Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (123 page)

“Well, no.” He rubbed a knuckle lightly over his upper lip, and I thought he was—for once—trying
not
to laugh at me. But no; he’d only been making up his mind what to say.

“Do you not know what the word ‘sachem’ means?”

“Rather obviously not,” I said, a little miffed. “What’s it mean, then?”

He straightened up, half consciously. “A sachem is an elder of the people. A sachem might advise and lead a great number of his people. I did.”

Well, that accounted for his self-confidence.

“Why aren’t you a sachem anymore?”

“I died,” he said simply.

“Oh.” I looked around us. We had come to the trout lake, which was glimmering with a cold bronze light; the sun was coming down, and the forest surrounding us was mostly pine and birch trees, dark against the sky. There was no sign of any human habitation. I took a deep breath of the wind and the coming dark. I’d taken his arm coming down the hill; his flesh had been warm and solid; I’d felt the hardness of his bones.

“You’re not a ghost, are you?” I said, and thought, oddly, that I would have believed either answer.

He looked at me for several moments before answering.

“I don’t know,” he said.

We found a fallen log and sat down. At the far end of the lake, a family of beavers had built a lodge that dammed the small creek leading out of it. I could see a beaver on top of the lodge, its stocky form silhouetted against the light, head raised to the breeze.

“Jamie says they mostly come out at night,” I said, nodding toward it. “But we see them often in the daytime, too.”

“They feel safe, I suppose. I have not heard many wolves. Other than small Hunter; he howls very well but is not big enough to hunt beaver yet. And his parents don’t let him out at night.”

“Haha,” I said politely. “How did you come to die? An accident?”

He grinned at me, showing teeth that were visibly worn but mostly present.

“Few people do it on purpose. A snake bit me.” He pushed back his left sleeve and showed me the scar on the underside of his arm: a deep, irregular hollow in his flesh, about two inches long. I took his hand and turned it for a better look. He was very lean, and well hydrated; the larger blood vessels were clearly visible, firm under the skin.

“Good Lord, it looks as though it bit you right in the radial artery. What sort of snake was it?”

“You would call it a rattlesnake.” He didn’t remove my hand, but put his other hand over it. “I knew at once that it had killed me; there was great pain in my arm, and an instant later, I felt the poison strike my heart like an arrow. I grew hot and then so cold that my teeth chattered, though the day was warm. My eyes went dark, and I curled up like a worm, hoping that it wouldn’t last too long.”

It had lasted three days and three nights.

“This was not pleasant,” he assured me. “The False Face Society came, they put poultices upon the wound and danced…I still see their feet, sometimes, when I dream—moccasins shuffling past my face, one after another, on and on…and the masks bending over me, a small drum beating; I can hear that, too, sometimes, and my own heartbeat unsteady, stopping and starting and the drum still beating…”

He stopped for a moment, and I put my free hand over his. After a moment, he took a deep breath and looked at me.

“And I died,” he said. “It was in the deep part of the third night. I must have been asleep when it happened, for I found myself standing by the door of the hut, looking out into the forest and seeing the stars—stars as I have never seen them before or since,” he added softly. “It was so peaceful, so beautiful.”

“I know,” I said, just as softly. We sat for a few moments together, remembering.

The beaver slid down the side of the lodge and swam off, making an arrow of dark water in the shining lake, and the Sachem sighed and let go of my hands.

“I walked—I suppose you would call it walking, though I didn’t seem to have feet—but I went into the woods and walked away from…everything. I was going somewhere, but I didn’t know where. And then I met my second wife.” He paused, an expression of warmth and longing lighting his face.

“She told me she was glad to see me, and would see me again, but not now. I wasn’t meant to come yet; there were things that I needed to do; I had to go back. I didn’t want to,” he said, glancing at me. “I wanted to go with her, toward…” He broke off, shrugging.

“But I did go back. I woke up and I was in the medicine hut and my arm hurt a lot, but I was alive. They told me I had been dead for hours, and they were shocked. I was…resigned.”

“But you weren’t exactly the same person you were before,” I said.

“No. I told them I was not the Sachem anymore; I could see that my nephew was able to lead men in battle and I would be his adviser, but that it was to him that they must look now.”

“And…now you see ghosts?” Jenny had told me what he’d said about Ian the Elder and his leg.
Raised every hair on my body,
she’d said, and my own nape was prickling.

“Now I see ghosts,” he said, quite matter-of-factly.

“All the time?”

“No, and I am thankful that I don’t. But now and then, there they are. Mostly they have no business with me, nor I with them, and they pass by like a flash of light. But then again…”

He was looking at me in a thoughtful way that raised a few more hairs.

“Do I…have ghosts?” I said, hoping that it wasn’t like having fleas.

He tilted his head to one side, as though inspecting me.

“You lay your hands on many people, to try to heal them. Some of them die, of course, and some of those, I think, follow you for a short time. But they find their way and leave you. You have a small child sometimes near you, but she is very faint. The only other one I have seen with you more than once is a man. He wears spectacles.” He made circles of his thumbs and middle fingers and held them up to his eyes, miming glasses. “And a peculiar hat, with a short brim. I think he must be from your place across the stones, for I have never seen anything like that.”

I honestly thought I was having a heart attack. There was an immense pressure in my chest, and I couldn’t breathe. The Sachem touched my arm, though, and the pressure eased.

“You shouldn’t worry,” he assured me. “He is a man who loved you; he means you no harm.”

“Oh. Good.” I’d broken out in a cold sweat and groped for a handkerchief. I was wiping my face and neck with it when the Sachem got to his feet and offered me a hand.

“What is strange,” he said as I rose, “is that this man often follows your husband, too.”

WHEN I GOT
back to the house, I went straight to Jamie’s study. Jamie wasn’t in it; he’d gone to check operations at the still, as he did twice weekly. I didn’t hear anyone in the house, but found myself walking as softly as a cat burglar, and wondered exactly whom I was sneaking up on. The answer to that was obvious, and I resumed my normal firm step, letting the echoes fall where they might.

The book was still behind the ledgers. I turned it over with the distinct feeling that it might explode, or the photograph leap from the cover and accost me. Nothing happened, though, and the photograph remained…just a photograph. It was certainly an image of Frank, much as I remembered him, but I didn’t feel Frank’s presence. As soon as the thought occurred to me, I glanced over my shoulder. Nothing there.

Would you know, if there was?
That thought raised goose bumps on my forearms, but I shook it off.

“I would,” I said firmly, aloud, and took the book to the window, so the sun shone on it. Frank was wearing his normal black-rimmed glasses in the photo—but he wasn’t wearing a hat.

“Well, assuming he’s right,” I said accusingly to the photo, “what the hell are you doing, following either me
or
Jamie around?”

Getting no answer to this, I sat down in Jamie’s chair.

The Sachem had said Frank—always assuming it
was
Frank he saw, though I was becoming sure of this—was “a man who loved you.”
Loved,
past tense. That gave me a small double pang: one of loss, the other of reassurance. Presumably there was no question of postmortem jealousy, then? But if not…

But you don’t even know that Jamie’s
right
about this damned book!

I opened the book, read a page without taking in a word of its meaning, and closed it again. It didn’t bloody matter. Whether by Frank’s intent—malign or not—or only a figment of Jamie’s imagination, stimulated by the pressure of current events or the stirrings of a mistaken sense of guilt…Jamie thought what he thought, and nothing short of Divine Revelation was likely to change that.

I closed my eyes and sat still. We didn’t yet own a clock, and yet I could hear the seconds tick past. My body kept its own time, between my heartbeat and the pulsing of my blood, the ebb and flow of sleep and wakefulness. If time was eternal, why wasn’t I? Or perhaps we only become eternal when we stop keeping time.

I’d nearly died three times: when I lost Faith, when I caught a great fever, and—only a year ago!—when I was shot at Monmouth. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember, but I remembered only small, vivid flashes of each experience. I felt very calm, thinking of death. It wasn’t something I was afraid of; I just didn’t want to go while there were people who needed me.

Jamie had come to the verge of death more frequently—and a lot more violently—than I had, and I didn’t think he was afraid of it, either.

But you still have people who need
you,
dammit!

The thought made me angry—at both Frank and Jamie—and I got up and shoved the book back behind the ledgers. Even without a clock, I knew it was nearly suppertime. I had a sort of chowder going, made with potatoes and onions and a little dried corn, but it wasn’t very good…Bacon! Yes, definitely bacon.

I was coming out of the smoke shed with several rashers on a plate when a bit more of what I was determinedly not thinking about bubbled up. Bree had told me—and Jamie—about the letter Frank had left for her. An extremely disturbing letter, on multiple levels. But what was echoing in the back of my mind just now was the last paragraph of that letter:

And…there’s him. Your mother said that Fraser sent her back to me, knowing that I would protect her—and you. She thought that he died immediately afterward. He did not. I looked for him, and I found him. And, like him, perhaps I send you back, knowing—as he knew of me—that he will protect you with his life.

For the first time, it occurred to me that even if Jamie was right, and Frank
was
making an attempt to tell him something—it might be a warning, rather than a threat.

Savannah

WILLIAM DIDN’T GO DIRECTLY
to Lord John’s house when he arrived in Savannah. Instead, he stopped at a barber on Bay Street and had a much-needed shave and his hair trimmed and properly bound. That was as much as he could do for the moment, bar digging a halfway-clean shirt out of his saddlebag and changing into it in the shop. Face raw and stinging with razor burn and bay rum, and deeply aware of his own residual stink beneath it, he left his horse at the livery, walked to Oglethorpe Street, and after a moment’s thought circled his father’s house and walked into the cookhouse out back.

Lord John was out with his brother. Gone to the camp, the startled cook informed him. And the viscountess? In the parlor, doing needlework.

“Thank you,” he said, and went into the house, pausing briefly to kick his boots against the step, in order to knock off some of the dry mud.

He made no attempt to quiet his footsteps; they hit the painted floorcloth in the hallway with the regular thump of a muffled drum. When he reached the parlor door, she was sitting bolt-upright and wide-eyed, a large piece of half-embroidered white silk spilling over her lap and a needle threaded with scarlet floss motionless in her hand.

“William,” she said, and cocked her head to one side. She didn’t smile; neither did he. He leaned against the jamb and crossed his arms, looking steadily at her.

“I found him.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head violently, as though attacked by gnats.

“Where?” she asked, her voice a little husky, and he saw that her free hand had closed on the silk, crushing it.

“A place called Morristown. It’s in New Jersey.”

“His grave? That was in New Jersey, but you said he wasn’t in it…”

“He’s definitely not in his grave,” he assured her, not trying to keep the cynical tone out of his voice.

“You mean…he’s…alive, then?” She kept her face under control, but her cheeks were pink, not white, and he could see the thoughts darting like minnows at the back of her changeable eyes.

“Oh, yes. But you knew that.” He considered her for a moment, then added, “He’s a general now. General Raphael Bleeker. Did you know
that
?”

She took a long, slow breath, holding his eyes with hers.

“No,” she said at last. “But I’m not surprised.” Her lips compressed briefly. “He’s with Washington, then,” she said. “Father Pardloe said the rebels had gone to winter quarters in New Jersey.”

She’d dropped the silk; it slithered to the ground, unregarded. She stood up abruptly, fists closed at her sides, and turned her back on him.

“He said it was your idea,” William said mildly. “That he should pretend to be dead.”

“I couldn’t stop him.” She spoke to the yellow toile de Jouy wallpaper, through her teeth by the sound of it. “I begged him not to do it.
Begged
him.” She turned around then and glared at him. “But you know what they’re like, these Greys of yours. Nothing matters to them when they’ve made up their minds—nothing. And nobody.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” William said. His heart had slowed down a bit after his first sight of her, but it was speeding up again. “It’s true that you can’t change their minds—but they do care, sometimes. Ben cared.” He cleared his throat. “For you.” He had the bruises to prove it.

And still does.
He didn’t say it out loud, but he saw from her face that he didn’t need to.

“Not enough,” she said shortly, though there was a quiver in her voice. “Not
nearly
enough. It was only my telling him what it would do to Trevor—having a traitor for a father—that finally made him agree to disappear quietly, instead of having a blazing row with his father and stamping off to glory with his precious rebels. That’s what he would have liked,” she added, with a twitch of the mouth that might have been either bitterness or reluctant amusement.

There was a moment’s silence in the room. William could hear footsteps somewhere upstairs, and muffled yelling that was undoubtedly Trevor. Amaranthus’s eyes flicked upward, but she didn’t move. A moment later, the footsteps evidently reached the little boy, because the yelling stopped abruptly. Amaranthus’s shoulders relaxed a little and he noticed for the first time that she wore dark blue and wore no fichu, so the curve of her full breasts showed white above the cloth.

She saw him notice and gave him a direct look.

“I
wanted
a coward, you know,” she said. “A man who’d stay away from danger and blood and all those things.”

“And you thought I might be one?” He was curious, rather than offended.

She made a small puffing noise and shook her head.

“At first. Uncle John said you’d resigned your commission, and I could see that he and Father Pardloe were bothered that you did.”

“I expect they were,” he said, careful to let nothing show in his voice.

“But it didn’t take long to see what you were. What you still are.” Her fists had gradually relaxed, and one hand absently gathered her skirt into folds.

He wanted to ask just what she thought he
was,
but that could wait.

“Ben,” he said firmly. “I have to tell Uncle Hal. But I—I mean, he has to know that Ben’s alive and where—and what—he is. But perhaps he needn’t know that…you knew about it.”

He hadn’t thought for a moment of concealing her knowledge from Uncle Hal until he heard the words coming out of his mouth.

Her face changed like a drop of quicksilver, and she turned round again and stood stiff as a tailor’s dummy. He thought he could see her heart beating, the tight blue bodice quivering ever so slightly across her back.

He realized suddenly that now
he
was standing there with his hands fisted, and made himself relax. A drop of sweat ran down the back of his neck—there was a fire and the room was warm. The ghost of bay rum lingered among the scents of burning wood and candle wax.

She made a tiny sound, perhaps a muffled sob, and crossed her arms, hugging herself convulsively.

He took a step toward her, uncertain, and stopped. What might Uncle Hal do, if he learned of her duplicity? He supposed that his uncle might be able to take Trevor away from her and send her away…

“They’ll hang him,” she whispered, so softly that for a moment he heard only the anguish in it, and that anguish made him go to her and put his hands on her shoulders. A deep shiver went over her as though she were dissolving inside, and his arms went round her.

“They won’t,” he whispered into her hair, but she shook her head and the shiver didn’t stop.

“Yes, they will. I’ve heard them talk—the officers, the politicals, the—the
nitwits
at parties—gloating at the th-thought of Washington and his generals hanging on a g-gibbet.” She took a deep, tearing breath. “Like rotten fruit. That’s what they always say—like rotten fruit.”

His stomach tightened and so did his arms.

“So you still love him,” he said quietly, after what seemed a long while.

Her head fitted neatly under his chin, and he could feel the heat of it and smell her hair; she was wearing his father’s Italian cologne. He closed his eyes and took one breath at a time, imagining cedar groves and olive orchards and sun on ancient stone.

And dripping water in a garden and a toad’s gleaming black eyes…

And a moment later, the door opened.

“Oh, William,” Lord John said mildly. “You’re back, then.”

WILLIAM STOOD STILL
a moment longer, his arms round Amaranthus. He wasn’t guilty in this—well, not quite—and he declined to act as though he was. He stepped back and gave her arms a comforting squeeze before turning round to face his father.

Lord John was standing there in full day uniform, his hat in one hand. He looked calm and pleasant, but his eyes were clearly drawing conclusions, and probably the wrong ones.

“I found Ben,” William said, and his father’s eyes sharpened at once. “He’s alive, and he’s joined the Americans. Under an assumed name,” he added.

“Thank God for small mercies,” Lord John said, half under his breath, then tossed his hat onto one of the gilt chairs and went to Amaranthus, who was still facing the wall, her head bowed. Her shoulders were shaking.

“You should sit down, my dear.” Lord John took her firmly by one forearm and turned her round. “Go and tell cook we want some tea, please, William—and something to eat. You’ll feel better with something in your stomach,” he told Amaranthus, guiding her toward the settee. She’d gone the color of egg custard and had her lashes lowered—to hide her telltale eyes, William thought cynically. She wasn’t crying; there were no tears on her cheeks. He’d never seen her cry, and wondered briefly if she could.

“Where’s Uncle Hal?” he asked, pausing on the threshold. “Shall I go and fetch him?”

Amaranthus gasped as though he’d punched her in the stomach, and looked up, wide-eyed. His father reacted in much the same way, though in a more stoic and soldierly fashion.

“God,” William said softly. He stood quite still for a moment, thinking, then shook himself back into order.

“He’s on his way to Charles Town,” Lord John said, and blew out a long breath. “Going to have a look at the fortifications. He’ll be back in a week or two.”

William and Lord John exchanged a brief look, glanced together at Amaranthus, then back at each other.

“I—don’t suppose it’s news that will spoil with keeping,” William said awkwardly. “I’ll…just go and tell Cook about the tea.”

“Wait.” Amaranthus’s voice stopped him at the door, and he turned. She was still pale and curdled, and her hands were knotted just under her breasts, as though to keep her heart from escaping. She had regained her self-possession, though, and her voice trembled only a little as she focused her gaze on Lord John.

“I have to tell you something, Uncle John.”

“No,” William said quickly. “You don’t need to say anything right now, cousin. Just—just rest a bit. You’ve had a shock. So have we all.”

“No,” she said, and shook her head slightly, dislodging a few blond strands. “I do.” She made an effort to smile at William, though the effect was rather ghastly. His own heart felt like a stone in his chest, but he did his best to smile back.

Lord John rubbed a hand down over his face, then went to the sideboard, where he took down a bottle and shook it experimentally. It sloshed reassuringly.

“Sit down, Willie,” he said. “Tea can wait. Brandy can’t.”

WILLIAM WONDERED VAGUELY
just how much brandy his father and uncle got through in a year. Beyond its social functions, brandy was the usual first resort of either man, faced with any crisis of either a physical, political, or emotional nature. And given their mutual profession, such crises were bound to occur regularly. William’s own first memory of having been given brandy dated from the age of five or so, when he had climbed up the stable ladder in order to get on the back of Lord John’s horse in its stall—something he was firmly forbidden to do—and had been promptly tossed off by the startled horse, smacking into the wall at the back of the stall and sinking, dazed, into the hay between the horse’s back hooves.