Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (97 page)

SILVIA SENT HER
girls off with a tray loaded with food, to eat in the bedroom. Then she sat down at the table, where Jenny and Rachel had laid out thick slices of bread on which to serve the bacon and beans, they having no more than the two warped wooden plates that had been provided with their rooms.

Ian thought the smell of food might be enough to knock him over; he couldn’t recall the last time he’d eaten—he thought it might have been yesterday sometime, but he’d been too busy to notice. He broke off a corner of bread with a good bit of beans cooked with bacon and onions on it, shoveled it into his mouth, and made an involuntary sound that caused all the women to look at him.

“Ye sound like a starving wolf, lad,” his mother said, raising her brows.

Rachel laughed, and Silvia smiled, very gingerly. She ate the same way, owing to her split lip, and he thought, from the tentative way she chewed, that a couple of her teeth might have been loosened as well. If he’d had any compunction about killing Judge Fredericks—and he hadn’t—it would have vanished on the spot.

He felt much the same toward the so-called Friends of the Yearly Meeting. Rachel had told him a good bit about the nature of Quaker meetings, and he understood that while anyone was welcome to sit and to worship with them, it was a different thing to be part of the meeting: people were accepted only after consideration and conference.

There was something akin to the way a clan worked in this; there was an expectation of obligation that went both ways. So he could understand, he supposed, why the Friends of Philadelphia hadn’t simply scooped Silvia into their bosoms. Still, he resented them for it.

“Friends are ideally meant to be compassionate, peaceable, and honest,” Rachel said, frowning. “This does
not
mean that they reserve judgment, nor that they don’t possess strong opinions, which they are, of course, welcome to express.”

“And they gossip?” Ian asked. Rachel sighed.

“We do. I mean,” she added, “we discourage anything in the way of ill-natured gossip, spreading scandal or personal disparagement—but by the nature of a meeting, everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

“Aye.” Ian scraped a last bit of bread around the rim of the pot, salvaging the rest of the succulent juice. “Well, Friend Silvia’s business is none of theirs. Do ye have a notion what ye’d like to do, or where ye want to go, lass?” he asked, addressing Silvia. “We’ll help ye do it, regardless.”

“I wish to go with you,” Silvia blurted. A red tide surged up her thin neck and blotched her cheeks. “I know I haven’t any right to ask you—but I do.”

Rachel at once looked at Ian, and so did his mother. Well, he was the man, and it was his fault they were here, so he supposed he had a right to decide how many women he could reasonably juggle. Still…

“I do not wish to remain in Philadelphia,” Silvia said. She’d got hold of herself and her voice was steady. “Since Yearly Meeting knows who I am—both by name and reputation,” she added, with a slight note of bitterness, “I will find no acceptance here. Any meeting that took me in would soon realize their mistake. And while I could earn a living as an actual whore, I will not on any account expose my daughters to such a life.”

“Aye,” Ian said reluctantly. “I suppose ye’re right, but—we’re bound for New York, lass, and the country of the Hodeenosaunee.”

“That’s the Iroquois League,” Rachel put in. “More specifically, we’re bound for a small town called Canajoharie, inhabited by the Mohawk.”

“I suppose I might find a place somewhere before we reach Canajoharie. But if not—have the Mohawk any objection to whores?” Silvia asked, a small frown creasing the flesh between her brows.

“They dinna really have a word for that,” Ian said. “And if they dinna have a word for something, it’s no important.”

Oggy, who had been having an earnest conversation with his toes, looked up at this point, said “Da” very clearly, and then returned to his toes.

Ian smiled, then sighed deeply and addressed his son.

“Three women and three wee lassies. I’m sure ye’ll be as much aid to me as ye can,
a bhalaich,
but there’s no help for it. I’ll need another man.”

IT HAD BEEN ONE
of those beautiful autumn days when the sun is bright and warm at its zenith, but a chill creeps in at dawn and dusk and the nights are cold enough to make a good fire, a good thick quilt, and a good man with a lot of body heat in bed beside you more than welcome.

The good man in question stretched himself, groaning, and relapsed into the luxury of rest with a sigh, his hand on my thigh. I patted it and rolled toward him, dislodging Adso, who had alighted at the foot of the bed, but leapt off with a brief
mirp!
of annoyance at this indication that we didn’t mean to lapse into immobility just yet.

“So, Sassenach, what have ye been doing all day?” Jamie asked, stroking my hip. His eyes were half closed in the drowsy pleasure of warmth, but focused on my face.

“Oh, Lord…” Dawn seemed an eon ago, but I stretched myself and eased comfortably into his touch. “Just chores, for the most part…but a man named Herman Mortenson came up from Woolam’s Mill in late morning to have a pilonidal cyst at the base of his spine lanced and evacuated; I haven’t smelled anything that bad since Bluebell rolled in a decayed pig’s carcass. But then,” I added, sensing that this might not be the right note on which to begin a pleasant autumn evening’s
rencontre,
“I spent most of the afternoon in the garden, pulling up peanut bushes and picking the last of the beans. And talking to the bees, of course.”

“Did they have anything interesting to say to ye, Sassenach?” The stroking had edged over into a pleasant massage of my behind, which had the salutary side effect of causing me to arch my back and press my breasts lightly against his chest. I used my free hand to loosen my shift, gather one breast up, and rub my nipple against his, which made him clutch my arse and say something under his breath in Gaelic.

“And, um, how was
your
day?” I asked, desisting.

“If ye do that again, Sassenach, I’m no going to answer for the results,” he said, scratching his nipple as though it had been bitten by a large mosquito. “As for what I did, I built a new gate for the farrowing sty. Speakin’ o’ pigs.”

“Speaking of pigs…” I repeated, slowly. “Um…did you go into the sty?”

“No. Why?” His hand moved a little farther down, cupping my left buttock.

“I’d forgotten to tell you, because you’d gone to Tennessee to talk to Mr. Sevier and Colonel Shelby and didn’t come back for a week. But I went up there”—the sty was a small cave in the limestone cliff above the house—“a week ago, to fetch a jar of turpentine I’d left there from the worming, and—you know how the cave curves off to the left?”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on my mouth as though reading my lips.

“Well, I went round the corner, and there they were.”

“Who?”

“The White Sow herself, with what I assume were two of her daughters or granddaughters…the others weren’t white, but they had to be related to her because all three of them were the same size—immense.” Your average wild hog stood about three foot at the shoulder and weighed two or three hundred pounds. The White Sow, who was not a wild hog herself but the product of a domestic porcine line bred for poundage, was a good deal older, greedier, and more ferocious than the average, and while I wasn’t as good as Jamie at estimating the weight of livestock, I would have clocked her at six hundred pounds without a moment’s hesitation. Her descendants weren’t much smaller.

The sense of placid malignity had frozen me in place, and my skin rippled into instant gooseflesh at the memory of those small dark-red intelligent eyes, fixed on me from the pale bulk in the shadows of the cave.

“Did she go after ye?” Jamie ran a concerned hand over the curve of my shoulder, feeling the goose bumps. I shook my head.

“I thought she would. Every second I was there, and every second it took me to inch my way back into the light and out of the cave, I thought she was going to heave to her feet—they were all sort of…reclining in the matted straw—and run me down, but they just…looked at me.” I swallowed, and a new wave of horripilation ran down my arms.

“Anyway,” I finished, nudging closer to his warmth, “they didn’t eat me. Maybe she remembers that I used to feed her scraps—but I don’t know that she feels that kindly toward
you.
”

“I’ll take my rifle when I go up there,” he promised. “If I see them, we’ll have meat for the winter.”

“You bloody be careful,” I said, and nipped the flesh of his shoulder. “I don’t think you could get all three before one of them gets you. And I rather think that killing the White Sow might be bad luck.”

“Bah,” he said comfortably, and rolled over, pinning me to the mattress with a whoosh of down feathers. He lowered his head and nibbled my earlobe, making me squirm and muffle a shriek.

“Tell me about the bees,” he said, breathing warmly into my ear. “It may settle ye enough to fix your mind where it belongs, instead of on pigs.”

“You
asked,
” I said, with dignity, refusing to address the question of where my mind belonged. “As for the bees…I thought they’d hibernate, but Myers says they don’t, though they do stay inside their hives when it gets cold. But there are still late flowers in the garden, and they’re still at work. Just before I came down tonight—it was starting to get dark—I found two of them, curled up together in the cup of a hollyhock, covered in pollen and holding each other’s feet.”

“Were they dead?”

“No.” He’d moved off me but was still imminent. His hair was loose, soft and tumbled, sparking red and silver in the firelight, and I brushed it behind his ear. “I thought they were, the first time I saw it, but I’ve seen it several times since, and they’re just sleeping in the flowers. They wake up when the sun warms them and fly off.

“I don’t know whether it’s something like camping out for them, or whether they just get too tired to make their way back to the hive or are caught out by the dark and lie down where they can,” I added. “You mostly see single bees doing it, though. Seeing two of them together like that…it was very sweet.”

“Sweet,” he echoed, and threading his fingers through mine kissed me gently, tasting of smoke and beer and bread with honey.

“Do you know why they’re called hollyhocks?”

“No, but I suppose ye’re going to tell me.” One big hand ran down the side of my neck and delicately grasped my nipple. I returned the favor, enjoying the rough feel of the hairs around his.

“The Crusaders brought it back to England, because you can make a salve of its root that’s particularly good for an injury to a horse’s hocks. Apparently crusading is hard on the hocks.”

“Mmm…I wouldna doubt it.”

“So,” I whispered, flicking my thumbnail lightly, “ ‘Holly’ is an old spelling of ‘Holy’—for the ‘Holy Land’?”

“Mmphm…”

“And ‘hock’—well, for ‘hocks.’ What do you think of that?”

A subterranean quiver rippled through his body, and he lay down on top of me and eased both hands under my hips. His breath tickled warmly in my ear.

“I think I should like to sleep in a flower wi’ you, Sassenach, holding your feet.”

I reached to put out the candle and my mind settled where it belonged, in the warm heart of the firelit darkness.

I SLEPT THE
sleep of the gardener, physical exhaustion leavened by tranquility, and dreamed—little wonder—of weeds. I was yanking them out of the ground at the foot of a vast bank of blooming pea vines, tossing the weeds over my shoulder and hearing them plink on the ground like coins, then realizing that it was raining…

I rose slowly out of my dream of slugs and rain-wet vegetables to realize that Jamie had got up and was using the tin chamber pot, having withdrawn to a polite distance by the window to do so. Knowing that his grandfather, the Old Fox, had suffered from an enlarged prostate, I was inclined to listen—as tactfully as possible—in case of any adverse indications, but the sound was reassuringly strong and well defined, and I closed my eyes and pretended to have just wakened when he crawled back into bed.

“Mm?” I said, and patted his arm. He lay down, sighing, and took my hand.

“What’s today?” he said. “Or what will it be, when the sun comes up?”

“What is—oh, you mean what’s the date? It’s October the seventh. I’m sure, because I wrote down October sixth in my black book when I did my notes after supper. Why?”

“A few more days, then. It’ll be the eleventh.”

“What happens on the eleventh?”

“According to your damned first husband, that’s when the Americans will lift their siege on Savannah.” He made a low, disgruntled noise in the back of his throat. “I should never have let Brianna go!”

I paused for a minute before answering, not sure of the ground.

“The city won’t be invaded,” I said, though I was uneasy, too.
If we believe Frank’s book, and I suppose we must…
“And you couldn’t have stopped her, you know.”

“I could,” he said stubbornly. “Or,” he added more fairly, “I could have stopped Roger Mac. And she wouldna go without him. And now the whole family’s there, God damn it.” He moved his legs restlessly, rustling under the covers.

“Yes,” I said, taking a deep breath. “They are. Including William.”

He stopped fidgeting abruptly and breathed through his nose for a bit.

“Aye,” he said at last, reluctantly. “I shouldna have done it, though—sent Bree into danger. Not even for William’s sake.”

A throaty call from a sleepy dove in the trees outside announced that the dawn was coming. No point in trying to soothe Jamie back to sleep, even if it was possible, and it wasn’t. His uneasiness was catching. I knew he was only second-guessing himself; all this had been discussed beforehand. Roger and Bree knew when the battle would happen—and that the city would not be taken. Even so, they’d have had time enough to leave the city, if things seemed too dangerous. And…despite his current edginess, Jamie did, in fact, trust John Grey to see them safe—or as safe as anyone could be, in a time like this.

“Jamie,” I said softly, at last, and touched his hand lightly. “No place is safe now. Not Savannah. Not Salisbury or Salem. Not here.”

He grew still.
Not here.

“No,” he said softly, and squeezed my hand. “Not here.”