Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (111 page)

“I’M SORRY,” ROGER SAID
at last. “I had to…”

“It’s all right,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “You’re back. That’s all that matters.”

“Well, maybe not
all
that matters,” he said, the ghost of laughter in his voice. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday and I smell like a rubbish fire.”

His stomach growled loudly in agreement and she laughed, letting go of him.

“Come on,” she said, turning back to her horse. “When we get to the house, just say hi to the kids and wash. I’ll go and tell Henrike that we need food—”

“A
lot
of food.”

“—a lot of food. Go!”

She found both Henrike and Angelina in the kitchen with Cook, buzzing excitedly. They pounced on her at once, wide-eyed and full of questions. Had Mr. MacKenzie seen the battle? Was he wounded? What had he said about the fighting? Had he seen General Prévost there, or Lord John?

She felt as though Angelina had punched her in the stomach. She knew Lord John had been in the battle, with his brother. She just hadn’t thought through what that meant. Of course they had fought. Whether either of the Greys had fired a gun or drawn a sword, they had undoubtedly given orders, helped light the fuse that had blown up and killed American besiegers.

She heard Lord John’s voice in memory, light and reassuring: “We
are
His Majesty’s army. We know how to do this sort of thing.”

All the blood had left her face and she felt cold and clammy. It hadn’t occurred to her that they would think Roger had been with the British army. But of course they would.

It hadn’t occurred to her that men she knew, liked, admired had killed other men for whom she felt the same, just days ago. She felt the cold, stinking darkness of the tent where Casimir Pulaski lay dead by lanternlight, and her right hand clenched, feeling the aching muscles and the film of sweat between the pencil and her skin as she’d sketched through the night, capturing sorrow, grief, rage, and love as the soldiers came to say farewell.

Pozegnanie.

She managed to ask for food to be sent, for someone to arrange a bath for Roger, and went up to her room, placing each foot carefully on the steps as she climbed the stairs. Roger’s discarded clothes lay on the floor by the window, and the acrid smell of war hung in the air.

Gingerly, she gathered up the remains of Roger’s black suit. It was filthy, coat and breeches mud-spattered from shoulder to knee, and gray sand sifted from the skirts when she shook it. There was a large, rough patch on the breast of the coat where something had dried, nearly the same color as the black broadcloth, but when she dabbed it with a wet rag, the cloth came away red and with a faint, meaty smell of blood.

There was something small and hard in the breast pocket. She hooked a finger inside and pulled out a brownish lump that proved to be a tooth, split, carious, and with half its root missing.

With a small huff of distaste, she set it on the table and returned to the coat—there had been something else in the pocket, a paper of some kind.

It was a small note, folded once and stuck together with the blood that had saturated the coat, but the blood had dried and she was able to separate the folds by delicate prying, flaking away the blood with the blade of her penknife.

She shouldn’t have been surprised; she’d smelled the powder smoke when she’d embraced him. Blood was a good deal more immediate, though. He hadn’t just been near the battle, he’d been
in
it, and she wasn’t sure whether to be more angry or more scared at the thought.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” she muttered under her breath. “Why, for God’s sake?”

She’d got the paper halfway open—far enough to see her own name. Very carefully, she broke the last of the dried blood and spread the stained and crumpled paper out on the table.

Dearest Bree,

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be here, but I have the strongest feeling that here is where I should be. It wasn’t quite “Whom shall I send? Who shall go for us?”—but something close, and so was my answer.

Slowly, she sat down on the bed, with its clean, safe counterpane and spotless pillows, and read it again. She sat for a few minutes, breathing slowly, deeply, calming herself.

She was by no means a Bible scholar, but she knew this passage; it turned up at least once a year in the readings at Mass, and the young priest who had taught religion at her school had used it when talking to the eighth-graders about vocations.

It was from Isaiah, the story in which the prophet is awakened from sleep by an angel, who touches a hot coal to his lips to cleanse him, to make him capable of speaking God’s word. She thought she knew what came next, but she rose and went down the quiet hallway to the library, where she knew she’d seen a Bible in the shelves. It was there, a handsome book bound in cool black leather, and she sat down and found what she was looking for with no trouble.

Isaiah, chapter 6, verse 8:

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.

She could feel her lips moving, repeating “send me,” but they moved silently and the words rang only in her own ears.

Send me.

She sat down, the open book heavy on her knee. Her hands were sweating, but her fingers were cold, and she fumbled, turning the page.

Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered. Roger had heard that call, and he’d answered it. She swallowed painfully, past the lump in her throat.

“You’re an idiot,” she whispered, but it was herself she spoke to, not him. She’d told him that she’d do everything she could to help him, if he was sure that being a minister was truly his vocation. She’d been schooled by priests and nuns; she knew what a vocation was. Only she hadn’t, really.

I’m sorry,
he’d written in his note to her.

“No,
I’m
sorry,” she said aloud and, closing the book, sat for a few minutes, staring into the fire. The house was quiet around her, wrapped in that peaceful hour before the preparations for supper began.

She’d imagined him doing what he did on the Ridge, though more officially: listen to people who needed someone to hear them, advise the troubled, comfort the dying, christen children, marry people and bury them…but she hadn’t imagined him comforting men dying on a battlefield, in the midst of cannon fire, nor burying them afterward and coming home bloody, with a stranger’s shattered teeth in his pocket. But something had called to him, and he’d gone to do it.

And he had, thank God, come back to her. Come in need of her. She blew out a long, slow breath and, rising, went to slide the Bible back into its place.

Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?

“Well,
there’s
a rhetorical question,” she said. “There isn’t anybody else who can do that for him, is there?” She took a breath, and clean air from the sea came in through the open window.

“Send me.”

Savannah

THE SIEGE WAS LIFTED,
the city largely untouched by battle, save cannonball holes and minor fires in the houses closest to the fighting. Savannah was a gracious city, and its grace was still evident, as people resumed their lives with very little fuss.

John Grey picked up the handkerchief that Mrs. Fleury had just dropped for the second time and handed it back, again with a bow. He didn’t think it was flirtation—if it was, she was very bad at it. She was also a good quarter century his elder, and while she was still sharp of both eye and tongue, he’d noticed how the spoon rattled in her saucer when she’d picked up her teacup earlier in the afternoon.

If her hands were palsied, though, her mind was not.

“That girl,” she said, pursing her lips toward Amaranthus, who stood on the other side of the room, in conversation with a young man he didn’t know. “Who is she?”

“That is Viscountess Grey, ma’am,” Grey said courteously. “My brother’s daughter-in-law.”

Mrs. Fleury’s slightly red-rimmed eyes narrowed in closer inspection.

“Where’s her husband?”

Grey felt the usual qualm in his innards at mention of Ben, but answered smoothly.

“My nephew had the misfortune to be captured by the rebels at the Brandywine, ma’am. We have had little news of him since, but hope that he will soon return to us.”
Even if it’s in a box…
Hal couldn’t stand much more uncertainty—and he
would
have to write to Minnie soon.

“Hmph.” The old lady raised her quizzing glass—yes, definitely palsy; he could see the chain trembling against her bosom—and gave Amaranthus a fierce stare through it.

“That young lady don’t act much like she’s pining for him, does she?”

Frankly, she didn’t, but Grey didn’t want to discuss his niece-by-marriage with Mrs. Fleury, who had used her widowhood to advantage and was quite obviously an accomplished gossip.

“She bears up bravely,” he said. “Allow me to fetch you another cup of tea, ma’am.”

While on this errand, he contrived to pass within hailing distance of Amaranthus and William, who were chatting with each other beneath a large portrait of the late Mr. Fleury, bewigged and dressed in plum velvet. This fine impression of a successful merchant was slightly spoilt by the artist’s effort to add a prosperous paunch to an otherwise lean figure; the alteration had required a hasty adjustment to Mr. Fleury’s posture, careless overpainting causing it to appear that the gentleman possessed a ghostly third leg, which hovered uncertainly behind William’s left ear.

There was no impropriety in their poses at all, but he was strongly aware of a charged atmosphere between them. It was visible in the effort they made
not
to touch each other.

As Grey approached them, Amaranthus accepted a plate of cake from William with such delicacy of touch that he might have just fallen into a privy, whilst William smiled into her eyes with an expression that anyone who knew him could have read, and that Amaranthus certainly
did.

Jesus Christ. Surely they haven’t…maybe not, but they’re bloody thinking about it. Both of them.

That was disturbing on multiple grounds. He quite liked Amaranthus, for one thing. And as William’s stepfather, he wanted to think the boy had been brought up better than to make addresses to a married woman, let alone his own cousin’s wife.

But he knew all too well the power of the flesh. Strong enough to be visible to Mrs. Fleury, at any rate.

“John,” said a soft voice behind him, and he stiffened.

“Perseverance,” Grey said, shaking his head as his erstwhile stepbrother came up beside him, smiling. “Never was a man so well named.”

“You’re looking well, John,” Percy said, ignoring this. “Blue velvet always suits you. You recall the suits we wore to our parents’ wedding?” The smile was real, deep in those soft brown eyes, and Grey was astonished and annoyed to feel it run straight down his backbone and tighten his balls.

Yes, he bloody remembered that wedding and those suits. And—as Percy so clearly intended—he remembered standing beside Percy in church as his mother married Percy’s stepfather, his hand and Percy’s touching, hidden in full skirts of royal-blue velvet, fingers slowly entwining, the touch a promise. One Percy had fucking broken.

“What do you want, Perseverance?” he asked bluntly.

“Oh, quite a lot of things,” Percy replied, the smile now reaching his lips. “But principally…I want to talk to Fergus Fraser.”

“You did,” Grey said, setting his half-empty glass on the tray of a passing servant. “At Coryell’s Ferry. I heard you. And I heard
him,
” he added. “He wasn’t having any of you then, and I doubt he’s changed his mind. Besides, what the devil do you think I could do about it, even if I wanted to?”

Percy’s smile remained, but his eyes crinkled in a way indicating that he considered Grey’s reply to be humorous.

“I had the pleasure of meeting your son in the summer, at Mrs. Prévost’s luncheon.”

No. For God’s sake, bloody no.

“And while I did indeed meet Mr. Fergus Fraser again briefly in Charles Town some little time ago, I had also the privilege of seeing General Fraser at close range during the
pourparlers
before Monmouth.”

“So?” Grey kept his own smile fixed blandly in place, though he was well aware that Percy could read in his eyes what he was thinking.

Percy blinked, coughed once, and averted his gaze, fixing it instead upon Mr. Fleury’s phantom leg.

“Bugger off, Percy,” Grey said, not unkindly, and went to fetch Mrs. Fleury’s tea.

The sense of warmth and faint sexual excitement remained with him, though, along with a disturbingly exhilarating sensation of Percy’s eyes on his back. It had been a good many years since he’d felt Percy’s touch, but he remembered it. Vividly.

He pushed the feeling firmly away. He wasn’t likely to succumb to Percy’s physical charms nor yet his clumsy blackmail. What if Percy
did
decide to go round telling the world that he thought William’s resemblance to a Scottish rebel general rather striking? It might stimulate gossip for a brief time, but William had left the army and remained an earl. His position couldn’t really be endangered. All William would need to do, should any question be asked of him, was to give the querent an icy stare and ignore them.

He was going to have to find out what Percy was up to, though, and why. A thread of heat ran down his back again, as though someone had poured hot coffee down his neckband.

Across the room, he saw Amaranthus’s long forefinger come to rest gently on William’s chest, pointing out something obvious.

HER FINGER RESTED—JUST
barely—on the largest of the beetles on his waistcoat, a two-and-a-half-inch monster in brilliant-yellow silk with black-tipped horns. And, of course, tiny red eyes.

“Dynastes tityus,”
she said, with approval. “The eastern Hercules beetle.”

“Really?” William said, laughing. “
Dynastes tityus
means, if I’m not mistaken, Tithean rebel. Was Hercules a Tithean?”

“A Titan, was he not?” Amaranthus tilted her head, lifting one brow. Her brows were soft but well marked, a darker blond than her hair.

“Yes. Perhaps that’s what the person who named this thing meant—but why rebel? Is this fellow known to be rebellious?” He looked down his nose at his chest—and Amaranthus’s long, slim index finger. Her wedding band glimmered on the fourth finger, and he took a deep breath that made her pointing finger sink slightly into the ochre silk. She smiled up at him, and slowly withdrew the finger.

“As to the beetle, I wouldn’t know. But you are, aren’t you?”

“Me? How do you mean?”

“I mean that you don’t intend to live your life to please other people’s expectations. Do you?”

That was a lot more direct than he’d expected—but then, she
was
startlingly direct.

“Your expectations?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” she said, dimpling. “I expect nothing, William. From you or anyone else.” She paused for an instant, and her eyes fixed with his. They were gray now that she wore violet satin, and translucent as rain on a windowpane. “Unless you refer to the modest proposal I made you?”

In spite of the internal struggle going on inside him, he smiled at her reference to Jonathan Swift—though in truth, her own proposal had been nearly as shocking as Swift’s satirical essay advocating infant cannibalism as a remedy for poverty.

“That was what I had in mind, yes.”

“I’m pleased to know that you’re considering it,” she said, and though the dimple had left her cheek, it was plainly audible in her voice.

He opened his mouth to deny that he was doing any such thing—but while he had firmly refused to think about her outrageous suggestion, he was aware that his body had already accomplished its considerations and was making its equally firm conclusions known to him.

He coughed and glanced casually around the room. Papa was talking to the French diplomat and not looking in his direction, thank God.

“Well.” He cleared his throat and folded his hands behind his back. “I don’t know that ‘consideration’ is the right word, precisely—but the matter is irrelevant for the moment. I came this afternoon to see you—”

“Indeed?” She looked pleased.

“In order to tell you that I am leaving in the morning and don’t know how long it may be until I return.”

She ceased looking pleased, and he regretted that, but there was nothing to be done about it.

“Come,” he said, and touched her hand, nodding toward the French doors, open to the garden. “I’ll tell you why.”

She caught his mood at once and gave a slight nod.

“Not together,” she said. “I’ll go first. Go and have a drink, then take your leave through the front door and walk round.”

HE FOUND HER,
at length, at the far end of Mrs. Fleury’s enormous garden, contemplating a small grotto, in which a stone
putto
was urinating on a toad that sat in the middle of a carved stone basin, its round eyes gleaming black beneath the stream.

“It’s a real toad,” she remarked, glancing briefly at him before returning her attention to the amphibian in question. “A
Scaphiopus
of some kind. They live mostly underground, but they do like water.”

“Obviously,” William said, but he wasn’t letting her distract him, and without ado he told her about the letter Denzell Hunter had sent to Uncle Hal. She went white and pulled her cape tight across her body, as though stricken by a sudden chill.

“Oh, no. No. Oh, poor woman!” To his surprise, her eyes were full of tears. But then he remembered that she, too, had a child, and must at once have imagined losing Trevor in such fashion.

“Yes,” he said, a lump in his own throat. “It’s very terrible. Uncle Hal naturally wants Dottie here, where he can take care of her, make sure she’s safe. So I’m going to go and fetch her.”

“Of course.” Amaranthus’s voice was unaccustomedly hoarse and she cleared her throat with a small, precise
“hem,”
then let go of her cape, straightening up. “I’m glad that your cousin will be restored to her family—to be alone, with such a dreadful loss…How long do you think the journey will take?”