* * *
Wilmington was a small town, but because of its fortuitous situation as a seaport at the mouth of a navigable river, it boasted not only a farmer’s market and a shipping dock, but several shops that stocked imported luxuries from Europe, as well as the homegrown necessities of daily life.
“Beans, all right,” Fergus said. “I like beans, even in large quantities.” He shifted the burlap sack on his shoulder, balancing its unwieldy weight. “And bread, of course we must have bread—and flour and salt and lard. Salt beef, dried cherries, fresh apples, all well and good. Fish, to be sure. Needles and thread I see also are certainly necessary. Even the hairbrush,” he added, with a sidelong glance at my hair, which, inspired by the humidity, was making mad efforts to escape the confinement of my broad-brimmed hat. “And the medicines from the apothecary, naturally. But lace?”
“Lace,” I said firmly. I tucked the small paper packet containing three yards of Brussels lace into the large basket he was carrying. “Likewise ribbons. One yard each of wide silk ribbon,” I told the perspiring young girl behind the counter. “Red—that’s yours, Fergus, so don’t complain—green for Ian, yellow for Duncan, and the very dark blue for Jamie. And no, it isn’t an extravagance; Jamie doesn’t want us to look like ragamuffins when we meet his uncle and aunt.”
“What about you, Auntie?” Ian said, grinning. “Surely ye willna let us men be dandies, and you go plain as a sparrow?”
Fergus blew air between his lips, in mingled exasperation and amusement.
“That one,” he said, pointing to a wide roll of dark pink.
“That’s a color for a young girl,” I protested.
“Women are never too old to wear pink,” Fergus replied firmly. “I have heard les mesdames say so, many times.” I had heard les mesdames’ opinions before; Fergus’s early life had been spent in a brothel, and judging from his reminiscences, not a little of his later life, too. I rather hoped that he could overcome the habit now that he was married to Jamie’s stepdaughter, but with Marsali still in Jamaica awaiting the birth of their first child, I had my doubts. Fergus was a Frenchman born, after all.
“I suppose the Madams would know,” I said. “All right, the pink, too.”
Burdened with baskets and bags of provisions, we made our way out into the street. It was hot and thickly humid, but there was a breeze from the river, and after the stifling confines of the shop, the air seemed sweet and refreshing. I glanced toward the harbor, where the masts of several small ships poked up, swaying gently to the rocking of the current, and saw Jamie’s tall figure stride out between two buildings, Rollo pacing close behind.
Ian hallooed and waved, and Rollo came bounding down the street, tail wagging madly at sight of his master. There were few people out at this time of day; those with business in the narrow street prudently flattened themselves against the nearest wall to avoid the rapturous reunion.
“My Gawd,” said a drawling voice somewhere above me. “That’ll be the biggest dawg I believe I’ve ever seen.” I turned to see a gentleman detach himself from the front of a tavern, and lift his hat politely to me. “Your servant, ma’am. He ain’t partial to human flesh, I do sincerely hope?”
I looked up at the man addressing me—and up. I refrained from expressing the opinion that he, of all people, could scarcely find Rollo a threat.
My interlocutor was one of the tallest men I’d ever seen; taller by several inches even than Jamie. Lanky and rawboned with it, his huge hands dangled at the level of my elbows, and the ornately beaded leather belt about his midriff came to my chest. I could have pressed my nose into his navel, had the urge struck me, which fortunately it didn’t.
“No, he eats fish,” I assured my new acquaintance. Seeing me craning my neck, he courteously dropped to his haunches, his knee joints popping like rifle shots as he did so. His face thus coming into view, I found his features still obscured by a bushy black beard. An incongruous snub nose poked out of the undergrowth, surmounted by a pair of wide and gentle hazel eyes.
“Well, I’m surely obliged to hear that. Wouldn’t care to have a chunk taken out my leg, so early in the day.” He removed a disreputable slouch hat with a ragged turkey feather thrust through the brim, and bowed to me, loose snaky black locks falling forward on his shoulders. “John Quincy Myers, your servant, ma’am.”
“Claire Fraser,” I said, offering him a hand in fascination. He squinted at it a moment, brought my fingers to his nose and sniffed them, then looked up and broke into a broad smile, nonetheless charming for missing half its teeth.
“Why, you’ll maybe be a yarb-woman, won’t you?”
“I will?”
He turned my hand gently over, tracing the chlorophyll stains around my cuticles.
“A green-fingered lady might just be tendin’ her roses, but a lady whose hands smell of sassafras root and Jesuit bark is like to know more than how to make flowers bloom. Don’t you reckon that’s so?” he asked, turning a friendly gaze on Ian, who was viewing Mr. Myers with unconcealed interest.
“Oh, aye,” Ian assured him. “Auntie Claire’s a famous healer. A wise-woman!” He glanced proudly at me.
“That so, boy? Well, now.” Mr. Myers’s eyes went round with interest, and swiveled back to focus on me. “Smite me if this ain’t Lucifer’s own luck! And me thinkin’ I’d have to wait till I come to the mountains and find me a shaman to take care of it.”
“Are you ill, Mr. Myers?” I asked. He didn’t look it, but it was hard to tell, what with the beard, the hair, and a thin layer of greasy brown dirt that seemed to cover everything not concealed by his ragged buckskins. The sole exception was his forehead; normally protected from the sun by the black felt hat, it was now exposed to view, a wide flat slab of purest white.
“Not to say ill, I don’t reckon,” he replied. He suddenly stood up, and began to fumble up the tail of his buckskin shirt. “It ain’t the clap or the French pox, anyhow, ’cause I seen those before.” What I had thought were trousers were in fact long buckskin leggings, surmounted by a breechclout. Still talking, Mr. Myers had hold of the leather thong holding up this latter garment, and was fumbling with the knot.
“Damnedest thing, though; all of a sudden this great big swelling come up just along behind of my balls. Purely inconvenient, as you may imagine, though it don’t hurt me none to speak of, save on horseback. Might be you could take a peep and tell me what I best do for it, hm?”
“Ah.…” I said, with a frantic glance at Fergus, who merely shifted his sack of beans and looked amused, blast him.
“Would I have the pleasure to make the acquaintance of Mr. John Myers?” said a polite Scottish voice over my shoulder.
Mr. Myers ceased fumbling with his breechclout and glanced up inquiringly.
“Can’t say whether it’s a pleasure to you or not, sir,” he replied courteously. “But be you lookin’ for Myers, you’ve found him.”
Jamie stepped up beside me, tactfully inserting his body between me and Mr. Myers’s breechclout. He bowed formally, hat under his arm.
“James Fraser, your servant, sir. I was told to offer the name of Mr. Hector Cameron by way of introduction.”
Mr. Myers looked at Jamie’s red hair with interest.
“Scotch, are you? Be you one of them Highlander fellows?”
“I am a Scotsman, aye, and a Highlander.”
“Be you kin to Old Hector Cameron?”
“He is my uncle by marriage, sir, though I have not met him myself. I was told that he was well known to you, and that you might consent to guide my party to his plantation.”
The two men were frankly sizing each other up, eyes flicking head to toe as they talked, appraising bearing, dress, and armament. Jamie’s eyes rested approvingly on the long sheath-knife at the woodsman’s belt, while Mr. Myers’s nostrils flared wide with interest.
“Comme deux chiens,” Fergus remarked softly behind me. Like two dogs. “…aux culs.” Next thing you know, they will be smelling each other’s backside.
Mr. Myers darted a glance at Fergus, and I saw a quick flash of amusement in the hazel depths before he returned to his assessment of Jamie. Uncultured the woodsman might be, but he plainly had some working knowledge of French.
Given Mr. Myers’s olfactory inclinations and lack of self-consciousness, I might not have been surprised to see him drop to all fours and perform in the manner Fergus had suggested. As it was, he contented himself with a careful inspection that took in not only Jamie but Ian, Fergus, myself, and Rollo.
“Nice dawg,” he said casually, holding out a set of massive knuckles to the latter. Rollo, thus invited, instituted his own inspection, sniffing industriously from moccasins to breechclout as the conversation went on.
“Your uncle, eh? Does he know you’re coming?”
Jamie shook his head.
“I canna say. I sent a letter from Georgia, a month ago, but I’ve no way to tell whether he’s had it yet.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Myers said thoughtfully. His eyes lingered on Jamie’s face, then passed swiftly over the rest of us.
“I’ve met your wife. This’ll be your son?” He nodded at Ian.
“My nephew, Ian. My foster son, Fergus.” Jamie made the introductions with a wave of his hand. “And a friend, Duncan Innes, who’ll be along presently.”
Myers grunted, nodding, and made up his mind.
“Well, I should reckon I can get you to Cameron’s all right. Wanted to be sure you was kin, but you got the look of the widder Cameron, in the face. The boy some, too.”
Jamie’s head jerked up sharply.
“The widow Cameron?”
A sly smile flitted through the thicket of beard.
“Old Hector caught the morbid sore throat, up and died late last winter. Don’t figure they get much mail, wherever he is now.”
Abandoning the Camerons for matters of more immediate personal interest, Myers resumed his interrupted excavations.
“Big purple thing,” he explained to me, fumbling his loosened thong. “Almost as big as one o’ my balls. You don’t think it might could be as I’ve decided sudden-like to grow an extry, do you?”
“Well, no,” I said, biting my lip. “I really doubt it.” He moved very slowly, but had almost got the knot in his thong undone; people in the street were beginning to pause, staring.
“Please don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “I do believe I know what that is—it’s an inguinal hernia.”
The wide hazel eyes got wider.
“It is?” He seemed impressed, and not at all displeased by the news.
“I’d have to look—somewhere indoors, that is,” I added hastily “—to be sure, but it sounds like it. It’s quite easy to repair surgically, but…” I hesitated, looking up at the Colossus. “I really couldn’t—I mean, you’d need to be asleep. Unconscious,” I amplified. “I’d have to cut you, and sew you up again, you see. Perhaps a truss—a brace—might be better, though.”
Myers scratched slowly at his jaw, meditating.
“No, I done tried that, ’twon’t do. Cuttin’, though…You folks be staying here in the town for a spell before you head up to Cameron’s?”
“Not long,” Jamie interrupted firmly. “We shall be sailing upriver to my aunt’s estate, as soon as passage can be arranged.”
“Oh.” The giant pondered this for a moment, then nodded, beaming.
“I know the very man for you, sir. I’ll go this minute and fetch Josh Freeman out the Sailor’s Rest. Sun’s still high, he’ll be not too drunk to do business yet.” He swept me a bow, battered hat to his middle. “And then could be your wife might have the kindness to meet me in yonder tavern—it’s a mite more genteel than the Sailor’s—and have a look at this…this…” I saw his lips try to form themselves around “inguinal hernia,” then give up the effort and relax. “This yere obstruction.”
He clapped the hat back on his head, and with a nod to Jamie, was off.
Jamie watched the mountain man’s stiff-legged retreat down the street, slowed by cordial greetings to all he passed.
“What is it about ye, Sassenach, I wonder?” he said conversationally, eyes still fixed on Myers.
“What is what about me?”
He turned then, and gave me a narrow eye.
“What it is that makes every man ye meet want to take off his breeks within five minutes of meetin’ ye.”
Fergus choked slightly, and Ian went pink. I looked as demure as possible.
“Well, if you don’t know, my dear,” I said, “no one does. I seem to have found us a boat. And what have you been up to this morning?”
* * *
Industrious as always, Jamie had found us a potential gem-buyer. And not only a buyer, but an invitation to dinner with the Governor.
“Governor Tryon’s in the town just now,” he explained. “Staying at the house of a Mr. Lillington. I talked this morning wi’ a merchant named Mac-Eachern, who put me on to a man named MacLeod, who—”
“Who introduced you to MacNeil, who took you to drink with MacGregor, who told you all about his nephew Bethune, who’s the second cousin half removed of the boy who cleans the Governor’s boots,” I suggested, familiar by this time with the Byzantine pathways of Scottish business dealings.
Put two Highland Scots in a room together, and within ten minutes they would know each other’s family histories for the last two hundred years, and have discovered a helpful number of mutual relatives and acquaintances.
Jamie grinned.
“It was the Governor’s wife’s secretary,” he corrected, “and his name’s Murray. That’ll be your Da’s cousin Maggie’s eldest boy from Loch Linnhe,” he added, to Ian. “His father emigrated after the Rising.” Ian nodded casually, doubtless docketing the information in his own version of the genetic encyclopedia, stored against the day it would prove useful.
Edwin Murray, the Governor’s wife’s secretary, had welcomed Jamie warmly as a kinsman—if only by marriage—and had obtained an invitation for us to dine at Lillington’s that night, there ostensibly to acquaint the Governor with matters of trade in the Indies. In reality, we were intending to acquaint ourselves with Baron Penzler—a well-to-do German nobleman who would be dining there as well. The Baron was a man not only of wealth but of taste, with a reputation as a collector of fine objects.
“Well, it sounds a good idea,” I said dubiously. “But I think you’d better go alone. I can’t be dining with governors looking like this.”
“Ah, ye look f—” His voice faded as he actually looked at me. His eye roamed slowly over me, taking in my grimy, bedraggled gown, wild hair and ragged bonnet.
He frowned at me. “No, I want ye there, Sassenach; I may need a distraction.”
“Speaking of distraction, how many pints did it take you to wangle an invitation to dinner?” I asked, mindful of our dwindling finances. Jamie didn’t blink, but took my arm, turning me toward the row of shops.
“Six, but he paid half. Come along, Sassenach; dinner’s at seven, and we must find ye something decent to wear.”
“But we can’t afford—”
“It’s an investment,” he said firmly. “And besides, Cousin Edwin has advanced me a bit against the sale of a stone.”