The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (512 page)

Our Population here exhibits a gratifying Growth of late, with the addition of some twenty Families since last I wrote. God has prospered our Efforts during the Summer, blessing us with an Abundance of Corn and wild Hay, and an Abundance of Beasts to consume them. I estimate the Hogs running at large in my Wood to number no fewer than forty at present, two Cows have borne Calves, and I have bought a new Horse. This Animal’s Character lies in grave Doubt, but his Wind does not.

Thus, my good News.

And so to the bad. I am made Colonel of Militia, ordered to muster and deliver so many Men as I can to the Service of the Governor, by mid-month, this Service to be of Aid in the Suppression of local Hostilities.

You may have heard, during your visit to North Carolina, of a Group of Men who style themselves “Regulators”—or you may not, as other Matters compelled your Attention on that Occasion (my Wife is pleased to hear good Report of your own Health, and sends with this a Parcel of Medicines, with Instructions for their Administration should you still be plagued with Headache).

These Regulators are no more than Rabble, less disciplined in their Actions even than the Rioters whom we hear have hanged Gov. Richardson in Effigy in Boston. I do not say there is no Substance to their Complaint, but the Means of its Expression seems unlikely to result in Redress by the Crown—rather, to provoke both Sides to further Excess, which cannot fail to end in Injury.

There was a serious outbreak of Violence in Hillsborough on 24 September, in which much Property was wantonly destroyed and Violence done—some justly, some not—to officials of the Crown. One Man, a Justice, was grievously Wounded; many of the Regulation were arrested. Since then, we have heard little more than Murmurs; Winter damps down Discontent, which smolders by the Hearths of Cottages and Pothouses, but once let out with the Spring Airing, it will flee abroad like the foul Odors from a sealed House, staining the Air.

Tryon is an able Man, but not a Farmer. If he were, he would scarce think of seeking to make War in Winter. Still, it may be that he hopes by making Show of Force now—when he is likely sure it will not be needed—so to intimidate the Rapscallions as to obviate its Necessity later. He is a Soldier.

Such remarks bring me to the true Point of this Missive. I expect no evil Outcome of the present Enterprise, and yet—you are a Soldier, too, even as I am. You know the Unpredictability of Evil, and what Catastrophe may spring from trivial Beginnings.

No man can know the Particulars of his own End—save that he will have one. Thus, I have made such Provision as I can, for the Welfare of my Family.

I enumerate them here, as you will not know them all: Claire Fraser, my beloved Wife; my Daughter Brianna and her Husband, Roger MacKenzie, and their Child, Jeremiah MacKenzie. Also my Daughter Marsali and her Husband, Fergus Fraser (who is my adopted Son)—they have now two young ones, Germain and Joan by Name. Wee Joan is named for Marsali’s sister, known as Joan MacKenzie, presently abiding still in Scotland. I have not the leisure to acquaint you with the History of the Situation, but I am disposed for good Reason to regard this young Woman likewise as a Daughter, and I hold myself similarly obligated for her Welfare, and that of her Mother, one Laoghaire MacKenzie.

I pray you for the Sake of our long Friendship and for the Sake of your Regard for my Wife and Daughter, that if Mischance should befall me in this Enterprise, you will do what you can to see them safe.

I depart upon the Morrow’s Dawn, which is now not far off.

Your most humble and obedient Servant,
James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser

Postscriptum: My Thanks for the Intelligence you provide in answer to my earlier Query regarding Stephen Bonnet. I note your accompanying Advice with the greatest Appreciation and Gratitude for its kind Intent—though as you suspect, it will not sway me.

Post-Postscriptum: Copies of my Will and Testament, and of the Papers pertaining to my Property and Affairs here and in Scotland, will be found with Farquard Campbell, of Greenoaks, near Cross Creek.

P
ART
T
HREE

Alarms and
Excursions

26

THE MILITIA RISES

The weather favored us, keeping cold but clear. With the Muellers and the men from the nearby homesteads, we set out from Fraser’s Ridge with a party of nearly forty men—and me.

Fergus would not serve with the militia, but had come with us to raise men, he being the most familiar with the nearby settlements and homesteads. As we approached the Treaty Line, and the farthest point of our peripatetic muster, we formed a respectable company in number, if not in expertise. Some of the men had been soldiers once, if not trained infantrymen; either in Scotland, or in the French and Indian Wars. Many had not, and each evening saw Jamie conducting military drills and practice, though of a most unorthodox sort.

“We havena got time to drill them properly,” he’d told Roger over the first evening’s fire. “It takes weeks, ken, to shape men so they willna run under fire.”

Roger merely nodded at that, though I thought a faint look of uneasiness flickered across his face. I supposed he might be having doubts regarding his own lack of experience, and exactly how he himself would respond under fire. I’d known a lot of young soldiers in my time.

I was kneeling by the fire, cooking corn dodgers on an iron griddle set in the ashes. I glanced up at Jamie, to find him looking at me, a slight smile hidden in the corner of his mouth. He’d not only known young soldiers; he’d been one. He coughed, and bent forward to stir the coals with a stick, looking for more of the quails I’d set to bake, wrapped in clay.

“It’s the natural thing, to run from danger, aye? The point of drilling troops is to accustom them to an officer’s voice, so they’ll hear, even over the roar of guns, and obey without thinkin’ of the danger.”

“Aye, like ye train a horse not to bolt at noises,” Roger interrupted, sardonically.

“Aye, like that,” Jamie agreed, quite seriously. “The difference being that ye need to make a horse believe ye ken better than he does; an officer only needs to be louder.” Roger laughed, and Jamie went on, half-smiling.

“When I went for a soldier in France, I was marched to and fro and up and down, and wore a pair of boots clear through before they gave me powder for my gun. I was sae weary at the end of a day of drilling that they could have shot off cannon by my pallet and I wouldna have turned a hair.”

He shook his head a little, the half-smile fading from his face. “But we havena got the time for that. Half our men will have had a bit of soldiering; we must depend on them to stand if it comes to fighting, and keep heart in the others.” He glanced past the fire, and gestured toward the fading vista of trees and mountains.

“It’s no much like a battlefield, is it? I canna say where the battle may be—if there is one—but I think we must plan for a fight where there’s cover to be had. We’ll teach them to fight as Highlanders do; to gather or to scatter at my word, and otherwise, to make shift as they can. Only half the men were soldiers, but all of them can hunt.” He raised his chin, gesturing toward the recruits, several of whom had bagged small game during the day’s ride. The Lindsay brothers had shot the quail we were eating.

Roger nodded, and bent down, scooping a blackened ball of clay out of the fire with his own stick, keeping his face hidden. Almost all. He had gone out shooting every day since our return to the Ridge, and had still to bag even a possum. Jamie, who had gone with him once, had privately expressed the opinion to me that Roger would do better to hit the game on the head with his musket, rather than shoot at it.

I lowered my brows at Jamie; he raised his at me, returning my stare. Roger’s feelings could take care of themselves, was the blunt message there. I widened my own eyes, and rose.

“But it isn’t really like hunting, is it?” I sat down beside Jamie, and handed him one of the hot corn dodgers. “Especially now.”

“What d’ye mean by that, Sassenach?” Jamie broke the corn dodger open, half-closing his eyes in bliss as he inhaled the hot, fragrant steam.

“For one, you don’t know that it will come to a fight at all,” I pointed out. “For another, if it does, you won’t be facing trained troops—the Regulators aren’t soldiers, any more than your men are. For a third, you won’t really be trying to kill the Regulators; only frighten them into retreat or surrender. And for a fourth”—I smiled at Roger—“the point of hunting is to kill something. The point of going to war is to come back alive.”

Jamie choked on a bite of corn dodger. I thumped him helpfully on the back, and he rounded on me, glaring. He coughed crumbs, swallowed, and stood up, plaid swinging.

“Listen to me,” he said, a little hoarsely. “Ye’re right, Sassenach—and ye’re wrong. It’s no like hunting, aye. Because the game isna usually trying to kill
you
. Mind me—” He turned to Roger, his face grim. “She’s wrong about the rest of it. War is killing, and that’s all. Think of anything less—think of half-measures, think of frightening—above all, think of your own skin—and by God, man, ye will be dead by nightfall of the first day.”

He flung the remains of his corn dodger into the fire, and stalked away.

I sat frozen for a moment, until heat from the fresh corn dodger I was holding seeped through the cloth round it and burned my fingers. I set it down on the log with a muffled “ouch,” and Roger shifted a little on his log.

“All right?” he said, though he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on the direction in which Jamie had vanished, toward the horses.

“Fine.” I soothed my scorched fingertips against the cold, damp bark of the log. With the awkward silence eased by this little exchange, I found it possible to address the matter at hand.

“Granted,” I said, “that Jamie has a certain amount of experience from which to speak … I do think what he said was rather an overreaction.”

“Do you?” Roger didn’t seem upset or taken aback by Jamie’s remarks.

“Of course I do. Whatever happens with the Regulators, we know perfectly well that it isn’t going to be an all-out war. It’s likely to be nothing at all!”

“Oh, aye.” Roger was still looking into the darkness, lips pursed in thoughtfulness. “Only—I think that’s not what he was talking about.”

I lifted one eyebrow at him, and he shifted his gaze to me, with a wry half-smile.

“When he went out hunting with me, he asked me what I knew about what was coming. I told him. Bree said he’d asked her, and she told him, too.”

“What was coming—you mean, the Revolution?”

He nodded, eyes on the fragment of corn dodger he was crumbling between long, callused fingers.

“I told him what I knew. About the battles, the politics. Not all the detail, of course, but the chief battles I remembered; what a long, drawn-out, bloody business it will be.” He was quiet for a moment, then looked up at me, a slight glint of green in his eye.

“I suppose ye’d call it fair exchange. It’s hard to tell with him, but I
think
I maybe scared him. He’s just returned the favor.”

I gave a small snort of amusement, and stood up, brushing crumbs and ashes off my skirt.

“The day you scare Jamie Fraser by telling him war stories, my lad,” I said, “will be the day hell freezes over.”

He laughed, not discomposed in the slightest.

“Maybe I didn’t scare him, then—though he got very quiet. But I tell you what”—he sobered somewhat, though the glint stayed in his eye—“he did scare me, just now.”

I glanced off in the direction of the horses. The moon hadn’t yet risen, and I couldn’t see anything but a vague jumble of big, restless shadows, with an occasional gleam of firelight off a rounded rump or the brief shine of an eye. Jamie wasn’t visible, but I knew he was there; there was a subtle shift and mill of movement among the horses, with faint whickers or snorts, that told me someone familiar was among them.

“He wasn’t just a soldier,” I said at last, speaking quietly, though I was fairly sure Jamie was too far away to hear me. “He was an officer.”

I sat down on the log again, and put a hand on the corn dodger. It was barely warm now. I picked it up, but didn’t bite into it.

“I was a combat nurse, you know. In a field hospital in France.”

He nodded, dark head cocked in interest. The fire threw deep shadows on his face, emphasizing the contrast of heavy brow and strong bones with the gentle curve of his mouth.

“I nursed soldiers. They were
all
scared.” I smiled a little, sadly. “The ones who’d been under fire remembered, and the ones who hadn’t, imagined. But it was the officers who couldn’t sleep at night.”

I ran a thumb absently over the bumpy surface of the corn dodger. It felt faintly greasy, from the lard.

“I sat with Jamie once, after Preston, while he held one of his men in his arms as he died. And wept. He remembers that. He doesn’t remember Culloden—because he can’t bear to.” I looked down at the lump of fried dough in my hand, picking at the burned bits with my thumbnail.

“Yes, you scared him. He doesn’t want to weep for you. Neither do I,” I added softly. “It may not be now, but when the time does come—take care, will you?”

There was a long silence. Then, “I will,” he said quietly. He stood up and left, his footsteps fading quickly into silence on the damp earth.

The other campfires burned brightly, as the night deepened. The men still kept to the company of relative and friend, each small group around its own fire. As we went on, they would begin to join together, I knew. Within a few days, there would be one large fire, everyone gathered together in a single circle of light.

Jamie wasn’t scared by what Roger had told him, I thought—but by what he himself knew. There were two choices for a good officer: let concern for his responsibilities tear him apart—or let necessity harden him to stone. He knew that.

And as for me … I knew a few things, too. I had been married to two soldiers—officers, both; for Frank had been one, too. I had been nurse and healer, on the fields of two wars.

I knew the names and dates of battles; I knew the smell of blood. And of vomit, and voided bowels. A field hospital sees the shattered limbs, the spilled guts, and bone ends … but it also sees the men who never raised a gun, but died there anyway, of fever and dirt and sickness and despair.

I knew that thousands died of wounds and killing on the battlefields of two World Wars; I knew that hundreds upon hundreds of thousands died there of infection and disease. It would be no different now—nor in four years.

And that scared me very much indeed.

The next night, we made camp in the woods on Balsam Mountain, a mile or so above the settlement of Lucklow. Several of the men wanted to push on, to reach the hamlet of Brownsville. Brownsville was the outer point of our journey, before turning back toward Salisbury, and it held the possibility of a pothouse—or at least a hospitable shed to sleep in—but Jamie thought better to wait.

“I dinna want to scare the folk there,” he had explained to Roger, “riding in with a troop of armed men after dark. Better to announce our business by daylight, then give the men a day—and a night—to make ready to leave.” He had stopped then, and coughed heavily, shoulders racked with the spasm.

I didn’t like either the looks of Jamie or the sound of him. He had the patchy look of a mildewed quilt, and when he came to the fire to fill his dinner bowl, I could hear a faint wheezing sigh in every breath. Most of the men were in similar condition; red noses and coughing were endemic, and the fire popped and sizzled every few moments, as someone hawked and spat into it.

I should have liked to tuck Jamie up in bed with a hot stone to his feet, a mustard plaster on his chest, and a hot tisane of aromatic peppermint and ephedra leaves to drink. Since it would have taken a brace of cannon, leg irons, and several armed men to get him there, I contented myself with fishing up a particularly meaty ladle of stew and plopping it into his bowl.

“Ewald,” Jamie called hoarsely to one of the Muellers. He stopped and cleared his throat, with a sound like tearing flannel. “Ewald—d’ye take Paul and fetch along more wood for the fire. It’ll be a cold night.”

It already was. Men were standing so close to the fire that the fringes of their shawls and coats were singed, and the toes of their boots—those who had boots—stank of hot leather. My own knees and thighs were close to blistering, as I stood perforce near the blaze in order to serve out the stew. My backside was like ice, though, in spite of the old pair of breeks I wore under shift and petticoat—both for insulation and for the avoidance of excessive friction while on horseback. The Carolina backwoods were no place for a sidesaddle.

The last bowl served, I turned round to eat my own stew, with the fire at my back, a grateful bloom of warmth embracing my frozen bottom.

“All right, is it, ma’am?” Jimmy Robertson, who had made the stew, peered over my shoulder in search of compliment.

“Lovely,” I assured him. “Delicious!” In fact, it was hot and I was hungry. That, plus the fact that I hadn’t had to cook it myself, lent a sufficient tone of sincerity to my words that he retired, satisfied.

I ate slowly, enjoying the heat of the wooden bowl in my chilly hands, as well as the soothing warmth of food in my stomach. The cacophony of sneezing and hacking behind me did nothing to impair the momentary sense of well-being engendered by food and the prospect of rest after a long day in the saddle. Even the sight of the woods around us, bone-cold and black under growing starlight, failed to disturb me.