Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (64 page)

“FANNY AND CYRUS SITTING
in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g,” Roger said as he came into the surgery. I laughed, but looked guiltily over my shoulder.

“They’d better not be. Jamie’s roaming about like a wolf, seeking whom he may devour.” Cyrus was a very tall, very thin lad from one of the fisher-folk families, though I didn’t know which one. He’d sat down next to Fanny at church one Sunday and had been appearing now and then near her like a tall, bashful ghost. I’d never heard him speak and wondered whether he had any English. Fanny’s Gaelic was so far limited to commonplaces like, “Pass me a bannock, please,” and the Lord’s Prayer, but I supposed they might be of an age where young people are naturally tongue-tied in each other’s presence.

“They’re not,” Roger assured me. “I just saw them on the creek bank, sitting a decorous two feet apart, Cyrus with his hands folded so tight in his lap that he must be cutting off the circulation. Who’s Jamie seeking to devour, and why?”

“He got a letter from Benjamin Cleveland, signed by two other landowners over the mountain in Tennessee County, as well. They’re pestering Jamie to commit his militia and come join them in ‘rooting out the vile root of tyranny’—which I take to mean going round the neighbors and, if they’re Loyalists, hauling them out and beating them, taking their stock, burning their buildings, hanging them, or doing other antisocial things to discourage them.”

Roger’s laughter disappeared.

“Mr. Cleveland’s prose style leaves a bit to be desired,” he said. “ ‘Rooting out the root,’ I mean—but at least he’s clear about it.”

“So is Jamie,” I said, and resumed pounding the roots in my mortar with somewhat more force than necessary. “Meaning he’s damned if he’ll do it but he can’t just tell them to go directly to hell without passing Go. If he did, the only thing stopping them from adding the Ridge to their visiting list would be distance.”

“How far is it from here to Tennessee County?” Roger asked, uneasy. “Some way, surely?”

I stopped pounding long enough to shrug and wipe the forming sweat off my forehead with my sleeve.

“Roughly three or four days’ ride. With good weather,” I added, with a glance at the window, which showed sunshine streaming over the blooming grass.

“And, um…there’s Captain Cunningham and his Loyalist friends to be considered, too, I suppose?”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Yes, rather the local worm in the apple, isn’t he? On the other hand,” I added judiciously, “he’s probably Jamie’s best excuse for not joining our friend Benjamin on his bloodthirsty rounds—the notion that Jamie has to stay here on the Ridge in order to keep his own Loyalists in line. Which might actually be true, come to think of it.”

“I suppose so. What is that?” he asked, nodding at the mortar, purely for distraction.

“Echinacea,” I said. “It’s a bit early, but I need it. You dig the roots in autumn, because that’s when the plant starts storing its energy in the root; it doesn’t need to keep flowers and leaves going.

“You realize,” I added, pausing for breath, “that distance notwithstanding, the only things keeping Nicodemus Partland’s thugs—I mean, it must be him, mustn’t it?—from going through the Ridge like a dose of salts are you and Jamie?”

Roger looked as though he wasn’t surprised to hear that but was still discomfited.

“Aye,” he said slowly. “Ye can see it in Lodge. Ye know it’s not done to talk politics or religion there? Equality, Fraternity, et cetera?”

“So I’ve heard.” I’d slowed down a little in my pounding, and gave him a wry smile. “I always assumed that was a custom more honored in the breach, though. Um…knowing what people are like, I mean.”
Men,
I meant, and he noticed, giving me back the wry smile. He tilted a hand to and fro in equivocation.

“The Lodge members mostly keep to the letter of the law there—but what happens in practice is that some men just stop coming, if they’ve got substantial differences.”

I stopped pounding and looked at him. “That’s why Jamie always goes on Tuesdays—he’s staked the Lodge out as his territory?”

“Yes and no. He’s modest about it, but he
is
the Worshipful Master. And frankly, any place with him in it tends to be his territory.”

That made me laugh, and I picked up a bottle of beer from the counter, took a swig, and offered it to him.

“But?” I said.

He nodded and took the bottle.

“But. He encourages everyone to come, regardless, and he keeps the peace—in Lodge, where he can do it without it being overtly about politics. But as ye say…in the breach. Men do talk, and even if they’re not talking
about
politics, it’s easy enough to tell who’s who. And after a point—most of the committed Loyalists stopped coming.”

“They’re gathering at the captain’s house?” I guessed, and he nodded. That gave me a qualm.

“How many?”

“Twenty or so. Most of the Ridge folk are on our side, though the larger part of them would really just rather be left alone and no be bothered.”

“I can’t say I blame them,” I said dryly. A high, thin scream came from the window and I turned sharply but relaxed again almost at once.

“Mandy and Orrie Higgins are collecting leeches for me, with Fanny,” I said, waving at the window. “They keep putting them on each other. Speaking of that—” I leaned back a little, looking him over. “Were you looking for Jamie, or do you need medical attention?”

He smiled, recalled to his mission.

“The latter—but it’s no for me. I was just visiting the Chisholms and as I was leaving, I stopped to talk to Auld Mam—she was sitting on a bench outside smoking her pipe, so I sat down and chatted a bit.”

“That must have been fun.”

“Well, up to a point. But then she told me that whenever she goes to the privy, her womb falls out into her hand, and would I ask ye if there’s anything to be done about it.”

He flushed a little and I stifled a laugh.

“Let me think that one over. I’ll go up and talk to her tomorrow. Meanwhile, would you go fish Mandy and Orrie out of the creek, and find out if Cyrus is staying for supper?”

AS HE WALKED
down toward the creek, he saw Jem, Germain, Aidan, and a few of the other boys from uphill, carousing through the woods, brandishing sticks at each other, slashing them like swords and pretending to fire them as muskets, shouting “Bang!” at random intervals.

“It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye,” he murmured, hearing Mrs. Graham’s admonition from his youth. No point in rounding up that lot and lecturing them, though. Beyond the fact that they were boys, there was a colder fact, too: said boys were only a few years away from being able to ride with a militia or join the army.

And the bloody war was heading in their direction, fast.

“Seventeen eighty-one, though,” he said, and crossed his fingers. “Yorktown happens in October of 1781. Two bloody years. But
only
two bloody years.” Surely they could make it that far?

The sight of Mandy and Orrie in the creek, sopping wet, covered with mud and waterweed, and chattering happily as a pair of titmice, eased his mind a bit—and so did the sight of Fanny and Cyrus, who had now moved closer together.

Cyrus, more than a foot taller than Fanny, was doing his best to arch over and look at what she was showing him without accidentally touching her. Roger cleared his throat, not wanting to startle them, and Cyrus snapped rigidly upright.

“It’s all right,
a charaid,
” Fanny told him, pronouncing
“a charaid”
very carefully—and very wrongly. Roger smiled, and saw Cyrus do so, too, though he tried to hide it. “It’s only Roger Mac.”

“True,” Roger said amiably, smiling down at them. “Mrs. Claire only wants to know will ye stay to dinner,
a bhalaich
?”

Cyrus had gone pink in the ears at being discovered so close to Fanny, and had in consequence lost all his English, but replied in Gaelic that he thanked the mistress and would like nothing better, but that his brother Hiram had told him to be back before nightfall, and it was a long walk.

“Aye, then.
Oidhche mhath.
”

He noticed, as he turned away, that Fanny had brought out her small roll of personal treasures to show Cyrus; his eye caught the gleam of a pendant in the grass, and Fanny had her hand half shielding an unfolded paper with some sort of drawing, as though to keep it from
his
eyes. Ah, must be the picture of her dead sister; Bree had described it to him. Cyrus must be well in with a chance, then, if Fanny was sharing
that
with the lad.

“Godspeed,
a bhalaich,
” he said, mostly to himself, and smiled.

Smiled not only out of a general benevolence toward the young lovers, but because Fanny’s drawing had reminded him of the reason for that benevolence.

Roger touched the pocket of his breeches, feeling the crackle of paper and the small hardness of the broken wax seal. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe it. He had, after all, been expecting it—or something like it. But there’s a difference between thinking you understand something, and then holding the reality in your hand and realizing that maybe you don’t. But realizing also that what you don’t yet understand may be the most important thing you ever do.

A faint sound of screeching made him turn his head, fatherly instincts at once focused—but Mandy’s piercing complaint left off almost at once, as she pushed Orrie, who fell backward into the water—not for the first time.

Well, maybe the second most important thing,
he thought, smiling a little. His adoptive father—who had been, in fact, his great-uncle—had been a Presbyterian minister, and had never married—though ministers were allowed to marry, and generally encouraged to do so, as their wives could be a help on the organizing side of a congregation.

He’d never asked the Reverend why he hadn’t married—nor had he ever wondered, until now. Maybe it had been as simple as not meeting the right person and being unwilling to settle for simple companionship. Maybe as simple as a feeling that it would be difficult to balance a commitment to God with the commitment to a wife and children.

Ye gave me the wife and children first,
he thought in the general direction of God.
So I’m thinking Ye maybe don’t want me to ditch them in order to do whatever else Ye’ve got in mind.

Whatever else. That was the reality he had in his pocket, still hidden for the moment. A letter from the Reverend David Caldwell—a friend and a very senior Presbyterian elder. He had performed the marriage ceremony for Roger and Bree and helped a great deal in preparing Roger for his first go at ordination. It was both a comfort and a joy to know that Davy Caldwell still thought he could do it.

There is a Presbytery set for a General Assembly in Charles Town, to take place in May of next Year. I will of course speak in your Behalf, as regards Acceptance of your Seminary Record and previous Qualification for Ordination. It would be as well, though, were you to form some Connection with a Few of the Elders who will take part in the Presbytery before you meet them more formally in Charles Town—as a man might use both Buttons and Belt to keep his Breeches up.

The Reverend Caldwell’s words still made him smile. But under the humor and the sense of gratitude to Davy Caldwell was a sense of…what? He’d no notion what to call it, this strange flutter in his chest, a not unpleasant hollowness in the belly—anticipation, but worse, as though he were standing on the edge of a precipice, about to jump, without knowing whether he’d soar or crash on the rocks below. He was under no illusions about the rocks. But he had dreams of flying.

…And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

the high untrespassed sanctity of space,

put out my hand and touched the face of God.

The Reverend had had a yellowed copy of that poem pinned to the huge corkboard in his office for as long as Roger could remember—and for the first time, it now occurred to him that perhaps the Reverend had kept it in memory of Roger’s father, who’d died, like the poet, flying a Spitfire in the war. Or so he’d thought.