Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (60 page)

Brianna and Roger exchanged a long look, and I felt a twinge of the heart. I hadn’t thought of that, but he was right. Snow-choked passes cut off the high mountains from the low country as effectively as a thousand-foot stone wall.

Brianna was nodding, though.

“We’ll do it,” she said simply.

“We?” said Roger, but he smiled.

“Are ye sure?” Jamie asked, and I saw the fingers of his right hand flutter briefly at the edge of the table.

“If you’re going to buy a lot of guns, you probably need to get your gold and whisky to the coast,” Bree pointed out reasonably. “Lord John’s offering me an assured safe-conduct pass—and armed escort, if I want it, which I don’t—to go there.” She lifted a shoulder. “What could be easier?”

Jamie lifted a brow. So did Roger.

“What?” she demanded, looking from one to the other. Jamie made a slight Scottish noise and looked away. Roger drew a deep breath as though about to speak, then let it out again.

“Ye’re thinking of hiding six casks of whisky and five hundred pounds in gold in your wee box of paints?” Jamie said.

“Under the noses of your armed guards,” Roger added, “who will presumably be British soldiers, charged, among other things, with the arrest of, of—”

“Moonshiners,” I said.

Jamie raised his other brow.

“Really,” I said. “The notion being that people with illegal stills operate them largely at night, I suppose.”

“Well, I do have a
plan,
” Brianna said, with some asperity. “I’m going to take the kids with me.”

“Wow!” said Jemmy. Amanda, having no idea what was being discussed, loyally chirped “Wow” as well, which made Fanny and Germain laugh.

Jamie said something under his breath in Gaelic. Roger didn’t say it, but might as well have had the words “God help us all” tattooed on his forehead. I felt similarly, but for once, I thought I’d concealed my sentiments better than the men, who weren’t trying to conceal theirs at all. I wiped my face with a towel, and started slicing the apple-and-raisin pie for dessert.

“Possibly there are a few refinements that could be added,” I said, as soothingly as possible, my back safely turned. “Why don’t we talk about it when the children are in bed.”

WE’D SHOOED ALL
the children upstairs to bed and Jamie had brought down a bottle of the JFS. Aged seven years in sherry casks, it may not have been quite worth its weight in gold, but it was still an invaluable aid to conferences with a strong potential for going sideways.

He poured each of us a large tot and, sitting down himself, raised a hand for silence while he took a mouthful, held it for a long moment, then swallowed and sighed.

“All right,” he said, lowering his hand. “What is it ye have in mind, then,
mo nighean ruadh
?”

Roger gave a mild snort of amusement at hearing him call Brianna “my redhaired lass,” and I smiled into my whisky. It neatly carried the simultaneous implications that whatever she had in mind was likely reckless to an alarming degree—and that her propensity for such recklessness had likely come from her redheaded sire.

Bree picked that one up, too, raised her ruddy brows, and lifted her cup to him in toast.

“Well,” she said, having taken and savored her own first sip. “You need to get guns and horses.”

“I do,” Jamie said patiently. “The horses will be no great matter, though, so long as we do it carefully. I can get them from the Cherokee.”

She nodded and flipped a hand in acceptance of that.

“All right. The guns—you actually have two problems there, don’t you?”

“I’d be happy if it were only two,” he said, taking another sip. “Which problems d’ye mean, lass?”

“Buying the guns—oh, I see what you mean about more than two problems. But putting that aside for a minute: you need to buy the guns, and then you need to get them back here. Do you have an idea where you’re going to get them, by the way?”

“Fergus,” Jamie said promptly.

“How?” I asked, staring at him.

“He’s in Charles Town,” he said. “The Americans hold the city, under General Lincoln. And where there’s an army, there are guns.”

“You’re planning to steal guns from the Continental
army
?” I blurted. “Or make Fergus do it, which is even worse?”

“No,” he said patiently. “That would be treason, aye? I’m going to buy them from whoever
is
stealing them. Someone always is. Fergus will likely ken who the local smugglers are, already, but if not, I’ve considerable faith that he can find out.”

“It’ll cost a pretty price,” Roger said, lifting a brow.

Jamie grimaced, nodding. “Aye. I’ve kept that gold safe all these years for the time it should be needed for the cause of revolution—and…now it is.”

“Okay,” Bree said patiently. “Let’s say that Fergus can get hold of guns for you, one way or another. If he
has
to pay for them”—here Jamie smiled, despite the seriousness of the conversation—“then you need to get the gold to him, and someone then needs to bring the guns back. Sooo…” She took a deep breath and glanced at Roger, then stuck up a thumb.

“One. Now the harvest is in, we need to get Germain home to his family in Charleston as soon as we can; he’s dying to see his mother and his new baby brothers. Two”—the index finger rose—“Lord John wants me to come paint a portrait in Savannah, for which I’ll get paid in actual money, which we need for things like clothes and tools. And three…” She raised the middle finger, and without looking at Roger said, “Roger needs to be ordained. The sooner the better.”

Jamie turned his head to look at Roger, who had flushed deeply at this.

“Well, you
do,
” Bree said to him. Without waiting for an answer, she turned back to Jamie and laid both hands flat on the table.

“So I write back to Lord John right away, and tell him I’ll do it, and I don’t need guards, thank you, but Roger is traveling with me and we’re bringing the kids. Because if we don’t make it back before snowfall,” she explained, turning her face to me, “it could be five or six months before we saw them again. And,” she added, looking squarely at Jamie, “I think they’ll be safer going with us than staying here. What if Captain Cunningham’s friends decide to come back and bring a militia through the Ridge, and loot and burn this house while they’re at it?”

The blunt question gave me a shock, and clearly unsettled both Jamie and Roger, too. Jamie cleared his throat carefully.

“Ye think I’d be taken unawares?” he asked mildly.

“No, I think you’d clean their clocks,” she said, half-smiling. “But that doesn’t mean I want the kids in the middle of that kind of fight, especially without me and Roger here to keep them out of the line of fire.”

Her hands were still flat on the table, and so were Jamie’s, and I saw the echo in their flesh—his hands large and battered, the knuckles enlarged by work and by age, one finger missing and the others scarred but still holding a long-fingered, powerful grace—the same grace, unmarred and smooth-skinned, but likewise powerful, in Brianna’s.

“So,” she said, taking a breath, “I tell Lord John I’ll do it but that we’ll come through Charleston first so that Roger can check into whatever else he needs to do for ordination and to get Germain back to his family.

“Lord John likes Germain,” she continued, smiling despite the seriousness of the situation. “He’ll want to help. So I ask him to send me a passport or whatever you call it these days, signed by his brother. An official letter that gives us free passage, without interference, through roads and cities held by the British army. We’ll be an innocent minister’s family with three kids and traveling under the protection of the Duke of Pardloe, who’s the colonel of whatever his regiment is. What are the odds of anybody strip-searching us?”

Jamie’s brows drew together and I could see that he was reckoning those odds and, while still not liking them, was obliged to admit that it
was
a plan.

“Aye, well,” he said reluctantly. “That
might
work, for getting the gold to Fergus—and I can maybe arrange something for the whisky. There’s always sauerkraut. But I’m no having ye come back with a load of contraband muskets in your wagon. Ordained minister or no,” he added, raising an eyebrow at Roger. “I’ve called on God for a good deal of help in my life, and got it, but I’m no asking Him to save me—or you—from my own foolishness.”

“I’m with ye on that one,” Roger assured him. “How long would it take, d’ye think, to get a reply from his lordship, with the clearance papers?”

“Maybe two or three weeks, if the weather holds.”

“Then we’ll have time to think what to do with the guns, always assuming we get them.” Roger lifted his hitherto untasted cup and clinked it against mine. “Here’s to crime and insurrection.”

“Did you say sauerkraut?” Brianna asked.

OVER THE NEXT FEW
weeks, the different approaches to God on offer at the Meeting House collected their own adherents. Many people attended more than one service, whether from an eclectic approach to ritual, indecision, a desire for society if not instruction—or simply because it was more interesting to go to church than it was to sit at home piously reading the Bible out loud to their families.

Still, each service had its own core of worshippers who came every Sunday, plus a varying number of floaters and droppers-in. When the weather was fine, many people remained for the day, picnicking under the trees, comparing notes on the Methodist service versus the Presbyterian one. And—being largely Highland Scots possessed of strong personal opinions—arguing about everything from the message of the sermon to the state of the minister’s shoes.

Rachel’s Meeting attracted fewer people and many fewer arguments, but those who came to sit in silence and in company to listen to their inner light came every week, and little by little, more came.

It wasn’t always completely silent—as Ian noted, the spirit had its own opinions, and some meetings were
very
lively—but I thought that for a number of the women, at least, the opportunity to just sit down for an hour in a quiet place was worth more than even the most inspired preaching or singing.

Jamie and I always attended all three services, both because the landlord couldn’t be seen to show partiality, even if the Presbyterian minister
was
his own son-in-law and the Quaker—presider? instigator? I wasn’t sure what one might call Rachel, other than perhaps the speck of sand inside a pearl—his niece by marriage. And because it allowed him to keep his thumb firmly on the pulse of the Ridge.

After each of the morning services, I would take up my station under a particular huge chestnut tree and run a casual clinic for an hour or so, dressing minor injuries, looking down throats, and offering advice along with a surreptitious (because it
was
Sunday, after all) bottle of “tonic”—this being a concoction of raw but well-watered whisky and sugar, with assorted herbal substances added for the treatment of vitamin deficiency, alleviation of toothache or indigestion, or (in cases where I suspected its need) a slug of turpentine to kill hookworms.

Meanwhile, Jamie—often with Ian at his elbow—would wander from one group of men to another, greeting everyone, chatting, and listening. Always listening.

“Ye canna keep politics secret, Sassenach,” he’d told me. “Even if they wanted to—and they mostly don’t want to—they canna hold their tongues or disguise what they think.”

“What they think in terms of political principle, or what they think of their neighbors’ political principles?” I asked, having caught the echoes of these discussions from the women who formed the major part of my pastoral Sunday surgery.

He laughed, but not with a lot of humor in it.

“If they tell ye what their neighbor thinks, Sassenach, it doesna take much mind reading to ken what
they
think.”

“Do you think they know what
you’re
thinking?” I asked, curious. He shrugged.

“If they don’t, they soon will.”

TWO WEEKS LATER,
when Captain Cunningham had finished the final prayer, but before he could dismiss his congregation, Jamie rose to his feet and asked the captain’s permission to address the people.

I saw Elspeth Cunningham’s back—always straight as a pine sapling—go rigid, the black feathers on her churchgoing hat quivering in warning. Still, the captain didn’t have much choice, and with a fair assumption of graciousness, he stepped back and gestured Jamie to take the floor.

“Good morn to ye all,” he said, with a bow to the congregation. “And I ask your pardon—and Captain Cunningham’s”—another bow—“for needing to disturb your peace of mind on a Sunday. But I’ve had a wee note this week that’s disturbed my own peace of mind considerably, and I hope ye’ll give me the opportunity to share it with ye.”

A murmur of agreement, puzzlement, and interest passed through the room. Along with a subterranean rumble, barely felt, of apprehension.

Jamie reached into his coat and removed a folded note, with a broken candle-wax seal that had seeped grease into the paper, so that the shadows of words showed through as he unfolded it. He put on his spectacles and read it aloud.

“Mr. Fraser—

I take the Liberty of telling you I have had Word that General Gates attacked the Forces of Lord Cornwallis near Camden and suffered a Great Defeat, including the lamentable Death of Major General De Kalb. With the retreat of Gates’s Forces, South Carolina is abandoned to the Enemy. Meanwhile, I hear that additional Troops are being sent North from Florida to support the Occupation of Savannah. Such News is alarming, but I am alarmed further to hear from some Friends that General Clinton plans to attack the Backcountry by other, more insidious Means. He proposes to send Agents among us, to solicit, enlist, and arm Loyalists and by so doing, to raise a large Militia, supported by the regular Army, to attack and subdue any Hint of Rebellion in the Mountains of Tennessee and the Carolinas.

It is my firm Belief that this is no idle Rumor, and I will send you various Proofs as they come into my hands. Therefore…”

As he read, I had the oddest feeling of
déjà vu.
A sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and the ripple of gooseflesh up my arms. The room was hot and moist as a Turkish bath, but I felt as though I stood in a cold, empty room, with an icy Scottish rain beating at the window, hearing words of inescapable doom.

“And herewith acknowledged the Support of these Divine Rights by the Chieftains of the Highland Clans, the Jacobite Lords, and various other such loyal Subjects of His Majesty, King James, as have subscribed their Names upon this Bill of Association in token thereof.”

“No. Oh, God, no…” I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but it escaped my lips, though only in a whisper that made the people to each side of me glance sideways, then hastily away, as though I had suddenly sprouted leprosy. Jamie finished:

“I urge you therefore to make such Preparations as lie in your Power, and stand ready to join us in case of urgent Need, to defend our Lives and Liberty.”

There was a moment of ringing silence, and then Jamie folded the note and spoke before the reaction of the crowd could erupt.

“I shallna tell ye the name of the gentleman who sent me this letter, for he is a gentleman known to me by name and reputation and I will not endanger him. I believe that what he says is true.”

People were stirring all around me, but I sat frozen, staring at him.

No. Not again. Please, not again…

But you knew,
the reasonable part of my mind was saying.
You knew it was coming back. You knew he couldn’t get out of the way—and he wouldn’t, even if he could…

“I ken very well that some here profess loyalty to the King. Ye’ll all ken that I do not. Ye’ll do as your conscience bids ye—and so will I.” He met the eyes of men here and there in the audience, but avoided looking at Captain Cunningham, who stood, quite expressionless, to one side.

“I willna drive any man from his land for what he believes.” Jamie stopped for a moment, took his glasses off, and looked directly from face to face to face before continuing. I knew he was looking at the men he knew to be professed Loyalists, and repressed the urge to look round.

“But this land and its tenants are mine to protect, and I will do that. I’ll need help in this endeavor, and to that end, I will be raising a militia. Should ye choose to join me, I will arm ye, feed ye on the march, and provide mounts for those men who may not have one.”

I could feel Samuel Chisholm—aged eighteen or so—sitting next to me, stiffen and move his feet slightly under him, plainly deciding whether to leap to his feet and volunteer on the spot. Jamie saw him move and lifted his hand slightly, with a brief smile.

“Those who wish to join me today—come and speak wi’ me outside. Those who wish to think on the matter may come to my house at any time. Day or night,” he added, with a wry twist of the mouth that made a few people titter nervously.

“Your servant, sir,” he said, turning to a stone-faced Captain Cunningham, “and I thank ye for your courtesy.”

He walked steadily down the aisle between the benches, put down a hand to me and pulled me up, gave me his arm, and we walked briskly out, leaving a dropped-pin silence behind us.

HE DID THE
same thing at the Presbyterian service, Roger standing gravely behind him, eyes cast down. Here, though, the audience was prepared—everyone had heard what had happened at the Methodist service.

No sooner had he finished speaking than Bill Amos was on his feet.

“We’ll ride with ye,
Mac Dubh,
” he said firmly. “Me and my lads.”

Bill Amos was a handsome, black-haired, solid man, both physically and in terms of character, and there were murmurs of agreement among the people. Three or four more men rose on the spot to pledge themselves, and I could feel the hum of excitement stirring the humid air.

I could feel the sense of cold dread among the women, too. Several of them had spoken to me during my surgery between the services.

“Can ye no persuade your man otherwise?” Mairi Gordon had asked me, low-voiced and looking round to be sure she wasn’t overheard. “I’ve only my great-grandson, and I’ll be left alone to starve if he’s kilt.” Mairi was near my own age and had lived through the days after Culloden. I could see the fear at the back of her eyes, and felt it, too.

“I’ll…talk to him,” I said awkwardly. I could—and I would—try to persuade Jamie not to take Hugh Gordon, but I knew quite well what his answer would be.

“We won’t let you starve,” I said, with as much confidence as I could muster. “No matter what.”

“Aye, well,” she’d muttered, and let me dress the burn on her arm in silence.

The sense of excitement followed us out of the church. Men were clustering around Jamie; other men were in their own clusters, under the trees, in the shadow of the pines. I looked, but didn’t see Captain Cunningham among them; perhaps he knew better than to declare himself openly.

Yet.

The coldness I had felt in church was a shifting weight in my belly, like a pool of mercury. I went on talking pleasantly with the women and children—and the occasional man with a crushed toe or a splinter in his eye—but I could feel what was happening, all too clearly.

Jamie had split the Ridge, and the fracture lines were spreading.

He’d done it on purpose and from necessity, but that didn’t make the fact of it easier to bear. In the space of three hours, we had gone from a community—however contentious—to openly opposing camps. The earthquake had struck and the aftershocks would continue. Neighbors would be no longer neighbors, but stated enemies.

War had been declared.