Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (24 page)

I patted his arm, then rose and started straightening our discarded clothes, doing the best I could to lay them out in some way that would both prevent them being blown off the roof in case of a high wind but not end up impossibly crumpled. As I laid Jamie’s sporran on top of the pile with my shoes to help weigh things down, I saw the edge of a folded paper peeking out.

“Oh—Myers said he’d brought you a letter, too,” I said. “Is this it?”

“It is.” He sounded wary, as though not wanting me to touch it, and I drew back my hand. He set down the piece of cheese he’d been eating, though, and nodded at it. “Ye can read it, Sassenach. If ye like.”

“Is it disturbing news?” I asked, hesitating. After the emotional upheavals of Marsali’s letter, I didn’t want to ruin the peace of the summer night with something that could wait ’til morning.

“Nay, not really. It’s from Joshua Greenhow—ye recall him, from Monmouth?”

“I do,” I said, feeling momentarily dizzy.

I had been stitching a wound in Corporal Greenhow’s forehead when I’d been shot during the battle, and his appalled face, my needle and ligature dangling absurdly from his bloody forehead, was the last thing I saw as I fell. It wouldn’t be stretching things to say that what happened next was the worst physical experience of my life, as I lay on the ground in a spinning world of leaves and sky and overwhelming pain, bleeding to death and listening to a courier from General Lee trying to get Jamie to abandon me in the mud.

I glanced at the letter, but the light was too poor for me to read it, even if I’d had my spectacles to hand.

“What does he say?”

“Ach, mostly just where he is and what he’s doing—which is none sae much at the moment; just sitting about in Philadelphia. Though there is a bit about General Arnold in there.” He nodded at the letter. “Joshua says he’s married Peggy Shippen—ye’ll remember
her,
I expect—and he’s bein’ court-martialed for speculating. Arnold, I mean, not Mr. Greenhow.”

“Speculating in what?” I asked, folding the letter. I remembered Peggy, all right: an eighteen-year-old girl, beautiful and knowing it, flaunting herself before the thirty-eight-year-old general like a trout fly. “I can see why he’d marry
her
—but why on earth would she want to marry
him
?” Benedict Arnold had considerable charm and animal magnetism, but he also had one leg shorter than the other and—to the best of my knowledge—neither property nor money.

Jamie gave me a patient look.

“He’s the military governor of Philadelphia, for one thing. And her family are Tories. Ye ken what the Sons of Liberty did to her cousin—maybe she’s thinking she’d rather they didna come back and burn her father’s house over her head.”

“You have a point.” The night breeze was beginning to chill me through my damp shift, and I shivered. “Give me that shawl, will you?”

“As for what Arnold’s speculating in,” Jamie added, wrapping the shawl round my shoulders, “it could be anything. Most of the city will be for sale, should the price be right.”

I nodded, looking out at the night, which spread its velvet cloak around us—momentarily spangled by a shower of sparks that shot out of the chimney on the other side of the house, fading to black before they touched down.

“I can’t stop Benedict Arnold,” I said quietly. “I couldn’t stop him, even if he was here right in front of me this minute. Could I?” I turned my head to him, appealing.

“No,” he said very softly, and took my hand. His was large and strong, but as cold as my own. “Come lie wi’ me, Sassenach. I’ll warm ye and we’ll watch the moon come down.”

SOMETIME LATER, WE
lay curled together, naked in the cool night, happy in the warmth of each other’s body. The moon was coming down in the west, a sliver of silver that let the stars shine bright. The pale canvas rustled and murmured overhead, the scents of fir and oak and cypress surrounded us, and a random firefly, distracted from its business by a passing wind current, landed on the pillow by my head and sat for a moment, its abdomen pulsing with a regular cool-green light.

“Oidhche mhath, a charaid,”
Jamie said to it. It waved its antennae in an amiable fashion and sailed off, circling down toward the distant flicker of its comrades on the ground.

“I wish we could keep our bedroom like this,” I said wistfully, watching its tail light disappear into the darkness below. “It’s so lovely, being part of the night.”

“Nay so much when it rains.” Jamie lifted his chin toward our canvas ceiling. “Dinna fash, though; I’ll have a solid roof on before snow flies.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, and laughed. “Do you remember our first cabin, when it snowed and the roof leaked? You insisted on going up to fix it,
in
the pelting blizzard—and stark naked.”

“Well, and whose fault was that?” he inquired, though without rancor. “Ye wouldna let me go up in my shirt; what choice did I have?”

“You being you, none at all.” I rolled over and kissed him. “You taste like apple pie. Is there any left?”

“No. I’ll go down and fetch ye a bite, though.”

I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“No, don’t. I’m not really hungry and I’d rather just stay like this. Mm?”

“Mmphm.”

He rolled toward me, then scooted down the bed and lifted himself between my thighs.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, as he settled comfortably into position.

“I should think that was obvious, Sassenach.”

“But you’ve just been eating apple pie!”

“It wasna that filling.”

“That…wasn’t quite what I meant…” His thumbs were thoughtfully stroking the tops of my thighs, and his warm breath was stirring the hairs on my body in a very disturbing way.

“If ye’re afraid of crumbs, Sassenach, dinna fash—I’ll pick them off after I’ve finished. Is it baboons ye said that do that? Or was it fleas they pick?”

“I don’t
have
fleas” was all I could manage in the way of a witty riposte, but he laughed, settled his shoulders, and set to work.

“I like it when ye scream, Sassenach,” he murmured a little later, pausing for breath.

“There are children downstairs!” I hissed, fingers buried in his hair.

“Well, try to sound like a catamount, then…”

A LITTLE LATER,
I asked, “How far is it from here to Philadelphia?”

He didn’t answer at once, but gently massaged my bottom with one hand. Finally, he said, “Ken what Roger Mac said to me once? That to an Englishman, a hundred miles is a long way; to an American, a hundred years is a long time.”

I turned my head a little, to look at him. His eyes were fixed on the sky and his face was tranquil, but I knew what he was saying.

“How long, then?” I asked quietly, and laid a hand over his heart, to feel the reassurance of its slow, strong beating. He smelled of my own musk and his, and a tremor from the last little while echoed up my spine. “How long do we have, do you think?”

“Not long, Sassenach,” he said softly. “Tonight, it’s as far away as the moon. Tomorrow it may be in the dooryard.” The hairs on his chest had risen, whether from chilly air or the conversation, and he grasped my hand, kissed it, and sat up.

“Have ye ever heard of a man called Francis Marion, Sassenach?”

I paused in the act of reaching for my shift. He’d spoken very casually, and I glanced briefly at him. He had his back turned, and the scars on it were a mesh of fine silver lines.

“I might have,” I replied, looking critically at the hem of my shift. Slightly grubby, but it would do for one more day. I pulled it over my head and reached for my stockings. “Francis Marion…Was he known as the Swamp Fox?” I had vague memories of watching a Disney show by that name, and I
thought
the character’s name had been something Marion…

“He isn’t yet,” Jamie said, turning to look over his shoulder at me. “What d’ye know of him?”

“Very little, and that only from a television show. Though Bree could probably still sing the theme song—er, that’s music that was played at the beginning of each…er, performance.”

“The same music each time, ye mean?” A brow cocked with interest.

“Yes. Francis Marion…I recall him being captured by a British redcoat and tied to a tree in one episode, so he probably was a…” I stopped dead.

“Now,” I said, with that odd qualm of dread and awe that always came when I ran into one of Them. First Benedict Arnold, and now…“Francis Marion is…
now,
you mean.”

“So Brianna says. But she didna remember much about him.”

“Why are you interested in him, particularly?”

“Ach.” He relaxed, back on firmer ground. “Have ye ever heard of a partisan band, Sassenach?”

“Not unless you mean a political party, and I’m quite sure you don’t.”

“Like Whigs and Tories? No, I don’t.” He picked up the jug of wine, poured a cup, and handed it to me. “A partisan band is much like a band o’ mercenaries, save that they mostly dinna work for money. Something like a private militia, but a good deal less orderly in its habits.”

I’d seen a good many militia companies during the Monmouth campaign, and this made me laugh.

“I see. What does a partisan band do, then?”

He poured a cup of his own and lifted it to me in brief toast.

“Apparently they roam about, troubling Loyalists, killing freed slaves, and in general bein’ a burr under the saddle of the British army.”

I blinked. Walt Disney had apparently decided to omit a few things from the 1950s version of the Swamp Fox, and no wonder.

“Killing freed slaves? Whatever for?”

“The British are in the habit o’ freeing slaves who undertake to join the army. So Roger Mac says. Apparently Mr. Marion took—will take?—exception to this.” He frowned. “I think he’s maybe no doing it yet. I’ve not heard of any such thing, at least.”

I took a mouthful of the wine. It was muscat wine, cool and sweet, and it went down well on a night full of shadows.

“And where is Mr. Swamp Fox doing this?”

“Somewhere in South Carolina; I didna take notice of the details—I was taken up by the notion, ken?”

“Of a partisan band, you mean?” I’d been uneasy since I pulled my stockings on and had the absurd thought that perhaps I should take them off again. No running away from this particular conversation, though.

The fingers of his right hand moved slowly against his thigh, the soundless drumbeat of his thinking.

“Aye,” he said at last, and closed his fingers into a fist. “It’s what Benjamin Cleveland—ken, the great fat Overmountain bugger who tried to threaten me?—was proposing to me—in a roundabout way, but he was clear enough.” He looked down at me, eyes dark and serious in the dim flicker of the night.

“I shallna fight again wi’ the Continental army,” he said. “I’ve had enough of armies. And I dinna think General Washington would have me back, for that matter.” He smiled at that, a little ruefully.

“From what Judah Bixby told me, you resigned your commission pretty thoroughly. I’m sorry I missed it.” I smiled, too, with no less rue. I’d missed it because at the moment Jamie had resigned his commission, writing his resignation on the back of the messenger who’d come to summon him to duty, I was lying on the ground at his feet, in the process of bleeding to death. In fact, Judah—one of his young lieutenants, who had been present—told me that Jamie had actually written his brief refusal with mud soaked through with my blood.

“Aye,” he said dryly. “I didna hear what Washington thought about it, but at least he didna send to have me arrested and hanged for desertion.”

“I imagine he’s had a few other things on his mind since then.” I hadn’t been in any condition to hear—or care about—the progress of the war for some time after becoming one of the final casualties of the Battle of Monmouth. But it wasn’t possible to avoid for long. We’d lived in Savannah when the British invaded and occupied the city—they were still there, so far as I knew. But news, like water, runs downhill and was inclined to puddle in the coastal cities with newspapers, shipping, and the brand-new postal service. Hauling it up into the mountains was a slow, difficult process.