Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (71 page)

I wasn’t at all sure how I felt about that. It was true that I had inadvertently raised Hiram’s mother-in-law from the dead at her funeral; though she’d died more permanently a few minutes later, she’d had time to denounce Hiram for not paying for a sufficiently lavish funeral—but I’d thought the effect might have worn off by now.

“Who was it who tried to build a tower to heaven and came to a bad end?” I asked, dismissing the matter of my public image for the moment and peering over the edge of the platform.

“The men of Babel,” he said, rummaging in his pocket for a scrap of paper and a pencil. “I dinna think they were expecting company, though. Just showin’ off for the sake of it. That sort of thing always gets ye in trouble.”

“If we have enough company to justify
this
”
—
I waved at the long expanse of rough flooring—“we’ll already
be
in trouble.”

He paused and looked at me. He was thin and worn, his skin reddened and burnt across forearms and shoulders, wisps of ruddy hair flying in the wind, and his eyes very blue.

“Aye,” he said mildly. “We will be.”

The gurgling in my stomach changed its tune slightly. The third floor was meant to be attics—in part, for storage, or to provide rooms for a housekeeper, should I ever find one again—but also to provide a place of refuge for tenants who might need it. In case…

Jamie’s attention had shifted, though, and he was craning his neck to look over the edge. He beckoned to me, and I crossed to him. Below, Cyrus Crombie had opened the roll of fabric and had laid out his tools—mallet, chisel, and knife—on the rim of the well. He’d drawn up the bucket and now dipped his fingers into the water and sprinkled it on the tools. I could see that he was saying something, but he wasn’t speaking loudly, and I couldn’t hear above the whine of the wind.

“He’s blessing his tools?” I asked, looking at Jamie, who nodded.

“Aye, of course.” He seemed pleased. “Presbyterians may be heretics, Sassenach, but they still believe in God. I’d best go down now, and bid him welcome.”

I WAS STARTLED FROM
a solid sleep by Jamie exploding out of bed beside me. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, but as usual, it left me sitting bolt upright amid the quilts, dry-mouthed and completely dazed, heart hammering like a drill press.

He was already down the stairs; I heard the thump of his bare feet on the last few treads—and above that sound, frenzied pounding on the front door.

I shook my head violently and flung off the covers.
Him or me?
was the first coherent thought that formed out of the fog drifting through my brain. Night alarms like this might be news of violence or misadventure, and sometimes of a nature that required all hands, like a house fire or someone having unexpectedly met with a hunting panther at a spring. More often, though…

I heard Jamie’s voice, and the panic left me. It was low, questioning, with a cadence that meant he was soothing someone. Someone else was talking, in high-pitched agitation, but it wasn’t the sound of disaster.

Me, then. Childbirth or accident?
My mind had suddenly resurfaced and was working clearly, even while my body fumbled to and fro, trying to recall what I had done with my grubby stockings.
Probably birth, in the middle of the night…
But the uneasy thought of fire still lurked on the edge of my thoughts.

There was an obituary with my name on it, and Jamie’s, claiming that we had perished in a fire that consumed our house. The house had burned, and we hadn’t, but any hint of fire raised the hairs on my scalp.

I had a clear picture in my mind of my emergency kit and was grateful that I’d thought to refurbish it just before supper. It was sitting ready on the corner of my surgery table. My mind was less clear about other things; I’d put my stays on backward. I yanked them off, flung them on the bed, and went to splash water on my face, thinking a lot of things I couldn’t say out loud, as I could hear Fanny’s feet now scampering across the landing.

I reached the bottom of the stairs belatedly, to find Fanny with Jamie, who was talking with a young girl not much more than Fanny’s age, standing barefoot, distraught, and wearing nothing more than a threadbare shift. I didn’t recognize her.

“Ach, here’s Herself now,” Jamie said, glancing over his shoulder. He had a hand on the girl’s shoulder, as though to keep her from flying away. She looked as if she might: thin as a broomstraw, with baby-fine blond hair tangled by the wind, and eyes looking anxiously in every direction for possible help.

“This is Agnes Cloudtree, Claire,” he said, nodding toward the girl. “Frances, will ye find a shawl or something to lend the lass, so she doesna freeze?”

“I don’t n-need—” the girl began, but her arms were wrapped around herself and she was shivering so hard that her words shook.

“Her mother’s with child,” Jamie interrupted her, looking at me. “And may be having a bit of trouble with the birth.”

“We c-can’t p-pay—”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, and, nodding to Jamie, took her in my arms. She was small and bony and very cold, like a half-feathered nestling fallen from a tree.

“It will be all right,” I said softly to her, and smoothed down her hair. “We’ll go to your mother at once. Where do you live?”

She gulped and wouldn’t look up, but was so cold she clung to me for warmth.

“I don’t know. I m-mean—I don’t know how to say. Just—if you can come with me, I can take you back?” She wasn’t Scottish.

I looked at Jamie for information—I’d not heard of the Cloudtrees; they must be recent settlers—but he shook his head, one brow raised. He didn’t know them, either.

“Did ye come afoot, lassie?” he asked, and when she nodded, asked, “Was the sun still up when ye left your home?”

She shook her head. “No, sir. ’Twas well dark, we’d all gone to bed. Then my mother’s pains came on sudden, and…” She gulped again, tears welling in her eyes.

“And the moon?” Jamie asked, as though nothing were amiss. “Was it up when ye set out?”

His matter-of-fact tone eased her a little, and she took an audible breath, swallowed, and nodded.

“Well up, sir. Two handbreadths above the edge of the earth.”

“What a very poetic turn of phrase,” I said, smiling at her. Fanny had come with my old gardening shawl—it was ratty and had holes, but had been made of thick new wool to start with. I took it from Fanny with a nod of thanks and wrapped it round the girl’s shoulders.

Jamie had stepped out onto the porch, presumably to see where the moon now was. He stepped back in and nodded to me.

“The brave wee lass has been abroad in the night alone for about three hours, Sassenach. Miss Agnes—is there a decent trail that leads to your father’s place?”

Her soft brow scrunched in concern—she wasn’t sure what “decent” might mean in this context—but she nodded uncertainly.

“There’s a trail,” she said, looking from Jamie to me in hopes that this might be enough.

“Take Clarence,” he said to me, over her head. “The moon’s bright enough. I’ll go with ye.”
And I think we’d best hurry,
his expression added. I rather thought he was right.

CLARENCE WAS NOT
enthused at being rousted from his sleep, nor about carrying two people, even if one was a starveling girl. He kept huffing and snorting irascibly, walking slowly and blowing out his sides every time I tried to nudge him into speed with my heels. Jamie had taken Fanny’s enormous mare, Miranda, she being of a stolid, amiable temperament and stout enough to bear his weight. She wasn’t all that pleased by the nocturnal expedition, either, but plodded obligingly through the groves of aspen and larch, poplar and fir, up the steep, narrow trail that led toward the top of the Ridge.

Clarence followed her rather than be left behind, but he wasn’t in any hurry about it and I kept losing sight of the shadowy mass of horse and man—and with them, any notion of where the trail was. I wondered how on earth the girl had found her way to us through dark and bramble; her legs and arms were scratched and there were leaves and pine needles in her hair; she smelled of the forest.

The moon was well up the sky by now, a lopsided, tricky lump of a moon that made it just possible to perceive deceptive openings in the forest, without actually being bright enough to see anything more than three feet away.

I had Agnes perched in front of me, her shift rucked up and pale white legs like mushroom stems dangling in the darkness to either side. I wondered whether she had left home in a panic—or whether perhaps the grubby shift was her only garment. It smelled faintly of cooking grease and singed cabbage.

“Tell me about your mother, Agnes,” I said, giving Clarence a solid kick in the ribs. He twitched his ears in annoyance, and I desisted. He was a good mule, but not above decanting a rider who aggravated him. “When—about—did her pains begin?”

She was a little less frightened, now that she had obtained the help she sought, and gradually grew calmer as she answered my questions.

Mrs. Cloudtree (was there a Mr. Cloudtree in residence? Yes, there was, though her body stiffened when she mentioned him) was near to her time (good, not a premature birth), though she’d thought it might be as much as another two or three weeks (maybe a little early, then…but even so, the baby should have a reasonable chance…).

Her mother’s pains had come on about midday, Agnes said, and her mother hadn’t thought it would take long: Agnes had come within four hours of the waters breaking, and each of her little brothers even faster. (Good, Mrs. Cloudtree was a multigravida. But in that case, she
should
have delivered fairly quickly and without complications…and plainly she hadn’t…)

Agnes couldn’t explain quite what the trouble was, other than a longer-than-usual labor. But she knew there
was
trouble, and that interested me.

“It’s not…,” she said, pulling the old shawl tighter round her shoulders and turning her head in an effort to see my face, make me understand. “Something’s different.”

“Something feels wrong to you?” I asked, interested.

She shook her head dubiously. “I don’t know. I helped, last time, when Georgie was born. And I was there when Billy came…. I was too little to help, then, but I could see everything. This is just…different.” I heard her swallow, and patted her shoulder.

“We’ll be there soon,” I said. I wanted to assure her that everything would be all right, but she knew better, or she wouldn’t have come running through the dark, looking for help. I could only hope that nothing irretrievable had happened at the Cloudtrees’ cabin in the meantime.

I glanced up, looking for the moon. I’d never managed to shift my sense of time to stars and planets, rather than the clock, and so was obliged to calculate time, rather than know it, as Jamie did.
The moon was a ghostly galleon…
drifted through my head.
Could be,
I thought, spotting it momentarily through a break in the dark, fragrant firs surrounding us.
And a highwayman came riding…came riding…

I knew all I could know at this point; it was time to stop thinking. Every birth was different.
And every death.
The thought spoke itself inside my mind before I could stop it, and a shiver ran through me.

I asked a few questions about Agnes’s family, but she had withdrawn into her own anxiety and wasn’t disposed to talk much further. Beyond the information that they had built their present cabin in the early summer, I gained little knowledge of the Cloudtrees beyond their names: Aaron, Susannah, Agnes, William, and George.

At the top of the Ridge, Jamie halted at the edge of the Bald, as folk called the high, treeless meadows on the upper slopes of the mountain. As usual, there was a stiff wind blowing on the Bald, and the shawl I’d pulled over my head was snatched back and my hair with it, whipping free in the breeze. Jamie dropped Miranda’s reins, and she immediately lowered her head and began to munch grass.

Jamie dismounted and came to take Clarence’s bridle. Out from under the trees now, I could see him plainly by the moonlight; he was smiling up at me, watching as my hair was lifted straight up off my scalp.

“Dinna take flight just yet, Sassenach. I’ll need Miss Agnes to guide us from here,” he said, and reached up a hand to her. “Will ye come over to me, lass?”

I felt her stiffen, but after a moment’s hesitation she nodded and slid off Clarence. Clarence grunted and turned smartly round, obviously thinking that now we’d got rid of the girl, it was time to go home.

“Think again,” I told him, reining his head hard round. A short battle of wills followed, this resolved by Miranda and her riders moving off with the slow implacability of a steamroller. Clarence snorted and brayed after her, but she didn’t turn back, and after a moment’s fuming, he snapped into a tooth-jarring trot and plunged after her. A quarter of an hour later, we crossed the Cherokee Line. A white blaze, briefly showing by moonlight, marked one of the witness trees that marked the Treaty Line.

The moon was high overhead, and the trees open enough for me to see Jamie glance back over his shoulder. I raised my hand in a small wave of acknowledgment; I’d noticed. A premature birth might not be all Agnes’s family was risking, settling on Indian land. I was glad that Jamie had insisted on coming; he spoke enough Cherokee to get along, if that should become necessary.

The journey took no little time, as Agnes needed to come out into the open now and again to get her bearings—she could read stars, she said matter-of-factly—but within an hour, we saw the dim glow of a cabin’s windows, covered by oiled hide.

I slid off Clarence and pulled down the bag that held my kit.

“I’ll mind the horses,” Jamie said, coming up to take Clarence’s reins. “Ye’ll need to hurry, I expect?”

Agnes was already at the door, fluttering like a frantic moth, and even from where we stood, I could hear the deep, guttural noises of a woman deep in labor.

The door opened suddenly inward, and Agnes fell over the threshold. A tall, dark figure yanked her to her feet and slapped her across the face.

“Where the hell you
been,
girl!”