Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (118 page)

It had been a long—a very long—time since he’d read the Declaration of Arbroath, but they weren’t words you’d forget.

“As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting…”
He paused and looked Cunningham straight in the eyes.
“…but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”

He didn’t wait for the deep rumble of response but turned on his heel and went out the door, as quick as he could, and broke into a run as soon as he was outside, knife in hand.

There were three or four of them, waiting for him. But they’d thought he’d talk on, and he caught them staring, moon-faced in the light from the suddenly open door. He hit one in the jaw, shouldered another out of the way, and was into the wood before they could move. He heard the shouting and confusion as the men in the Meeting House all tried either to get out or to punch each other.

The moon wasn’t yet up and the woods were pitch-dark, but he’d chosen a large boulder near a huge spruce for his hiding place and had the pistol in his hand within moments. It was loaded and primed, but he didn’t cock it yet.

His heart was pounding in his ears as he slid through the brush—he daren’t run, in earshot of the Meeting House—but he thought he heard Cunningham’s quarterdeck roar. He was bellowing, “All hands!” and Jamie would have laughed, if he’d had breath.

His freedom—and probably his life—depended on two things now, and he had no control over either one.
If
Scotchee Cameron had got his note, and
if
he thought it was worth keeping the Cherokee from being involved in a fracas over the Line—that was one thing. The other was whether John Sevier had been able to find Partland and his men at Ninety-Six and stop them.

Hiram Crombie and the rest were keeping Cunningham and his men busy, from the sounds of it. But if either Cameron or Sevier had failed him, it was going to be a bloody night.

IT WAS WELL
past midnight; I’d sent the girls and Bluebell up to bed two hours ago, and now exhaustion hung over the kitchen like a low veil of chimney smoke. We had exhausted everything: prayer, conversation, industry, food, milk, and chicory coffee. Elspeth didn’t drink alcohol recreationally, pious Christian that she was, and had refused more than the one medicinal cup of whisky tonight. While I longed to obliviate myself, I felt that I had to stay sober, had to be ready. For what, I didn’t want to think—thinking was another thing I had exhausted.

For a time, I had been conscious every moment of what
might
be happening at the Meeting House. Visualizing the Lodge meeting—or what I knew of it, for Jamie observed the Masonic vows of secrecy, and while he laughed with me over the apron and dagger, he said nothing about their rituals. Wondering where the crisis would come.

“Nothing will happen during the meeting, Sassenach,” he’d said, in an effort to be reassuring. “Cunningham’s an officer and a gentleman, and a Mason of the Thirty-third Degree. He takes an oath seriously.”

“Such men are dangerous,” I’d said, quoting
Julius Caesar.
I was striving for levity, but Jamie had just nodded soberly and taken the best of his pistols from its place above the mantelpiece.

But now my mind was blank, having room only for a formless dread. I’d stirred up the fire; I stared into the flames, my face hot and my hands cold as ice, lying useless in my lap.

“It’s raining.” Elspeth broke the silence, lifting her head at the sound of the spatter of raindrops against the closed shutters. We were sitting by the kitchen fire again, having left the surgery spick-and-span. Fresh bandages. Linen towels. Surgical instruments recleaned and sterilized, laid out on their own fresh towel on the counter. The brazier cleaned and filled with new hickory chips, a selection of cautery irons ready beside it. Without speaking a word to each other about what we were doing, we had prepared for sudden and dire emergency.

“So it is.” The silence fell again. The sound of the rain had rekindled my thoughts, though. Would it keep them inside the Meeting House?

Nonsense, Beauchamp,
my mind replied.
When has rain stopped a Highlander from doing anything whatever? Nor yet a naval office, I suppose…

“I’m sorry.” Elspeth spoke abruptly and I glanced at her, startled. Her hands were folded tight in her lap. Her face was pale and her lips pressed together, as though sorry she’d spoken.

“It’s not your fault,” I said automatically, and then more consciously, “Nor mine.”

Her lips relaxed a little at that.

“No,” she said, softly. She was silent for a bit, but I could see her throat working faintly, as though she was arguing with herself about something.

“What is it?” I said at last, very quietly. She looked at me, and I saw her stringy throat bob as she swallowed.

“Five years,” she blurted.

“What?”

She looked away, but then back, dark eyes fixed on mine with an odd look, apology mingled with something else—relief? Triumph?

“When Simon died—my grandson…two years ago…”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I said, and a lance of real fear stabbed me in the heart. Like everyone else present at the time, I’d been deeply moved by Charles Cunningham’s maiden sermon, and the story of his son’s death—and his last words.
“I’ll see you again. In seven years.”

“
What
did you say?” Elspeth asked, incredulous. I flapped a hand at her in dismissal. If the captain believed his son’s word—and very plainly he
did
—then he must conclude that he was essentially immortal for the intervening years. Five years now.

“Holy Lord,” I said, finding a more acceptable interjection. There was an inch of buttermilk left in my cup, and I tossed it back as though it were bad whisky.

“That—I mean…it doesn’t mean that he will kill your husband,” Elspeth said, leaning forward anxiously. “Only that your husband will not kill him.”

“That must be a comfort to you.”

She flushed, embarrassed. Of course it was. She cleared her throat and tried to offer comfort, saying that Charles didn’t mean to kill Jamie, only to take him prisoner, and…

“And take him off to Patrick Ferguson to be hanged,” I finished, nastily. “For the sake of his own bloody advancement!”

“For the sake of his King and his honor as an officer of that King!” she snapped, glaring at me. “Your husband is a pardoned traitor and now he has forfeited the grace of that pardon! He has earned his own—” She realized what she was saying—what she plainly had been thinking for quite some time—and her mouth snapped shut like a trap.

The rain turned suddenly to hail, and hailstones beat upon the shutters with a sound like gunfire. We glanced at each other, but didn’t speak; we couldn’t have heard each other if we had.

We sat for some time by the fire, our chairs side by side, not speaking.
Two old witches,
I thought. Divided by loyalties and love; united in our fear.

But even fear becomes exhausting after a time, and I found myself nodding, the fire making white shadows flicker through my closing eyelids. Elspeth’s breathing roused me from my doze, a hoarse, rough sound, and she shifted suddenly, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her face buried in her hands. I reached across and touched her and she took my hand, holding tight. Neither of us spoke.

The hail had passed, the wind had dropped, the thunder and lightning had stopped and the storm settled down to a heavy, soaking, endless rain.

We waited, holding hands.

SOMETIME LATER—TIME HAD CEASED
to have meaning by then—we heard them. The sounds of a body of men and horses. Trampling and the sounds of urgency.

The noise had roused Fanny and Agnes; I heard their bare feet pattering down the stairs.

I was at the door with no memory of getting there, fumbling with the mortise bolt—I hadn't barred the door when Elspeth came. I yanked the heavy door in as though it weighed nothing, and in the dark and flickering candlelight I saw Jamie, among a many-headed mass of black confusion, a head taller than his companions and his eyes searching for me.

“Help me, Sassenach,” he said, and stumbled into the hall, lurching to one side and striking the wall. He didn't fall, but I saw the blood on his wet shirt, soaked and spreading.

“Where?” I said urgently, seizing his arm and looking for the source of the blood. It was running down his arm beneath the sleeve of his jacket; his hand was wet with it. “Where are you hurt?”

“Not me,” he said, chest heaving in the effort to breathe. He jerked his head backward. “Him.”

“CHARLIE!” ELSPETH'S CRY
made me jerk round to see Tom MacLeod and Murdo Lindsay negotiating a makeshift stretcher composed of jackets strung on hastily lopped branches around the doorjamb, trying not to drop or injure the contents. Said contents being Charles Cunningham in a noticeable state of disrepair.

They knew where the surgery was and proceeded there at a trot. Jamie pushed himself off the wall and called to them hoarsely in Gaelic, at which they immediately slowed down, walking almost on tiptoe.

“He's shot in the back, Sassenach,” Jamie said to me. “Maybe…a few other places.” His hand was trembling where it pressed against the wall, and his fingers left bloody smears.

“Go and sit down in the kitchen,” I said briefly. “Tell Fanny I said to get your clothes off and find out how bad it is, then come and tell me.”

The stretcher party had reached the surgery and I rushed in behind them, in time to superintend the moving of the captain onto my table.

“Don't pick him up!” I shouted, seeing them about to lay the stretcher on the floor. “Put the whole thing on the table!”

Cunningham was alive, and more or less lucid. Elspeth was already on the other side of the table, and between us we cut his clothes off, as gently as possible, she speaking reassuringly to him, though her hands were shaking badly.

He'd been shot twice from the front; a ball in the right forearm that had broken the radius just above the wrist, and a shot that had scored his ribs on the left but fortunately not entered the body. One side of his face was scratched and bruised, but from the presence of bark in some of the scratches, I thought he had likely collided with a tree in the dark, rather than been in a fistfight with one.

“Jamie says you've been shot in the back,” I said, bending low to speak to him. “Can you tell me where the wound is? High? Low?”

“Low,” he gasped. “Don't worry, Mother, it will be fine.”

“Be quiet, Charles!” she snapped. “Can you move your feet?”

His face was dead white, beard stubble like a scatter of pepper across his skin. I had my hands under him, feeling my way between the jackets of the stretcher and the layers of his own clothes, trapped under him. His clothes were sodden, but so were those of all the men—I could hear the dripping out in the hall, as several men were crammed in the doorway, listening. I pulled one hand out from under him, gingerly, and looked at it. It was scarlet to the wrist. I glanced at his feet. One of them twitched and Elspeth gasped. She was stanching the blood from his arm, but at this stopped and bent over him.

“Move the other, Charles,” she said urgently.

“I am,” he whispered. His eyes were closed and water ran from his hair. I looked down the table. Neither foot was moving.

Fanny pushed her way through the men at the door and came in, her hair loose over her wrapper and her eyes huge.

“Mr. Fraser has a bad cut from his right shoulder down across his chest,” she told me. “It just missed his left nipple, though.”

“Well, that's a bit of good news,” I said, repressing a mildly hysterical urge to laugh. “Did you—”

“We put a compress on it,” she assured me. “Agnes is pushing on it. With both hands!”

“How fast is the blood soaking through?” I had my hands back under Captain Cunningham, feeling my way through layers of sopping cloth, in search of the wound's exact location.

“He soaked the first compress, but the second one is doing better,” she assured me. “He wants whisky; is that all right?”

“Make him stand up,” I said, reaching the waistband of the captain's breeches. “If he can stand upright for thirty seconds, he can have whisky. If not, give him honey-water and make him lie down flat on the floor. No matter
what
he says.”

“We've already been giving him honey-water,” she said, and looked closely at our patient. “Should the captain maybe have some, too?” I had one hand on the captain's femoral artery—we'd cut his breeches, jacket, and shirt down the fronts and peeled the cloth away from his body—and the other underneath him. His pulse was surprisingly strong, which encouraged me. So did the fact that while blood was dripping off the table, it wasn't pulsing out into my hand. I thought the shot hadn't struck a major vessel. On the other hand…his feet still weren't moving.

“Yes,” I said. “Bring some; Mrs. Cunningham can give it to him while I…see about this.”

Elspeth laid her son's bandaged arm gently across his middle and smoothed the wet hair off his forehead, wiping his face with a towel.

“You'll be all right, Charles,” she said. She spoke gently now, but her voice was rock-steady. “You'll be warm and dry in no time.”

I closed my eyes, the better to listen to what my hands were telling me. I'd found the wound in his back, and it wasn't good. A ball had entered between the last thoracic and first lumbar vertebrae. It still
was
between the vertebrae; I could feel it with my middle finger, a small hard lump, and stuck fast; it didn't move when I pushed it a little. The flesh of his back was hard and cold, the muscles all in spasm.

He was shivering, though the room was quite warm. I told Elspeth to put a blanket over him, nodding at the vomit-yellow woolen coverlet, folded neatly on top of the cabinet.

The men who had brought him in were still in the hallways, talking in low voices. I recognized the voices; they were Jamie's trusted men.

“Gilly!” I called over my shoulder, and Gillebride MacMillan peered cautiously round the doorjamb.

“Seadh, a bhana-mhaighister?”

“Is anyone hurt? Beyond the captain and Jamie, I mean?”

“Ach, it's nay more than a few bruises and cracked ribs, mistress, and I think it may be that Tòmas has the broken nose.”

I had moved to the counter and was choosing my instruments, but was still thinking and talking at the same time.

“What about the others? The men who—were with the captain?”

He lifted a shoulder, but smiled, and I heard a brief laugh from someone in the hall. They'd won, I realized, and the adrenaline of victory was still holding them up.

“I could not say,
a bhana mhaighister,
save that I broke a shovel over the head of Alasdair MacLean, and there were knives, and two or three who came to grief in the landslide, so…”

“The landslide?” I looked over my shoulder at him, startled, then shook my head. “Never mind; I'll hear about it later.”

“They will have gone to—to my house.” Elspeth spoke softly. “The wounded Loyalists who didn't come here. I'll—I'll need to go and tend them.” She was holding her son's hand, though, fingers tightly laced with his, and her face was full of anguish when she looked at him.

I nodded, my throat tight in sympathy. I didn't need to see the thoughts racing across her face to know what they were: love and fear warring with duty. And I knew the deeper fear that was beginning to bloom within her. Her eyes were fixed on his bare feet, willing them to move.

“Gilly, go to the kitchen, will you, and fetch Agnes?”

He left, and I turned to Elspeth.

“He's not going to die,” I said, low-voiced but firm. “I don't know if he'll walk again—he might, he might not. The ball didn't go all the way through the spinal cord, but it's clearly done some damage. That
might
heal. I'm going to take the ball out and dress the wound, and when the swelling goes down and the bruising heals…” I made a small gesture, equivocating hope and doubt.

She drew a long, quavering breath and nodded.

“Stay while I take the ball out,” I said, and reached to take her hand. “It won't take long, and you'll be sure he's alive.”