross (49 page)

“You really are a fool, Beauchamp,” I murmured, pushing a curl of hair tiredly behind one ear. I went out, shutting the door of the surgery firmly behind me, and went to negotiate peace between Mrs. Bug and Mrs. Chisholm.

SUPERFICIALLY, peace in the house was restored, but an atmosphere of uneasiness remained. The women went about their work tense and tight-lipped; even Lizzie, the soul of patience, was heard to say “Tcha!” when one of the children spilled a pan of buttermilk across the steps.

Even outside, the air seemed to crackle, as though a lightning storm were near. As I went to and fro from sheds to house, I kept glancing over my shoulder at the sky above Roan Mountain, half-expecting to see the loom of thunderheads—and yet the sky was still the pale slate-blue of late autumn, clouded with nothing more than the wisps of mare’s tails.

I found myself distracted, unable to settle to anything. I drifted from one task to another, leaving a pile of onions half-braided in the pantry, a bowl of beans half-shelled on the stoop, a pair of torn breeks lying on the settle, needle dangling from its thread. Again and again, I found myself crossing the yard, coming from nowhere in particular, bound upon no specific errand.

I glanced up each time I passed the cross, as though expecting it either to have disappeared since my last trip, or to have acquired some explanatory notice, neatly pinned to the wood. If not
Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum
, then
something
. But no. The cross remained, two simple sticks of pinewood, bound together by a rope. Nothing more. Except, of course, that a cross is
always
something more. I just didn’t know what it might be, this time.

Everyone else seemed to share my distraction. Mrs. Bug, disedified by the conflict with Mrs. Chisholm, declined to make any lunch, and retired to her room, ostensibly suffering from headache, though she refused to let me treat it. Lizzie, normally a fine hand with food, burned the stew, and billows of black smoke stained the oak beams above the hearth.

At least the Muellers were safely out of the way. They had brought a large cask of beer with them, and had retired after breakfast back to Brianna’s cabin, where they appeared to be entertaining themselves very nicely.

The bread refused to rise. Jemmy had begun a new tooth, a hard one, and screamed and screamed and screamed. The incessant screeching twisted everyone’s nerves to the snapping point, including mine. I should have liked to suggest that Bree take him away somewhere out of earshot, but I saw the deep smudges of fatigue under her eyes and the strain on her face, and hadn’t the heart. Mrs. Chisholm, tried by the constant battles of her own offspring, had no such compunction.

“For God’s sake, why do ye no tak’ that bairn awa to your own cabin, lass?” she snapped. “If he mun greet so, there’s no need for us all to hear it!”

Bree’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

“Because,” she hissed, “your two oldest sons are sitting in my cabin, drinking with the Germans. I wouldn’t want to disturb them!”

Mrs. Chisholm’s face went bright red. Before she could speak, I quickly stepped forward and snatched the baby away from Bree.

“I’ll take him out for a bit of a walk, shall I?” I said, hoisting him onto my shoulder. “I could use some fresh air. Why don’t you go up and lie down on my bed for a bit, darling?” I said to Bree. “You look just a little tired.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. One corner of her mouth twitched. “And the Pope’s a little bit Catholic, too. Thanks, Mama.” She kissed Jemmy’s hot, wet cheek, and vanished toward the stairwell.

Mrs. Chisholm scowled horridly after her, but caught my eye, coughed, and called to her three-year-old twins, who were busily demolishing my sewing basket.

The cold air outside was a relief, after the hot, smoky confines of the kitchen, and Jemmy quieted a little, though he continued to squirm and whine. He rubbed his hot, damp face against my neck, and gnawed ferociously on the cloth of my shawl, fussing and drooling.

I paced slowly to and fro, patting him gently and humming “Lilibuleero” under my breath. I found the exercise soothing, in spite of Jemmy’s crankiness. There was only one of him, after all, and he couldn’t talk.

“You’re a male, too,” I said to him, pulling his woolen cap over the soft bright down that feathered his skull. “As a sex, you have your defects, but I will say that catfighting isn’t one of them.”

Fond as I was of individual women—Bree, Marsali, Lizzie, and even Mrs. Bug—I had to admit that taken en masse, I found men much easier to deal with. Whether this was the fault of my rather unorthodox upbringing—I had been raised largely by my Uncle Lamb and his Persian manservant, Firouz—my experiences in the War, or simply an aspect of my own unconventional personality, I found men soothingly logical and—with a few striking exceptions—pleasingly direct.

I turned to look at the house. It stood serene amid the spruce and chestnut trees, elegantly proportioned, soundly built. A face showed at one of the windows. The face stuck out its tongue and pressed flat against the pane, crossing its eyes above squashed nose and cheeks. High-pitched feminine voices and the sound of banging came to me faintly through the cold, clean air.

“Hmm,” I said.

Reluctant as I was to leave home again so soon, and little as I liked the idea of Jamie being involved in armed conflicts of any kind, the thought of going off to live in the company of twenty or thirty unshaven, reeking men for a week or two had developed a certain undeniable attraction. If it meant sleeping on the ground . . .

“Into each life some rain must fall,” I told Jemmy with a sigh. “But I suppose you’re just learning that now, aren’t you, poor thing?”

“Gnnnh!” he said, and drew himself up into a ball to escape the pain of his emergent teeth, his knees digging painfully into my side. I settled him more comfortably on my hip, and gave him an index finger to chew on. His gums were hard and knobbly; I could feel the tender spot where the new tooth was coming in, swollen and hot under the skin. A piercing shriek came from the house, followed by the sound of shouts and running feet.

“You know,” I said conversationally, “I think a bit of whisky would be just the thing for that, don’t you?” and withdrawing the finger, I tucked Jemmy up against my shoulder. I ducked past the cross and into the shelter of the big red spruce—just in time, as the door of the house burst open and Mrs. Bug’s penetrating voice rose like a trumpet on the chilly air.

IT WAS A LONG WAY to the whisky clearing, but I didn’t mind. It was blessedly quiet in the forest, and Jemmy, lulled by the movement, finally relaxed into a doze, limp and heavy as a little sandbag in my arms.

So late in the year, all the deciduous trees had lost their leaves; the trail was ankle-deep in a crackling carpet of brown and gold, and maple seeds whirled past on the wind, brushing my skirt with a whisper of wings. A raven flew past, high above. It gave an urgent, raucous cry, and the baby jerked in my arms.

“Hush,” I said, hugging him close. “It’s nothing, lovey; just a bird.”

Still, I looked after the raven, and listened for another. They were birds of portent—or so said Highland superstition. One raven was an omen of change; two were good fortune; three were ill. I tried to dismiss such notions from my mind—but Nayawenne had told me the raven was my guide, my spirit animal—and I never saw the big, black shadows pass overhead without a certain shiver up the spine.

Jemmy stirred, gave a brief squawk, and fell back into silence. I patted him and resumed my climb, wondering as I made my way slowly up the mountain, what animal might be his guide?

The animal spirit chose you, Nayawenne told me, not the other way around. You must pay careful attention to signs and portents, and wait for your animal to manifest itself to you. Ian’s animal was the wolf; Jamie’s the bear—or so the Tuscarora said. I had wondered at the time what one was supposed to do if chosen by something ignominious like a shrew or a dung beetle, but was too polite to ask.

Only one raven. I could still hear it, though it was out of sight, but no echoing cry came from the firs behind me. An omen of change.

“You could have saved yourself the trouble,” I said to it, under my breath so as not to wake the baby. “Hardly as though I needed telling, is it?”

I climbed slowly, listening to the sigh of the wind and the deeper sound of my own breath. At this season, change was in the air itself, the scents of ripeness and death borne on the breeze, and the breath of winter in its chill. Still, the rhythms of the turning earth brought change that was expected, ordained; body and mind met it with knowledge and—on the whole—with peace. The changes coming were of a different order, and one calculated to disturb the soul.

I glanced back at the house; from this height, I could see only the corner of the roof, and the drifting smoke from the chimney.

“What do you think?” I said softly, Jemmy’s head beneath my chin, round and warm in its knitted cap. “Will it be yours? Will you live here, and your children after you?”

It would be a very different life, I thought, from the one he might have led. If Brianna had risked the stones to take him back—but she had not, and so the little boy’s fate lay here. Had she thought of that? I wondered. That by staying, she chose not only for herself, but him? Chose war and ignorance, disease and danger, but had risked all that, for the sake of his father—for Roger. I was not entirely sure it had been the right choice—but it hadn’t been my choice to make.

Still, I reflected, there was no way of imagining beforehand what having a child was like—no power of the mind was equal to the knowledge of just what the birth of a child could do, wresting lives and wrenching hearts.

“And a good thing, too,” I said to Jemmy. “No one in their right mind would do it, otherwise.”

My sense of agitation had faded by now, soothed by the wind and the peace of the leafless wood. The whisky clearing, as we called it, was hidden from the trail. Jamie had spent days searching the slopes above the Ridge, before finding a spot that met his requirements.

Or spots, rather. The malting floor was built in a small clearing at the foot of a hollow; the still was farther up the mountain in a clearing of its own, near a small spring that provided fresh, clear water. The malting floor was out of direct sight of the trail, but not difficult to get to.

“No point in hiding it,” Jamie had said, explaining his choice to me, “when anyone wi’ a nose could walk to it blindfolded.”

True enough; even now, when there was no grain actively fermenting in the shed or toasting on the floor, a faintly fecund, smoky scent lingered in the air. When grain was “working,” the musty, pungent scent of fermentation was perceptible at a distance, but when the sprouting barley was spread on the floor above a slow fire, a thin haze of smoke hung over the clearing, and the smell was strong enough to reach Fergus’s cabin, when the wind was right.

No one was at the malting floor now, of course. When a new batch was working, either Marsali or Fergus would be here to tend it, but for the moment, the roofed floor lay empty, smooth boards darkened to gray by use and weather. There was a neat stack of firewood piled nearby, though, ready for use.

I went close enough to see what sort of wood it was; Fergus liked hickory, both because it split more easily, and for the sweet taste it gave the malted grain. Jamie, deeply traditional in his approach to whisky, would use nothing but oak. I touched a chunk of split wood; wide grain, light wood, thin bark. I smiled. Jamie had been here recently, then.

Normally, a small keg of whisky was kept at the malting floor, both for the sake of hospitality and caution. “If someone should come upon the lass alone there, best she have something to give them,” Jamie had said. “It’s known what we do there; best no one should try to make Marsali tell them where the brew is.” It wasn’t the best whisky—generally a very young, raw spirit—but certainly good enough either for uninvited visitors or a teething child.

“You haven’t got any taste buds yet, anyway, so what’s the odds?” I murmured to Jemmy, who stirred and smacked his lips in his sleep, screwing up his tiny face in a scowl.

I hunted about, but there was no sign of the small whisky keg either in its usual place behind the bags of barley or inside the pile of firewood. Perhaps taken away for refilling, perhaps stolen. No great matter, in either case.

I turned to the north, past the malting floor, took ten steps and turned right. The stone of the mountain jutted out here, a solid block of granite thrusting upward from the growth of turpelo and buttonbush. Only it wasn’t solid. Two slabs of stone leaned together, the open crack below them masked by holly bushes. I pulled my shawl over Jemmy’s face to protect him from the sharp-edged leaves, and squeezed carefully behind them, ducking down to go through the cleft.

The stone face fell away in a crumple of huge boulders on the far side of the cleft, with saplings and undergrowth sprouting willy-nilly in the crevices between the rocks. From below, it looked impassable, but from above, a faint trail was visible, threading down to another small clearing. Hardly a clearing; no more than a gap in the trees, where a clear spring bubbled from the rock and disappeared again into the earth. In summer, it was invisible even from above, shielded by the leafy growth of the trees around it.

Now, on the verge of winter, the white glimmer of the rock by the spring was easily visible through the leafless scrim of alder and mountain ash. Jamie had found a large, pale boulder, and rolled it to the head of the spring, where he had scratched the form of a cross upon it, and said a prayer, consecrating the spring to our use. I had thought at the time of making a joke equating whisky with holy water—thinking of Father Kenneth and the baptisms—but had on second thoughts refrained; I wasn’t so sure Jamie would think it a joke.

I made my way cautiously down the slope, the faint trail leading through the boulders, and finally round an outcrop of rock, before debouching into the spring clearing. I was warm from the walking, but it was cold enough to numb my fingers where I gripped the edges of my shawl. And Jamie was standing at the edge of the spring in nothing but his shirt.