Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (34 page)

“I wasn't. I'm not.” I rested my head on his shoulder, and he kissed my forehead.

“The bairns are settled, Sassenach. Come to bed wi' me, aye?”

I did, and we made love slowly, by the light of the embers, with the sound of the wind and the rain rushing past in the night outside.

Sometime later, on the edge of sleep, my hand on the warm round of Jamie's buttock, I thought of Frank's face; his photograph, drifting through my mind—those familiar hazel eyes behind the black-rimmed glasses. Earnest, intelligent, scholarly…honest.

THEY SMELLED IT FIRST.
Brianna felt her nose twitch at the mingled stench of urine and sulfur. Beside her on the wagon bench, reins in hand, her father coughed.
With a fine coating of charcoal dust…

“Mama says it’s got medicinal purposes—or at least some people used to think it had.”

“What, gunpowder?” He spared her a sideways glance, but most of his attention was focused on the small cluster of buildings that had just come into view, charmingly situated at a bend in the river.

“Mm-hmm.
A little Gun-powder tyed up in a rag, and held so in the mouth, that it may touch the aking tooth, instantly easeth the pains of the teeth.
Nicholas Culpeper, 1647.”

Her father grunted.

“That likely works. Ye’d be too busy trying to decide whether to vomit or cough to be worrit about your teeth.”

Someone heard the rattle of the wagon wheels. Two men who had been smoking pipes near the river—a safe distance from the buildings, she noted—turned to stare at them. One tilted his head, estimating, but evidently decided they were worth talking to; he tapped the dottle from his pipe into the water and, putting the long-stemmed clay pipe into his belt, strolled toward the road, followed by his companion.

“Ho, there!” the first man called, waving. Jamie pulled the horses to a stop and waved back.

“Good afternoon to ye, sir. I’m Jamie Fraser, and this is my daughter, Mrs. MacKenzie. We’re seeking to buy powder.”

“I’d expect ye are,” the man said, rather dryly. “Nobody’d come here for any other reason.”
Irish,
she thought, smiling at him.

“Oh, that ain’t true, John.” His friend, a stocky man of thirty or so, nudged him amiably in the ribs, grinning at Brianna. “Some of us come to drink your wine and smoke your tobacco.”

“John Patton, sir,” the Irishman said, ignoring his friend. He offered Jamie his hand, and having shaken it invited them to drive in beside the stone building nearest the water.

“It’s the least likely to blow up,” the other man—who had introduced himself as Isaac Shelby—said, laughing. Brianna noticed that John Patton didn’t laugh.

The stone building was a mill. A constant dull rumble came through the walls, beneath the plash of the waterwheel, and the smell was quite different here: damp stone, waterweed, and a faint smell that reminded her of doused campfires and rain on the ashes of a burnt place in the forest. It gave her an odd quiver, low in her belly.

Her father got down and set about unhitching the horses; he gave her an eye and tilted his head toward one of the ramshackle sheds higher up the bank, where three people were standing in a group, evidently arguing about something. One of them was a woman, and her posture—arms folded and head bent, but in a way that suggested not submission, but a barely restrained urge to butt her interlocutor in the nose—argued that here was The Boss.

Brianna nodded and set off toward the shed, aware from the sudden silence behind her that either Mr. Patton, Mr. Shelby, or both were eyeing her rear aspect. Not that they’d see much; she was wearing a hunting shirt that came nearly to her knees, but the mere fact that she had on breeches under it…

She heard Shelby cough suddenly, and deduced that he’d just met her father’s eye.

“Jamie Fraser,” she heard Shelby say, trying for nonchalance. “I know a good many Frasers. Would you be from up around the Nolichucky?”

“No, we have a place near the Treaty Line in Rowan County,” her father said. “It’s called Fraser’s Ridge.”

“Ah! Then I’ll know you, sir!” Shelby sounded relieved. “Benjamin Cleveland told me of meeting you. He—”

The voices behind her faded as the group near the shed noticed her. All of them looked startled, but the woman’s look changed almost immediately into a dour amusement.

“Good day to ye, Missus,” she said, openly eyeing Brianna’s hunting clothes. She was about Brianna’s age and wearing a canvas apron, much worn and stained, with small blackened holes where sparks appeared to have fallen. The dark-brown skirt and long-sleeved man’s shirt beneath were rough homespun, though fairly clean. “What might I be doin’ for ye?”

“I’m Brianna MacKenzie,” Bree said, wondering whether she ought to offer a hand to shake. Mrs. Patton—for surely she had to be—didn’t extend one, so Brianna contented herself with a cordial nod. “My father and I are, um, seeking to buy some gunpowder. Are you by chance Mrs. Patton?” she added, as the woman made no move to introduce herself.

The lady in question glanced over her shoulder, then slowly gazed round from side to side, as though looking for someone. One of the young men she’d been arguing with giggled, but shut up sharp when Mrs. Patton’s eye fell on him.

“I don’t know who else I’d be,” she said, but not unpleasantly. “What make of powder are ye after, and how much?”

That stopped Brianna cold for a moment. She knew absolutely nothing about makes of powder—or even how to refer to them. What she wanted to know was how to make the stuff in quantity and with a reasonable degree of safety.

“Powder for hunting,” she said, opting for simplicity. “And maybe something for…blowing up stumps?”

Mary Patton blinked, then laughed. The two young men joined her.

“Stumps?”

“Well, ye could set one on fire, I suppose, if ye touched off a bit of powder on top of it,” the elder of the young men said, smiling at her. The “on top” triggered belated realization, and she smacked her head in annoyance.

“Bloody hell,” she said. “Of course—you’d have to shape the charge. So…more something like a grenade, then.”

Mrs. Patton’s rather square face shifted instantly to surprise, and just as swiftly to wary calculation.

“Grenadoes, is it?” she said, and looked Brianna over with more interest. Then she glanced beyond Bree, and realization came into her eyes.

“Yer father, is it? That him?”

“Yes.” The woman was staring in a way that made Bree turn to look over her own shoulder. Her father had taken the horses down the bank to drink and was standing on the gravel there, talking to Mr. Shelby. He’d taken his hat off in order to splash water on his face, and the sun was sparking off his hair, which, while streaked with silver, was still overall a noticeable red.

“Red Jamie Fraser?” Mrs. Patton looked back sharply at her. “He’s the one they called Red Jamie, back in the old country?”

“I—suppose so.” Bree was flabbergasted. “How do you know that name?”

“Hmp.” Mrs. Patton nodded in a satisfied sort of way, her eyes still fixed on Jamie. “My pap’s older brothers, two of ’em, fought on both sides of the Jacobite Rising. One was transported to the Indies, but his brother went and found him, bought his indenture, and the two of them came to settle here where John and I had land. Those”—she gave a deprecating nod to the two young men, who had retired to a respectful distance—“are their sons.”

“Quite the family concern, isn’t it?” Bree nodded round to the mill and sheds, now noticing that there was a small cluster of cabins and a good-sized house standing perhaps a quarter mile away, inside a copse of maple trees.

“ ’Tis,” Mrs. Patton agreed, now amiable. “One o’ my uncles spoke often of your pa, fought with him at Prestonpans and Falkirk. He had some bits and pieces kept by, mementos o’ the war. And one thing he had was a broadsheet with a drawing of Red Jamie Fraser on it, offering a reward. A handsome man, even on a broadsheet. Five hundred pounds the Crown offered for him! Wonder what he’d be worth now?” she said, and laughed, with another look at the man in question, this one longer.

Bree assumed this to be a joke, and gave a tight smile in return. Just in case, she noted primly that her father had been pardoned after the Rising, and then firmly returned the conversation to gunpowder.

Mrs. Patton appeared to feel that they were now on friendly terms, and willingly showed her the two milling sheds, noting casually the crude construction of the walls.

“Something blows up, the roof just flies off and the walls fall out. No great matter to put it up again.”

“So these are milling sheds—but surely that’s the mill?” Bree nodded at the stone building, quite evidently a mill, its waterwheel turning serenely in the golden light of late afternoon.

“Aye. Ye grind the charcoal, then the saltpeter—know what that is, do ye?”

“I do.”

“Aye, and the sulfur. Ye do that with water, aye? Melts the saltpeter and ye grind it all together; while it’s wet, it’ll not burn, will it?”

“No.”

Mrs. Patton nodded, pleased at this evident understanding.

“So then. Ye’ve got black powder, but it’s coarse stuff, with bits and pieces of uncrushed charcoal in it, bits o’ wood, bits o’ stone, rat dung, all manner o’ stuff. So ye dry that in cakes—we store those in the other shed—and then at your leisure, so to speak, ye crush and grind it—and that ye do out here in this shed, away from everything else, because it damn well
will
explode if ye happen to strike a spark whilst ye’re doing that—and if ye’ve made a cloud of it when the spark goes off, God help ye, ye’ll go up like a torch.”

The prospect didn’t seem to concern her.

“Then ye corn it—which means putting it through screens, to divvy it into different sizes. Finest corning is for pistols and rifles—that’s what ye’d want for hunting, mostly. The coarser sizes are for cannon, grenadoes, bombs, that class o’ thing.”

“I see.” It was a simple process, as explained—but judging from the state of Mrs. Patton’s apron and the singe marks on some of the boards in the shed, rather dangerous. She could probably manage to make enough powder for hunting, if they really had to, but dismissed the idea of trying to do it in large quantities.

“Well, then. What’s your price, for the sort of powder you’d use for hunting?”

“Hunting, is it?” Mrs. Patton had pale-blue eyes and gave Brianna a shrewd look out of them, then glanced at Mr. Shelby and her father, still conversing by the river.
Why?
she wondered.
Does she think I need his permission?

“Well, my price is a dollar a pound. I sell for hard cash, and I don’t bargain.”

“Don’t you,” Bree said dryly. She reached into the pouch at her waist and came out with one of the thin gold slips that she’d sewn into her hems when she and the kids had come to find Roger. And she said a silent, absentminded prayer of thanks that they
had
found him, as she’d done a thousand times since.

“It’s not exactly cash, but it’s maybe hard enough?” she said, handing it over.

Mrs. Patton’s sandy eyebrows rose to the edge of her cap. She took the slip gingerly, felt its weight, and glanced sharply at Bree. To Brianna’s delight, she actually bit it, then looked critically at the tiny dent in the metal. It was stamped, but beyond the
14K
and
1 oz.,
she didn’t think the markings would mean anything to Mrs. Patton, and apparently they didn’t.

“Done,” said the gunpowder mistress. “How many?”

AFTER SCRUPULOUS WEIGHING
of both powder and gold, they agreed that one slip of gold was the fair equivalent of twenty dollars, and Brianna shook hands with Mrs. Patton—who appeared bemused but not shocked at the gesture—and made her way back to the wagon, carrying two ten-pound kegs of powder, followed by the two cousins, each similarly burdened.

Her father was still talking with Mr. Shelby but, hearing footsteps, turned round. His eyebrows rose higher than Mrs. Patton’s.

“How much—” He broke off and, pressing his lips together, took the kegs from her and loaded them into the wagon, along with the bags of rice, beans, oats, and salt that they’d traded for in Woolam’s Mill.

Finished, he reached for the sporran at his waist, but one of the cousins shook his head.

“She’s paid already,” he said, and with a brief tilt of the head toward Bree, turned and went back to the milling shed, followed by the other young man, who spared a look over his shoulder, then hurried to catch up with his cousin, saying something to him in a low voice that made the first man glance back again, then shake his head.

Her father said nothing until they were well out on the road toward home.