The Fiery Cross (71 page)

The snow was falling faster now, still a dry, light snow, but beginning to stick in random patches. We should leave soon, I thought, before the storm grew worse. It seemed somehow wrong, though, simply to go, with no attempt to determine the fate of Fanny Beardsley.

The whole situation seemed unreal. It was as though the woman had suddenly vanished through some sorcery, leaving this small substitute in exchange. It reminded me bizarrely of the Scottish tales of changelings; fairy offspring left in the place of human babies. I couldn’t fathom what the fairies could possibly want with Fanny Beardsley, though.

I knew it was futile, but turned slowly round once more, surveying our surroundings. Nothing. The clay bank loomed over us, fringed with dry, snow-dusted grass. The trickle of a tiny stream ran past a little distance away, and the trees rustled and sighed in the wind. There was no mark of hoof or foot on the layer of damp, spongy needles, and no hint of any trail. The woods were not at all silent, what with the wind, but dark and deep, all right.

“And miles to go before we sleep,” I remarked, turning back to Jamie with a sigh.

“Eh? Ah, no, it’s no more than an hour’s ride to Brownsville,” he assured me. “Or maybe two,” he amended, glancing up at the white-muslin sky, from which the snow was falling faster. “I ken where we are, now it’s light.”

He coughed again, a sudden spasm racking his body, then straightened, and handed me the cup and dummy.

“Here, Sassenach. Feed the poor were
sgaogan
while I tend the beasts, aye?”

Sgaogan
. A changeling. So the air of supernatural strangeness about the whole affair had struck him, too. Well, the woman had claimed to see ghosts; perhaps one of them had come for her? I shivered, and cradled the baby closer.

“Is there any settlement near here, besides Brownsville? Anywhere Mrs. Beardsley might have decided to go?”

Jamie shook his head, a line between his brows. The snow melted where it touched his heated skin, and ran down his face in tiny streams.

“Naught that I ken,” he said. “Is the wean takin’ to the goat’s milk?”

“Like a kid,” I assured him, and laughed. He looked puzzled, but one side of his mouth turned up nonetheless—he wanted humor just now, whether he understood the joke or not.

“That’s what the Americans call—will call—children,” I told him. “Kids.”

The smile broadened across his face.

“Oh, aye? So that’s why Brianna and MacKenzie call wee Jem so, is it? I thought it was only a bit of private fun between them.”

He milked the rest of the goats quickly while I dribbled more nourishment into the child, bringing back a brimming bucket of warm milk for our own breakfast. I should have liked a nice hot cup of tea—my fingers were chilled and numb from dipping the false teat over and over—but the creamy white stuff was delicious, and as much comfort to our chilled and empty stomachs as to the little one’s.

The child had stopped suckling, and had wet itself copiously; a good sign of health, by and large, but rather inconvenient just at the moment, as both its swaddling cloth and the front of my bodice were now soaked.

Jamie rootled hastily through the packs once again, this time in search of diapering and dry clothes. Fortunately, Mrs. Piggy had been carrying the bag in which I kept lengths of linen and wads of cotton lint for cleansing and bandaging. He took a handful of these and the child, while I went about the awkward and drafty business of changing my shift and bodice without removing skirt, petticoat, or cloak.

“P-put on your own cloak,” I said, through chattering teeth. “You’ll die of f-frigging pneumonia.”

He smiled at that, eyes focused on his job, though the tip of his nose glowed redly in contrast to his pale face.

“I’m fine,” he croaked, then cleared his throat with a noise like ripping cloth, impatient. “Fine,” he repeated, more strongly, then stopped, eyes widening in surprise.

“Oh,” he said, more softly. “Look. It’s a wee lassie.”

“Is it?” I dropped to my knees beside him to look.

“Rather plain,” he said, critically surveying the little creature. “A good thing she’ll have a decent dowry.”

“I don’t suppose you were any great beauty when you were born, either,” I said rebukingly. “She hasn’t even been properly cleaned, poor thing. What do you mean about her dowry, though?”

He shrugged, contriving to keep the child covered with a shawl, meanwhile sliding a folded sheet of linen dexterously beneath her miniature bottom.

“Her father’s dead and her mother’s gone. She’s no brothers or sisters to share, and I didna find any will in the house saying that anyone else was to have Beardsley’s property. There’s a decent farm left, though, and a good bit in trade goods there—to say nothing of the goats.” He glanced at Hiram and his family, and smiled. “So they’ll all be hers, I expect.”

“I suppose so,” I said slowly. “So she’ll be a rather well-to-do little girl, won’t she?”

“Aye, and she’s just shit herself. Could ye not have done that before I’d put ye on a fresh clout?” he demanded of the child. Unfazed by the scolding, the little girl blinked sleepily at him and gave a soft belch.

“Oh, well,” he said, resigned. He shifted himself to better shelter her from the wind, lifted the coverings briefly, and wiped a smear of blackish slime deftly off the budlike privates.

The child seemed healthy, though rather undersized; she was no bigger than a large doll, her stomach bulging slightly with milk. That was the immediate difficulty; small as she was, and with no body fat for insulation, she would die of hypothermia within a very short time, unless we could keep her warm as well as fed.

“Don’t let her get chilled.” I put my hands in my armpits to warm them, in preparation for picking up the child.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. I must just wipe her wee bum and then—” He stopped, frowning.

“What’s this, Sassenach? Is she damaged, d’ye think? Perhaps yon silly woman dropped her?”

I leaned close to look. He held the baby’s feet up in one hand, a wad of soiled cotton lint in the other. Just above the tiny buttocks was a dark bluish discoloration, rather like a bruise.

It wasn’t a bruise. It was, though, an explanation of sorts.

“She isn’t hurt,” I assured him, pulling another of Mrs. Beardsley’s discarded shawls up to shelter her daughter’s bald head. “It’s a Mongol spot.”

“A what?”

“It means the child is black,” I explained. “African, I mean, or partly so.” Jamie blinked, startled, then bent to peer into the shawl, frowning.

“No, she isn’t. She’s as pale as ye are yourself, Sassenach.”

That was quite true; the child was so white as to seem devoid of blood.

“Black children don’t usually look black at birth,” I explained to him. “In fact, they’re often quite pale. The pigmentation of the skin begins to develop some weeks later. But they’re often born with this faint discoloration of the skin at the base of the spine—it’s called a Mongol spot.”

He rubbed a hand over his face, blinking away snowflakes that tried to settle on his lashes.

“I see,” he said slowly. “Aye, well, that explains a bit, does it not?”

It did. The late Mr. Beardsley, whatever else he might have been, had assuredly not been black. The child’s father had been. And Fanny Beardsley, knowing—or fearing—that the child she was about to bear would reveal her as an adulteress, had thought it better to abandon the child and flee before the truth was revealed. I wondered whether the mysterious father had had anything to do with what had happened to Mr. Beardsley, for that matter.

“Did she know for sure that the father was a Negro, I wonder?” Jamie touched the small underlip, now showing a tinge of pink, gently with one finger. “Or did she never see the child at all? For after all, she must have given birth in the dark. If she had seen it looked white, perhaps she would ha’ chosen to brazen it out.”

“Perhaps. But she didn’t. Who do you suppose the father can have been?” Isolated as the Beardsleys’ farm had been, I couldn’t imagine Fanny having the opportunity to meet very many men, other than the Indians who came to trade. Did Indian babies perhaps have Mongol spots? I wondered.

Jamie glanced bleakly around at the desolate surroundings, and scooped the child up into his arms.

“I dinna ken, but I shouldna think he’ll be hard to spot, once we’ve reached Brownsville. Let’s go, Sassenach.”

JAMIE RELUCTANTLY DECIDED to leave the goats behind, in the interest of reaching shelter and sustenance for the child as quickly as possible.

“They’ll be fine here for a bit,” he said, scattering the rest of the hay for them. “The nannies wilna leave the auld fellow—and ye’re no going anywhere for the present, are ye,
a bhalaich
?” He scratched Hiram between the horns in farewell, and we left to a chorus of protesting
meh
s, the goats having grown used to our company.

The weather was worsening by the moment; as the temperature rose, the snow changed from dry powder to large, wet flakes that stuck to everything, dusting ground and trees with icing sugar, and melting down through the horses’ manes.

Well-muffled in my thick hooded cloak, with multiple shawls beneath and the child snuggled in a makeshift sling against my stomach, I was quite warm, in spite of the flakes that brushed my face and stuck in my lashes. Jamie coughed now and then, but on the whole, looked much healthier than he had; the need to take charge of an emergency had energized him.

He rode just behind me, keeping an eye out in case of marauding panthers or other menaces. I thought myself that any self-respecting cat—particularly one with a bellyful of goat—would spend a day like this curled up in some cozy den, not out tramping through the snow. Still, it was very reassuring to have him there; I was vulnerable, riding with one hand on the reins, the other wrapped protectively over the bulge under my cloak.

The child was sleeping, I thought, but not quiet; it stretched and squirmed with the slow, languid movements of the water world, not yet accustomed to the freedom of life outside the womb.

“Ye look as though you’re wi’ child, Sassenach.” I glanced back over my shoulder, to see Jamie looking amused under the brim of his slouch hat, though I thought there was something else in his expression; perhaps a slight wistfulness.

“Probably because I
am
with child,” I replied, shifting slightly in the saddle to accommodate the movements of my companion. “It’s just somebody else’s child I’m with.” The pressure of small knees and head and elbows shifting against my belly were in fact unsettlingly like the sensations of pregnancy; the fact that they were outside rather than inside made remarkably little difference.

As though drawn to the swelling under my cloak, Jamie nudged Gideon up beside me. The horse snorted and tossed his head, wanting to push ahead, but Jamie held him back with a soft
“Seas!”
of rebuke, and he subsided, huffing steam.

“Ye’re troubled for her?” Jamie asked, with a nod toward the surrounding forest.

No need to ask whom he meant. I nodded, my hand on the curled tiny backbone, arched still to fit the curve of the vanished womb. Where was she, Fanny Beardsley, alone in the wood? Crawled off to die like a wounded beast—or making, perhaps, for some imagined haven, floundering blindly through frozen leaf mold and deepening snow, heading back, maybe, toward the Chesapeake Bay and some memory of open sky, of broad waters and happiness?

Jamie leaned over and laid a hand on mine where it curled over the sleeping child; I could feel the chill of his ungloved fingers through the layer of cloth between us.

“She’s made her choice, Sassenach,” he said. “And she’s trusted us wi’ the bairn. We’ll see the wee lass safe; that’s all we can do for the woman.”

I couldn’t turn my hand to take his, but nodded. He let my hand go with a squeeze and dropped back, and I turned my face toward our destination, my lashes wet and spiky as I blinked away the melting drops.

By the time we came in sight of Brownsville, though, most of my concern for Fanny Beardsley had been subsumed by anxiety for her daughter. The child was awake and bawling, pummeling my liver with tiny fists in search of food.

I lifted myself in the saddle, peering through the curtain of falling snow. How big a place was Brownsville? I could see no more than the roofline of a single cabin peeping through the evergreen of pine and laurel. One of the men from Granite Falls had said it was sizable, though—what was “sizable,” here in the backcountry? What were the odds that at least one of the residents of Brownsville might be a woman with a nursing child?

Jamie had emptied out the canteen and filled it with goat’s milk, but it was better, I thought, to reach shelter before trying to feed the baby again. If there was a mother who might offer her milk to the child, that would be best—but if not, the goat’s milk would need to be heated; cold as it was outside, to give the baby cold milk might lower her body temperature dangerously.

Mrs. Piggy snorted out a great gout of steam, and suddenly picked up her pace. She knew civilization when she smelled it—and other horses. She threw up her head and whinnied piercingly. Gideon joined her, and when the racket stopped, I could hear the encouraging replies of a number of horses in the distance.

“They’re here!” I exhaled in a steamy burst of relief. “The militia—they made it!”

“Well, I should hope so, Sassenach,” Jamie replied, taking a firm grip to prevent Gideon’s bolting. “If wee Roger couldna find a village at the end of a straight trail, I’d have my doubts of his wits as well as his eyesight.” But he was smiling, too.

As we came round a curve in the trail, I could see that Brownsville really
was
a village. Chimney smoke drifted up in soft gray plumes from a dozen cabins, scattered over the hillside that rose to our right, and a cluster of buildings stood together by the road, clearly placed for custom, judging from the rubble of discarded kegs, bottles, and other rubbish strewn in the dead weeds of the roadside.

Across the road from this pothouse, the men had erected a crude shelter for the horses, roofed with pine boughs and walled on one side with more branches to break the wind. The militiamen’s horses were gathered under this in a cozy knot, hobbled and snorting, wreathed in clouds of their mingled breath.