Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (92 page)

“If you don’t need it more than an hour,” she said. “Someone’s coming at four o’clock.”

“That will be sufficient,” Fergus assured her. “We only require a place to sit down and collect ourselves. Though I suppose a glass of wine might not be out of the question?”

She looked at him for a moment, head on one side like a bird estimating whether that fallen leaf might hide a juicy worm, but then nodded, matter-of-factly.

“I’ll send Barbara up with it.
Adieu, mon brave,
” she said, and, kissing her fingertips, applied them briefly to Roger’s surprised cheek before skipping off down the hall—which, he saw, was not unlike that of the house they had just come from, though the art on display was considerably better.

“Come,” Fergus murmured, touching his arm.

The second-floor parlor was a small, charming room, with French doors opening onto a small balcony, and long lace curtains that barely stirred in the heavy air when they stepped in.

“I am a son of the house, so to speak,” Fergus said, sitting down with a brief wave of the hand toward the door.

“I didn’t ask,” Roger murmured, and Fergus laughed.

“You needn’t ask if Marsali knows about this place, either,” he assured Roger. “I won’t say I have no secrets from my wife—I think every man must require a few secrets—but this is not one of them.”

Roger’s heart was beginning to slow down, and he fished out a semi-clean handkerchief with which to mop his face. He found himself avoiding the tiny patch Miss Marigold’s fingers had touched, and scrubbed it briefly before putting the hankie away.

“The men we have just left,” Fergus said, dabbing his own face. “I recognize them.”

“Yes?”

“The fop—this is Percival Beauchamp, though I believe he used another name—perhaps more than one. He has approached me more than once with a similar taradiddle—that I was the son of a highborn man, had title to land—” He made a very French grimace of disdain, and Roger, already entertained by his pronunciation of “taradiddle,” made a similar grimace in order to keep from laughing.

“Now,” Fergus went on, hunching closer and lowering his voice, “at that time, he was attending the Comte de La Fayette as some sort of aide-de-camp. I dismissed him—I had met him once before
that,
and refused to speak with him then—and he went so far as to threaten me.
Chienne,
” he added, with contempt.

“Chienne?”
Roger asked, careful with the pronunciation. “You think he’s a
female
dog?”

Fergus looked surprised.

“Well, there are other words,” he said, and wrinkled his brow as though trying to summon a few, “but surely you noticed…?”

“Er…” A wave of heat that had nothing to do with the atmosphere rose behind Roger’s ears. “Actually, no. I just thought he was a, um, Frenchman. Ornamental, you know?”

Fergus burst out laughing.

Roger coughed. “So. Ye’re saying that Percival whatever-he’s-calling-himself is what people in Scotland might call a Nancy-boy. D’ye think that’s got anything to do with…the present situation?”

Fergus was still simmering with mirth, but he shook his head.

“
Oui,
but perhaps only because a man with such tastes—when they are known, and plainly they are—cannot be trusted, because he is always subject to the threat of public exposure. You must look at the man who controls him.”

Roger felt a touch of uneasiness. Well, in honesty, he’d
been
uneasy since they walked into the house on Hasell Street.

“Who do you suppose that is?”

Fergus glanced at him in surprise, then shook his head in mild reproof.

“I tell you,
mon frère,
you require a great deal more experience in the fields of sin, if you hope to be a good minister.”

“Ye’re suggesting that I send for Miss Marigold and ask for lessons?”

“Well, no,” Fergus said, giggling slightly. “Your wife would—but that’s not what I meant. Only that your own goodness, which is undeniable”—he smiled at Roger, with a warmth in his eyes that touched Roger deeply—“is one thing, but to help those of your flock who lack that goodness, you need to understand something of evil and thus the struggle that afflicts them.”

“I wouldn’t say you’re wrong,” Roger said warily. “But I know more than one man of the cloth who’s got himself in serious trouble while seeking that sort of education.”

Fergus lifted one shoulder, laughing.

“You can learn a great deal from whores,
mon frère,
but I agree that perhaps you should not make such inquiries alone. Still,” he said, sobering, “that’s not what I meant by evil.”

“No. But you said you’ve had passages with this Percival before. He didn’t strike me as—”

“He’s not. He’s a whore; he has likely been one all his life.” Seeing Roger’s expression, he didn’t smile, but one corner of his mouth lifted. “What is it they say? ‘It takes one to know one.’ ”

Roger felt a sudden contraction of his stomach muscles, as though he’d been lightly punched. He’d known that Fergus had been a child-whore in Paris, before encountering Jamie Fraser, who had engaged him as a pickpocket—but he’d forgotten.

“Monsieur Beauchamp is too old to sell his arse, of course, but he will sell himself. From necessity,” Fergus added dispassionately. “A person who has lived like that for a long time ceases to believe that they have any value beyond what someone will pay for.”

Roger was silent, thinking not so much of the recent Percival Beauchamp but of Fergus—and of Jane and Fanny Pocock.

“When you say
‘evil,’
though…” he began slowly.

“There were only two men in that room,” Fergus said simply. “Besides us, I mean.”

“Jesus.” He tried to think what the tall man had said or done that might have given Fergus the conviction—and it
was
a conviction, he could see that much in Fergus’s face—that the man was evil. “I can’t even remember what he looked like.”

“In my experience, the Devil seldom walks up and introduces himself to you by name,” Fergus said dryly. “All I can tell you is that I know evil when I see it—and I saw it on that man.”

Fergus stood up and went to the window, pulling back the lace curtain to look out. He drew a large black bandanna out of his pocket and wiped his face with it. “So the ink stains don’t show,” he said briefly, seeing Roger notice.

“So what do you plan to do about…this? If anything?”

Fergus exhaled strongly through his long French nose.

“You tell me that the city will soon fall to the British. These
crétins
offer me ridiculous daydreams. But”—he raised a monitory hook to stop Roger butting in—“they do have money, and they do mean business. I just don’t know what
sort
of business, and the guardian angel on my shoulder thinks I don’t want to find out.”

“Wise man, your guardian angel.”

Fergus nodded and was still, staring at the river in the distance as it went about its murky business. After a moment, he glanced at Roger.

“Brianna told Marsali that Lord John Grey had promised her a military escort to see her safely to Savannah.”

“Yes. But we don’t need it. No one’s going to bother a wagon full of children and sauerkraut.”

“Nonetheless.” Fergus stood up and shucked his coat, plucking the soaked linen of his shirt away from his chest. “Will you ask your wife to send a note to Lord John at once, please? Ask him to send his escort as soon as possible. We’re coming with you. I think the printing press might draw notice.”

BRIANNA WOKE SUDDENLY, IN
the disoriented state that occurs when you’ve gone to sleep in a strange place and don’t recall immediately where you are. She’d been dreaming—of what? Her heart was racing, and any minute it was going to—

Damn!
The wings started fluttering in her chest, like a flock of agitated bats trapped in her shift. She sat up, cursing under her breath, and struck herself hard in the chest, in hopes of startling her heartbeat back into regularity; sometimes that worked. Not this time. She swung her feet out of bed, planted them on the cold, damp floorboards, and took a deep breath, only to cough and let it out with a gasp.

“Roger!” she whispered as loudly as she could, trying to not wake the children to panic, and shook him by the arm. “Roger! Get up—I smell smoke!”

She remembered now where they were. They were sleeping in the loft, and with her eyes no longer clouded by sleep, now she could
see
the smoke she was smelling, white wisps slipping over the edge of the loft like ghosts, moving silently but with a horrifying speed.

“Jesus Christ!” Roger was up, naked and disheveled; she could see him in the dim cloud-glow from the owl-slits. “Bloody hell—go down and rouse everybody. I’ll grab the kids.” He was moving even as he said it, snatching a shirt off a stack of cheap Bibles.

A scream of pure terror from below split the air, followed by an instant of stunned silence, and then a
lot
of yelling, in French, English, and Gaelic, plus piercing shrieks from the babies.

“They’re roused,” she said, and pushing past Roger ran to scoop up Mandy, who was sitting up in her nest of quilts, squint-eyed and cross.

“You too noisy,” she said accusingly to her mother. “You woke me up!”

Brianna repressed the urge to say,
“You can sleep when you’re dead,”
and instead grabbed Esmeralda and shoved her into Mandy’s arms. She could hear Roger, behind her, trying to rouse Jemmy, who was dead to the world and planned to stay that way. “Come on,” she said to Mandy, who was slowly picking some sort of fuzz off her shift. “You can do that later. Hold on!”

With Mandy whining and clinging to her neck like a cranky gibbon and Esmeralda a solid lump mashed between them, she made her way one-handed backward down the ladder, bare toes curling to keep a grip on the foot-worn rungs. The smell of smoke was stronger now, but not choking, not yet…Tendrils rose past her toward the ceiling, coiling in slow-growing clouds under the beams as she looked up.

“Get out, get
out
!” someone was bellowing, louder than the rest, and as she hit the bottom of the ladder and turned, she saw Germain, wild with fear and furious with it, pulling one of his screaming sisters—by her hair—toward the door, kicking at the other who was scrambling round on the floor, evidently looking for something.
“Va-t’en, j’ai dit!”
he was shouting. “Move,
salope
! MOVE!”

“Germain!”

Marsali, white-faced, had both babies in her arms, a leather bag pressed between them. Germain heard her and turned, his face ten years older than he was, drawn with terror and determination.

“Je ne laisserai pas ça se reproduire,”
he said to Marsali, and shoved Félicité hard toward the door, then bent and yanked Joanie off the floor, wrestling her outside as she wailed and struggled. There was a sudden loud crack and a thump; Brianna turned to see Roger and Jem in a heap on the floor, the ladder skewed sideways, a rung hanging loose where it had given way under their combined weights.

“Get up, Da! Mama, Mama!” Jem ran to her and clung. She grabbed him with one arm and hugged him hard, then let go and pushed him toward the open door. Damp night air whooshed into the room, a welcome freshness—and an instant danger, Bree saw, seeing the smoke whirl up in a frenzy as the cold air touched it. Roger was crouched on one knee at the foot of the ladder, trying to stand.

“Take Mandy outside,” she said to Jem, who was standing in the middle of the floor, looking lost.
“Now.”
And thrusting Mandy and Esmeralda into his arms, she ran to Roger and grabbed his arm, got a shoulder under it, and managed somehow to get him on his feet, and then they were shuffling and staggering like people in a three-legged race, bumping off counters and knocking over tables, books, papers…

My God, the whole place will go up like a torch…

And then they were outside in the street, all of them coughing, crying, touching each other, counting noses again and again.

“Where’s Fergus?” Roger asked, his voice rasping.

ROGER FOUND FERGUS
a few moments later, at the back of the printshop, stamping out the last fragments of a small fire that had been built against the back door. The door itself was charred at the bottom, but the only remaining traces of the fire were a large black spot on the ground, a few scattered chunks of graying ember, and a small cloud of ashes and flecks of half-burnt paper that flew around Fergus’s stamping feet like a cloud of black-and-white moths.

“Merde,”
Fergus said, noticing Roger.

“Mais oui,”
Roger replied, coughing slightly from the drifting smoke. “One of your competitors?” He nodded at the half-burnt door, where someone had painted the words
NEXT TIME
in dripping whitewash.

Fergus shook his head, teeth clenched. His hair was standing on end and, like Roger, he wore nothing but a nightshirt, though he’d had the presence of mind to put on his boots before running outside. The fire was out, but Roger felt the heat from the smoking door on his bare legs.

“Loyalists,” Fergus said briefly, and coughed hard. Roger felt the tickle of smoke in his own throat and cleared it hard in hopes of quelling it; coughing still hurt.

“Marsali and Bree and the wee’uns are all right,” Roger said. Fergus nodded, cleared his throat, and spat into the ashes.

“I know,” he said, with a slight relaxation of his hard-lined face. “I heard them cursing.
Les femmes sauvages.
”

Roger hadn’t noticed the cursing, but he didn’t doubt it.

“Have they tried before?” he asked, lifting his chin at the paint-smeared door. Fergus lifted one shoulder in a Gallic shrug.

“Letters. Filth. A bag full of dead rats. Another bag with a live serpent—luckily it was a rattlesnake and not a cottonmouth. Marsali heard it before she picked the bag up.”

“Jesus Christ.” It was something between a curse and a prayer, and Fergus nodded, appreciating both.

“Les enfants savent qu’il ne faut rien toucher près de la porte,”
he said matter-of-factly. He took a deep, slow breath and shook his head at the door. “This is—” His lips tightened and he glanced at Roger. “You know—milady and milord told you, I expect. What…happened to our little one. Henri-Christian.” The name came hesitantly, as though it had been a long time since Fergus had spoken it aloud.

“I do,” Roger said, a lump in his throat making the words come out low and choked. He cleared it, hard. “Fucking cowardly wankers!”

“If you care to call them that.” Fergus was white around the mouth. “Cowards, certainly.
Canaille!
” He kicked the door so hard that it juddered in its frame. Recovering from shock and panic, Roger found his own anger rising.

“Those
shits
! Setting a fire where your family lives, your kids!”
And mine…

“As a warning, it’s much more effective than anonymous notes pushed under the door.” Fergus was breathing heavily and stopped to cough, shaking his head. He glared at Roger, eyes bloodshot with smoke. “If I find out who did this, I will tie them in a sack, row them out to sea, and throw them alive to the sharks, I swear it by the name of God and
la Virgine.
”

“I’ll help ye do it.” He’d have to, he thought; Fergus couldn’t row with one hand.

“Merci.”
Fergus glanced bleakly at the corner of the house; the shrieks and crying of frightened children in the street on the other side had died down, smothered in the sounds of running footsteps and exclamations. “I
will
find out,” he said, suddenly calm. “But now I must go to Marsali.”
Jesus, what the thought of another fire will have done to him and Marsali…the little girls…
He felt his blood go cold in his veins at the thought. Fergus was watching his face. He nodded, his own face sober now, and together they went to find their wives and children.

THERE WAS A
lot of clishmaclaver going on outside the printshop. Dawn was an hour off and there was barely enough light to see Marsali and Bree and all the kids, withdrawn to the far side of the street and huddled together in the dark like a herd of small bison.

Germain, with Jemmy stoutly by his side, was standing in front of the women and children, fists clenched and his face, too, looking as though he couldn’t decide whether to cry or pound somebody. Fergus exhaled through his teeth, clapped Germain on the shoulder, and went to take one of the twins from Marsali, who had them both in a death grip. Fergus said something very quiet to her in French, and Roger turned tactfully to Bree, who had sat down on the wooden sidewalk and gathered all three little girls around her. Fizzy was clinging to Bree’s shift and sniffing, and Joanie, who tended to be practical, was braiding Mandy’s hair.

“Ye all right?” Roger said, and rested his hand on Brianna’s head, her hair cool and damp in the morning fog off the harbor.

“Nobody died,” she said, and managed a small, shaky laugh. “Do you know what happened?”

“Sort of. Tell ye later, though.”

Other people were coming, some in their nightclothes, others on their way from or to work: bakers, tavern keepers, laborers, fishermen. Two whores hung about under a tree, whispering to each other and glancing from the printshop to the family.

Rather to Roger’s surprise, Fergus made no attempt at secrecy. He told everyone in turn exactly what had happened—and what he intended to do to the
maudit chiens
who had attacked his family and livelihood.

Roger, catching on, searched the faces as the light began to seep slowly through the fog, looking for anyone who seemed maliciously pleased, or too knowing. Everyone seemed honestly shocked, though, and one tall, handsome middle-aged woman who by her dress could be nothing other than the landlady of a prosperous tavern came up to Marsali and urged her to bring the babes along and come and have a bite of breakfast.

“On the house,” she added, looking at the children and quite obviously reckoning up the cost of their appetites.

“Well, I thank ye kindly, Mistress Kenney,” Marsali said. She glanced at Fergus and coughed a little. “If ye’ll give us a moment to go and put some clothes on?”

The remark caused Roger to realize that he was standing in the street barefoot, wearing nothing but a shirt. He helped collect the children, and as they started to trickle back across the street toward their threatened home, he saw that Marsali was carrying several slugs of type, evidently snatched from the type-case, under one arm. They looked heavy, and she let him take them from her, sighing with relief as he did.