Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (89 page)

The air was still like treacle, but Roger’s spirit was refreshed.

“Then let’s have a pint of something and you can tell me where the guns are.”

“You’re sitting on them. But by all means, let’s have a drink.”

ROGER’S ARRIVAL AT THE
printshop with Fergus, Roger looking slightly dazed but enormously happy, caused so much commotion that it was some time before people could stop asking questions long enough for him to answer some of them.

“Yes,” he said at last, his white neckcloth taken off and carefully hung from one of the drying lines in the printshop, to avoid loss or the possibility of dirty fingerprints. “Yes,” he said again, and accepted a glass of cooking sherry—that being the most festive beverage available at the moment. “It’s official. All three of them agreed. I’ll be formally ordained in a church, and that may need to wait ’til spring—but I’ve been accepted as suitable to be a Minister of the Word and Sacrament.”

“Is that as good as being the Pope?” Joanie asked, staring at her uncle in newfound awe.

“Well, I don’t get a fancy hat or a shepherd’s crook,” Roger said, still grinning, “but otherwise…aye. Just as good.
Slàinte!
” He toasted Joanie and then the rest of them, and downed the sherry.

“Mind,” he said, his voice hoarse and eyes watering slightly, “it was a near thing for a bit.” He coughed and waved away the proffered sherry bottle. “Thanks, no, that’s enough. Everything went down well, all through the Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, knowledge of Scripture, and evidence of good character—even having a Catholic wife didn’t give them more than a moment’s pause.” He grinned at Brianna. “As long as I could swear in good conscience that I should never allow ye to persuade me into Romish practices.”

Brianna laughed. She was still trembling inwardly from the experience on the riverbank, but that seemed trivial, drowned by her joy in Roger’s happiness. Firelight gleamed in his black hair and gave his eyes a green spark. He glowed, she thought, he really did.
Like a firefly dancing under the trees.

“What Romish practices did they have in mind?” she asked. She’d been sipping brandy, and now handed him her glass. “Slaughtering infants on the altar and drinking their blood?”

“No, just conspiring with the Pope, mostly.”

“To do
what
?”

“Ye’d have to ask the Pope,” he said, and laughed. “No, really,” he said, “the only thing that was a serious problem to them was the singing.”

“The singing?” she asked, puzzled. “Granted, Catholics sing—but so do you.”

“Aye, that was the problem.” His amusement came down a notch, but it was still there. “I dinna ken how they found out, but they’d heard that I sang hymns during services in church on the Ridge.”

“And they thought ye shouldna?” Marsali said, frowning. “Presbyterians dinna sing?”

“Not in kirk, they don’t. Not now.”

There was the briefest disturbance in the air at the words
“not now.”
Brianna saw Fergus and Marsali look at each other and neither one changed their expressions of tolerant amusement, but she’d felt it, like the prick of a thorn.

They know.
She and Roger had never discussed it, but of course they did. Fergus had lived with her parents before the Rising and at Lallybroch after Culloden—when her mother had gone. And of course Young Ian and Jenny knew. Did Rachel? she wondered.

Roger didn’t act as though anything had happened; he was going on to tell what the various ministers had said about the sinful practice of singing on a Sunday, let alone in kirk! With imitations of each of the ministers’ pronouncements.

“So how did you answer these remarks?” Fergus asked. His face was flushed with laughter, and his hair had lost its ribbon and come mostly out of its plait, streaming over his shoulder in dark waves streaked with silver. Sharp-featured, and with deep-set eyes, he looked to Brianna like a wizard of some sort—maybe a young Gandalf, prior to turning gray.

“Well, I said that given the condition of my voice—and I told them how that happened…” He touched the white rope scar, still visible across his throat. “…I admitted to error, but said I didna think anything I’d done in church could possibly qualify as song. And I admitted to doing lined singing, the call and response—but that’s a legitimate thing to do in a Presbyterian kirk. And in the end, it was really only the Reverend Selverson who was truly concerned about it, and the others overbore him. Oddly enough,” he added, holding out his glass for whatever was being poured at the moment, “it was your da who made the difference.”

“As he often does,” Brianna said dryly. “What on earth did he do this time?”

“Just being who he is.” Roger leaned back, relaxed, and his eyes met hers, still amused but quieter, with a softness in their depths that said he’d like to be alone with her. “The Reverend Thomas made the point that as I was Colonel Fraser’s son-in-law, my being a fully ordained minister was bound to have a beneficial influence on the colonel and thus indirectly on a great many other souls, your da being their landlord. And the Reverend Selverson, as it turns out, actually knows your da and thinks well of him, despite him being a Papist, so…” He held out a hand, flat, and tilted it to show the turning of opinion in his favor.

“Well, Da’s a man that could use a priest, more than most,” Marsali said. Everyone laughed, and so did Brianna, but she couldn’t help wondering what her mother might have to say about that.

“IT’S ONLY TWO
dozen guns,” Roger said, shucking his black coat in the loft before dinner. “But they’re rifles, not muskets. I’ve no notion of their quality, because they’re coated with grease and wrapped in canvas and buried under two hundred or so pounds of Jamaican bat guano, but—don’t laugh, I’m not joking.”

“I’m not,” she said, laughing. “Where on
earth
did they come from? Here, give me that, I’ll take it down and hang it in the airing cupboard—it smells like…”

“Bat guano,” he said, nodding as he handed her the limp, damp coat. “And sweat. A lot of sweat.”

She eyed his torso, and the white shirt now pasted to it, and turned to fetch a fresh—well, dry at least—shirt from the trunk.

“The guns?” she prompted, handing it to him.

“Ah.” He pulled the wet shirt off with a sigh of relief and stood for a moment, arms outstretched, letting the faint breeze off the river wash his naked flesh with coolness. “Oh, God. Guns…Well. Ye recall Fergus telling us about your Mr. Brumby importing half his molasses and smuggling the other half?”

“I do.”

“Well, it appears that molasses isn’t the only thing Mr. Brumby smuggles.”

“You’re kidding!” She stared at him, halfway between delight and dismay. “He’s running guns?”

“And likely anything else that will make him a profit,” he assured her, worming his way into the folds of the fresh shirt. “Your potential employer appears to be one of the biggest smugglers in the Carolinas, according to one Monsieur Faucette, who dabbles himself.”

“But Lord John thinks he’s a loyal Tory—Brumby, I mean.”

“He may actually
be
a Tory,” Roger said, turning back a cuff. “Though his loyalty is quite possibly open to question. We don’t know what he was planning to do with the guns, once he got them—but it isn’t likely that the British army is depending on Brumby to get them arms.”

Bree poured water into the ewer and handed him a towel, then closed the trunk lid and sat on it, watching as he swabbed sand and salt and the dust of Charles Town from his face and dried his loosened, sweat-soaked hair.

“So you’re saying the guns you and Fergus just acquired came from Saint Eustatius?”

“So says Monsieur Faucette, under the influence of a generous prompting of rum and gold. I don’t know how reliable information obtained by bribery may be, but I do know—or rather, Fergus does—that most professional smugglers are just that. Professionals, I mean; most of them aren’t doing it in order to support one side of the war against the other; they make money where they can, and often enough, from both sides. And as it happened, I’d given Fergus sufficient gold that he was in a position to grease Monsieur Faucette, who…er…facilitated a meeting between Fergus and the owner of a small trading vessel, who had just brought the guns to Charles Town from Saint Eustatius via Jamaica.
Et voilà,
” he ended, shaking out the towel with a flourish.

“Awriiiiiight,” Bree said, grinning. “So, if Mr. Brumby is really running guns for the Americans, at least we aren’t hurting him by stealing them to give them to Da.”

“I’m trying really hard not to consider the morality of the situation in any depth,” he said dryly, dropping the folded towel on the trunk beside her. “I’d like to at least make it through ordination before the Presbytery of Charles Town finds out about it.”

His wife made an obliging gesture, drawing her fingers across her lips in a zipping motion.

“So, what did you and Marsali do today?” he asked, to change the subject.

To his surprise, it was her face that changed.

“It—I don’t know how to say it, exactly.” She sent him a sidelong look, half puzzled, half ashamed. He sat down on a keg of varnish, leaned forward, and took her hand, long-fingered and cold, clasping it between his own. He didn’t try to say anything, but smiled into her eyes.

After a moment, she smiled back, though it was only a brief shadow at the corner of her mouth. She looked away, but the elegant, ink-stained fingers turned and linked with his.

“I was embarrassed,” she said, finally. “I haven’t been afraid of a man in a long time.”

“A man? Who? What did he do?” His own grip had tightened on hers at the thought of anyone hurting her.

She shook her head, looking away. Her cheeks were flushed.

“Just a pair of young…jerks.
Loyalist
jerks, no less.” She told him about the louts who had defaced the tavern’s sign and attacked her and Marsali.

“They didn’t really hurt us. They knocked me over—one of them pulled my feet out from under me, the bastard, and then they started dragging me toward the river, saying they’d thr—throw me in.” Her voice had thickened suddenly, and he heard the rage in it.

“There were two of them, Bree. You couldn’t have stopped them, together like that.”
Jesus. If I’d been there, I’d have—

She shivered briefly and squeezed his hand hard.

“That—” she started, but had to stop and swallow. “That’s what Da said to me. After Stephen Bonnet raped me. That I couldn’t have stopped him, even if I’d fought.”

“You couldn’t,” he said at once. She looked down at her hand, and he saw that he’d squeezed it so hard that her fingers, which had been grasping his, had sprung loose under the force of his grip and were sticking out of his solid grasp like a bundle of crayons. He cleared his throat and let go.

“Sorry.”

She gave a small laugh, but not with any sense of humor in it.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “That’s pretty much what Da did, only a lot rougher and on purpose.” The color had risen high in her cheeks, and her eyes were fixed on her hands, now clasped in her lap. “I wanted to kill him.”

“Stephen Bonnet?”

“No, Da.” She gave him a wry half smile. “He didn’t care. That’s what he was trying to make me do—try to kill him—so I’d believe I couldn’t do it, and so I’d have to believe that I
couldn’t
have done it. He humiliated me and he scared me and he didn’t mind if I hated him for it, as long as I understood that it wasn’t my fault.

“And I understand what you’re telling me, too,” she said, “I do.” And met his gaze straight on. “The thing is, though, I can usually make even men back up a little, or at least stop for a moment, and then I can either steer them into something else or make them go away. I mean—” She looked down her body and waved a hand. “I’m taller than most men, and I’m strong. When I’ve had trouble with some man on the Ridge, I’ve been able to face them down. So when that didn’t work this afternoon, I was—I didn’t expect that,” she ended abruptly.

It wasn’t a situation where tact would be helpful. He’d got a grip on his own fury; he couldn’t do anything about the boys—unless he saw the little bastards, and God help them if he did—but Brianna…he could maybe do something for her.

“On the Ridge,” he said carefully, “it’s not just your own physical presence—intimidating as that is to some men,” he said, with a brief grin. “When a man backs down, sometimes it’s down to you, all right—but sometimes it’s because your da is standing behind you.” He shrugged, careful not to add
or me.
“Metaphorically, I mean.”