95
THE SUMMER DIM
THE NEXT DAY Roger closed the door behind him and stood on the porch for a moment, breathing the cold bright air of the late morning—late, Christ, it couldn’t be more than half seven, but it was a good deal later than he was accustomed to start the day. The sun had already drifted into the chestnut trees on the highest ridge, the curve of its flaming disk visible in silhouette through the last of the yellow leaves.
The air still held the tang of blood, but there was no trace of the buffalo left, beyond a dark patch in the flattened pumpkin vines. He glanced around, taking stock as he mentally made his list of chores for the day. Chickens scratched in the fall-shabby yard, and he could hear a small group of hogs rooting for mast in the chestnut grove.
He had the odd feeling that he had left his work months, or even years, before, not days. The feeling of dislocation—so strong at first—had left him for quite a long time, but now it had come back again, stronger than before. If he closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, surely he would find himself on the Broad Street in Oxford, the smell of auto exhaust in his nostrils and the prospect of a peaceful morning’s work among the dusty books of the Bodleian ahead.
He smacked a hand against one thigh, to dispel the feeling. Not today. This was the Ridge, not Oxford, and the work might be peaceful, but it would be done with hands, not head. There were trees to be girdled and hay to be gathered; not the field hay, but the small wild patches scattered through the hills that would yield an armload here, an armload there—enough to allow the keeping of an extra cow through the winter.
A hole in the roof of the smoke-shed, made by a falling tree branch. The roof to be mended and re-shingled and the branch itself to be chopped for wood. A fresh privy-hole to be dug, before the ground froze or turned to mud. Flax to be chopped. Fence rails to split. Lizzie’s spinning wheel to mend . . .
He felt groggy and stupid, incapable of simple choice, let alone complex thought. He had slept enough—more than enough—to be physically recovered from the exhaustion of the last few days, but Thomas Christie and his family, coming on the heels of the desperate business of getting Jamie safely home, had taken all the mental energy he had.
He glanced at the sky; a low sweep of mare’s tails, sketched against the sky. No rain for a bit, the roof could wait. He shrugged and scratched his scalp. Hay, then, and tree-girdling. He stuffed a stone jar of ale and the packet of sandwiches Bree had made for him into his bag, and went to fetch the hand-scythe and hatchet.
Walking began to rouse him. It was cold in the shadows under the pines, but the sun was now high enough to make itself felt whenever he walked through the bright patches. His muscles warmed and loosened with the exercise, and by the time he had climbed to the first of the high meadows, he had begun to feel himself again, solidly embedded in the physical world of mountain and forest. The future had gone back to the world of dreams and memory, and he was once more present and accounted for.
“Good thing, too,” he muttered to himself. “Don’t want to be cutting off your foot.” He dropped the ax under a tree, and bent to cut hay.
It wasn’t the soothingly monotonous labor of regular haying, where the big two-handed scythe laid the dry, rich grass in pleasing swathes across a field. This was at once rougher but easier work, that involved grasping a clump of sprouting muhly or blue-stem with one hand, slicing the stalks near the root, and stuffing the handful of wild hay into the burlap sack he had brought.
It took no great strength, but required attention, rather than the mindless muscular effort of field-haying. The grass clumps grew thickly all over this small break in the trees, but were interspersed with outcrops of granite, small bushes, decaying snags, and brambles.
It was soothing labor, and while it did require some watchfulness, soon enough his mind began to stray to other things. The things Jamie had told him, out on the black mountainside, under the stars.
Some he had known; that there was bad feeling between Alex MacNeill and Nelson McIver, and the cause of it; that one of Patrick Neary’s sons was likely a thief, and what should be done about it. Which land to sell, when, and to whom. Others, he had had no inkling of. He pressed his lips tight together, thinking of Stephen Bonnet.
And what should be done about Claire.
“If I am dead, she must leave,” Jamie had said, rousing suddenly from a feverish stupor. He had gripped Roger’s arm with surprising strength, his eyes burning dark. “Send her. Make her go. Ye should all go, if the bairn can pass. But she must go. Make her go to the stones.”
“Why?” Roger had asked quietly. “Why should she go?” It was possible that Jamie was deranged by fever, not thinking clearly. “It’s a dangerous thing, to go through the stones.”
“It is dangerous for her here, without me.” Fraser’s eyes had momentarily lost their sharp focus; the lines of his face relaxed in exhaustion. His eyes half-closed and he sagged back. Then, suddenly, his eyes opened again.
“She is an Old One,” he said. “They will kill her, if they know.” Then his eyes had closed again, and he had not spoken again until the others had found them at daylight.
Viewed now in the clear light of an autumn morning, safely removed from the whining wind and dancing flames of that lost night on the mountain, Roger was reasonably sure that Fraser had only been wandering in the mists of his fever, concern for his wife muddled by phantoms that sprang from the poison in his blood. Still, Roger couldn’t help but take notice.
“She is an Old One.” Fraser had been speaking in English, which was too bad. Had it been Gaelic, his meaning would have been clearer. Had he said “She is ban-sidhe,” Roger would have known whether Jamie truly thought his wife was one of the faery-folk, or only a thoroughly human wisewoman.
Surely he couldn’t . . . but he might. Even in Roger’s own time, the belief in “the others” ran strongly, if less widely admitted, in the blood of the Highlands. Now? Fraser believed quite openly in ghosts—to say nothing of saints and angels. To Roger’s cynical Presbyterian mind, there wasn’t a great deal of difference between lighting candles to St. Genevieve and putting out a pan of milk for the faeries.
On the other hand, he was uneasily aware that he would himself never have disturbed milk meant for the Others, nor touched a charm hung over cow-byre or door lintel—and not only from respect for the person who had placed it there.
The work had warmed him thoroughly; his shirt was beginning to stick to his shoulders, and sweat trickled down his neck. He paused for a moment, to drink from his water gourd and tie a rag round his brow as a sweatband.
Fraser might just have a point, he thought. While the notion of himself or Brianna—even of Claire—as being sìdheanach was laughable on the face of it . . . there was more than one face to it, wasn’t there? They were different; not everyone could travel through the stones, let alone did.
And there were others. Geillis Duncan. The unknown traveler she had mentioned to Claire. The gentleman whose severed head Claire had found in the wilderness, silver fillings intact. The thought of that one made the hairs prickle on his forearms, sweat or no.
Jamie had buried the head, with due respect and a brief prayer, on a hill near the house—the first inhabitant of the small, sun-filled clearing intended as the future cemetery of Fraser’s Ridge. At Claire’s insistence, he had marked the small grave with a rough chunk of granite, unlabeled—for what was there to say?—but marbled with veins of green serpentine.
Was Fraser right? Ye should all go back, if the bairn can pass.
And if they didn’t go back . . . then someday they might all lie there in the sunny clearing together: himself, Brianna, Jemmy, each under a chunk of granite. The only difference was that each would bear a name. What on earth would they carve for dates? he wondered suddenly, and wiped sweat from his jaw. Jemmy’s would be no problem, but for the rest of them . . .
There was the rub, of course—or one of them. If the bairn can pass. If Claire’s theory was right, and the ability to pass through the stones was a genetic trait, like eye color or blood-type—then fifty/fifty, if Jemmy were Bonnet’s child; three chances out of four, or perhaps certainty, if he were Roger’s.
He hacked savagely at a clump of grass, not bothering to grasp it, and grain heads flew like shrapnel. Then he remembered the small pink figure underneath his pillow, and breathed deep. And if it worked, if there were to be another child, one that was his for sure, by blood? Odds three out of four—or perhaps another stone, one day, in the family graveyard.
The bag was almost full, and there was no more hay worth the cutting here. Fetching the hatchet, he slung the bag across his shoulder and made his way downhill, to the edge of the highest cornfield.
It bore no more resemblance to the British cornfields he had been used to than did the high meadows to a hayfield. Once a patch of virgin forest, the trees still stood, black and dead against the pale blue sky. They had been girdled and left to die, the corn planted in the open spaces between them.
It was the quickest way to clear land sufficiently for crops. With the trees dead, enough sunlight came through the leafless branches for the corn below. One or two or three years later, the dead tree roots would have rotted sufficiently to make it possible to push the trunks over, to be gradually cut for wood and hauled away. For now, though, they stood, an eerie band of black scarecrows, spreading empty arms across the corn.
The corn itself had been gathered; flocks of mourning doves foraged for bugs among the litter of dry stalks, and a covey of bobwhite took fright at Roger’s approach, scattering like a handful of marbles thrown across the ground. A ladder-backed woodpecker, secure above his head, uttered a brief shriek of startlement and paused in its hammering to inspect him before returning to its noisy excavations.
“You should be pleased,” he said to the bird, setting down the bag and unlimbering the hatchet from his belt. “More bugs for you, aye?” The dead trees were infested by myriad insects; several woodpeckers could be found in any field of girdled trees, heads cocked to hear the subterranean scratchings of their burrowing prey.
“Sorry,” he murmured under his breath to the tree he had selected. It was ridiculous to feel pity for a tree; the more so in this sprawling wilderness, where saplings sprang out of the thawing earth with such spring vigor as to crack solid rock and the mountains were so thickly blanketed with trees that the air itself was a smoky blue with their exhalations. For that matter, the emotion wouldn’t last longer than it took to begin the job; by the time he reached the third tree, he would be sweating freely and cursing the awkwardness of the work.
Still, he always approached the job with a faint reluctance, disliking the manner of it more than the result. Chopping down a tree for timber was straight-forward; girdling it seemed somehow mean-spirited, if practical, leaving the tree to die slowly, unable to bring water from its roots above the ring of bare, exposed wood. It was not so unpleasant in the fall, at least, when the trees were dormant and leafless already; it must be rather like dying in their sleep, he thought. Or hoped.
Chips of aromatic wood flew past his head, as he chopped his way briskly around the big trunk, and went on without pause to the next victim.
Needless to say, he took care never to let anyone hear him apologize to a tree. Jamie always said a prayer for the animals he killed, but Roger doubted that he would regard a tree as anything other than fuel, building material, or sheer bloody obstruction. The woodpecker screeched suddenly overhead. Roger swung round to see what had caused the alarm, but relaxed at once, seeing the small, wiry figure of Kenny Lindsay approaching through the trees. It appeared that Lindsay had come on the same business; he flourished his own girdling knife in cordial greeting.
“Madain mhath, a Smeòraich!” he shouted. “And what’s this I hear, that we’ve a newcomer?”
No longer even faintly surprised at the speed with which news passed over the mountain, Roger offered his ale-jug to Lindsay, and gave him the details of the new family.
“Christie is their name, is it?” Kenny asked.
“Yes. Thomas Christie, and his son and daughter. You’ll know him—he was at Ardsmuir.”
“Aye? Oh.”
There it was again, that faint tremor of reaction at Christie’s name.
“Christie,” Kenny Lindsay repeated. The tip of his tongue showed briefly, tasting the name. “Mm. Aye, well.”
“What’s the matter with Christie?” Roger demanded, feeling more uneasy by the minute.
“Matter?” Kenny looked startled. “Nothing’s the matter with him—is there?”
“No. I mean—you seemed a bit taken aback to hear his name. I wondered whether perhaps he was a known thief, or a drunkard, or the like.”
Enlightenment spread across Kenny’s stubbled face like sun on a morning meadow.
“Oh, aye, I take your meaning now. No, no, Christie’s a decent enough sort, so far as I ken the man.”
“So far as ye ken? Were ye not at Ardsmuir together, then? He said so.”
“Och, aye, he was there right enough,” Kenny agreed, but seemed still vaguely hesitant. Additional prodding by Roger elicited nothing, though, save a shrug, and after a few moments, they returned to the cutting, pausing only for the occasional swig of ale or water. The weather was cool, thank God, but working like that made the sweat run free, and at the end of the job, Roger took a last drink, and then poured the rest of his water over his head, gasping with the welcome chill on his heated skin.
“You’ll come ben for a bit, a Smeòraich?” Kenny laid down his ax and eased his back with a groan. He jerked his head toward the pines on the far side of the meadow. “My wee house is just there. The wife’s awa’ to sell her pork, but there’s fresh buttermilk in the spring.”
Roger nodded, smiling.
“I will then, Kenny, thanks.”
He went with Kenny to tend his beasts; Lindsay had two milch-goats and a penned sow. Kenny fetched them water from a small nearby creek, while Roger stacked the hay and threw a forkful into the goats’ manger.
“Nice pig,” Roger said politely, waiting while Kenny poured cracked corn into the trough for the sow, a big mottled creature with one ragged ear and a nasty look in her eye.
“Mean as a viper, and nearly as fast,” Kenny said, giving the pig a narrow look. “Near as Godalmighty took my hand off at the wrist yesterday. I meant to take her to Mac Dubh’s boar for breeding, but she wasna inclined to go.”
“Not much ye can do with a female who’s not in the mood,” Roger agreed.
Kenny wobbled his head from one side to the other, considering.
“Och, well, that’s as may be. There are ways to sweeten them, aye? That’s a trick my brother Evan taught me.” He gave Roger a gap-toothed grin, and nodded toward a barrel in the corner of the shed, that gave off the sweet pungency of fermenting corn.
“Aye?” Roger said, laughing. “Well, I hope it works, then.” He had an involuntary vision of Kenny and his imposing wife, Rosamund, in bed together, and wondered in passing whether alcohol played much part in their unlikely marriage.
“Oh, it’ll work,” Kenny said with confidence. “She’s a terror for the sour-mash, is that one. Trouble is, if ye give her enough to improve her disposition, she canna walk just so verra well. We’ll need to bring the boar to her, instead, when Mac Dubh’s on his feet.”
“Is she in season? I’ll bring the boar tomorrow,” Roger said, feeling reckless. Kenny looked startled, but then nodded, pleased.
“Aye, that’s kind, a Smeòraich.” He paused a moment, then added casually, “I hope Mac Dubh is on his feet soon, then. Will he be well enough to have met Tom Christie?”
“He hasn’t met him, no—but I told him.”
“Oh? Oh. Well, that’s fine, isn’t it?”
Roger narrowed his eyes, but Kenny looked away.
His sense of unease about Christie persisted, and seized by a sudden impulse, Roger leaned across the hay and grasped Kenny by the hand, startling the older man considerably. He gave the squeeze, the tap on the knuckle, and then let go.
Kenny gawked at him, blinking in the beam of sunlight from the door. Finally, he set down the empty pail, carefully wiped his hand on his ragged kilt, and offered it formally to Roger.
When he let go, they were still friendly, but the situation between them had altered, very subtly.
“Christie, too,” Roger observed, and Kenny nodded.
“Oh, aye. All of us.”
“All of you at Ardsmuir? And—Jamie?” He felt a sense of astonishment at the thought.
Kenny nodded again, bending to pick up his bucket.
“Oh, aye, it was Mac Dubh started it. Ye didna ken?”
No point in prevarication. He shook his head, dismissing the matter. He’d mention it to Jamie when he saw him—assuming Jamie was in any shape to be questioned then. He fixed Kenny with a direct look.
“So, then. About Christie. Is there anything wrong about the man?”
Lindsay’s earlier constraint had disappeared, now that it was no longer a matter of discussing a Masonic brother with an outsider. He shook his head.
“Och, no. It’s only I was a bit surprised to see him here. He didna quite get on sae well wi’ Mac Dubh, is all. If he had another place to go, I wouldna have thought he’d seek out Fraser’s Ridge.”
Roger was momentarily surprised by the revelation that there was someone from Ardsmuir who didn’t think the sun shone out of Jamie Fraser’s arse, though on consideration, there was no reason why this shouldn’t be so; God knew the man was quite as capable of making enemies as friends.
“Why?”
What he was asking was plain. Kenny looked about the goat-shed, as though seeking escape, but Roger stood between him and the door.
“No great matter,” he said, finally, shoulders slumping in capitulation. “Only Christie’s a Protestant, see?”
“Aye, I see,” Roger said, very dryly. “But he was put in with the Jacobite prisoners. So, was there trouble in Ardsmuir over it, is that what you’re telling me?”
Likely enough, he reflected. In his own time, there was no love lost between the Catholics and the stern Scottish sons of John Knox and his ilk. Nothing Scots liked better than a wee spot of religious warfare—and if you got right down to it, that’s what the entire Jacobite cause had been.
Take a few staunch Calvinists, convinced that if they didn’t tuck their blankets tight, the Pope would nip down the chimney and bite their toes, and bang them up in a prison cheek-by-jowl with men who prayed out loud to the Virgin Mary . . . aye, he could see it. Football riots would be nothing to it, numbers being equal.
“How did he come to be in Ardsmuir, then—Christie, I mean?”
Kenny looked surprised.
“Och, he was a Jacobite—arrested wi’ the rest after Culloden, tried and imprisoned.”
“A Protestant Jacobite?” It wasn’t impossible, or even farfetched—politics made stranger bedfellows than that, and always had. It was unusual, though.
Kenny heaved a sigh, glancing toward the horizon, where the sun was slowly sinking into the pines.
“Come along inside then, MacKenzie. If Tom Christie’s come to the Ridge, I suppose it’s best someone tells ye all about it. If I hurry myself, ye’ll be in time for your supper.”
Rosamund was not at home, but the buttermilk was cool in the well, as advertised. Stools fetched and the buttermilk poured, Kenny Lindsay was good as his word, and started in in businesslike fashion. Christie was a Lowlander, Kenny said; MacKenzie would have gathered as much. From Edinburgh. At the time of the Rising, Christie had been a merchant in the city, with a good business, newly inherited from a hard-working father. Tom Christie was far from lazy, himself, and determined to set up for a gentleman.
With this in mind, and Prince Tearlach’s army occupying the city, Christie had put on his best suit of clothes and gone calling on O’Sullivan, the Irishman who had charge of the army commissary. “Naebody kens what passed between them, other than words—but when Christie came out, he had a contract to victual the Highland Army, and an invitation to dance at Holyrood that night.” Kenny took a long drink of sweet buttermilk and set down the cup, his mustache thickly coated with white. He nodded wisely at Roger.
“We heard what they were like, those balls at the Palace. Mac Dubh told us of them, time and again. The Great Gallery, wi’ the portraits of all the kings o’ Scotland, and the hearths of blue Dutch tile, big enough to roast an ox. The Prince, and all the great folk who’d come to see him, dressed in silks and laces. And the food! Sweet Jesus, such food as he’d tell about.” Kenny’s eyes grew round and dreamy, remembering descriptions heard on an empty stomach. His tongue came out and absently licked the buttermilk from his upper lip.
Then he shook himself back to the present.
“Well, so,” he said, matter-of-factly. “When the Army left Edinburgh, Christie cam’ along. Whether it was to mind his investment, or that he meant to keep himself in the Prince’s eye, I canna say.”
Roger noted privately that the notion of Christie having acted from patriotic motives wasn’t on Kenny Lindsay’s list of possibilities. Whether from prudence or ambition, whatever his reasons, Christie had stayed—and stayed too long. He had left the Army at Nairn, the day before Culloden, and started back toward Edinburgh, driving one of the commissary wagons.
“If he’d left the wagon and ridden one o’ the horses, he might ha’ made it,” Kenny said cynically. “But no; he ran smack into a sackful o’ Campbells. Government troops, aye?”
Roger nodded.
“I heard tell as he tried to pass himself off as a peddler, but he’d taken a load of corn from a farmhouse on that road, and the farmer swore himself purple that Christie’d been in his yard no more than three days before, wi’ a white cockade on his breest. So they took him, and that was that.”
Christie had gone first to Berwick Prison, and then—for reasons known only to the Crown—to Ardsmuir, where he had arrived a year before Jamie Fraser.
“I came at the same time.” Kenny peered into his empty mug, then reached for the pitcher. “It was an old prison—half-falling down—but they’d not used it for some years. When the Crown decided to reopen it, they brought men from here and from there; maybe a hundred and fifty men, all told. Mostly convicted Jacobites—the odd thief, and a murderer or two.” Kenny grinned suddenly, and Roger couldn’t help smiling in response.
Kenny was no great storyteller, but he spoke with such simple vividness that Roger had no trouble seeing the scene he described: the soot-streaked stones and the ragged men. Men from all over Scotland, ripped from home, deprived of kin and companions, thrown like bits of rubbish into a heap of compost, where filth, starvation, and close quarters generated a heat of rot that broke down both sensibility and civilness.
Small groups had formed, for protection or for the comfort of society, and there was constant conflict between one group and another. They banged to and fro like pebbles in the surf, bruising each other and now and then crushing some hapless individual who got in between.
“It’s food and warmth, aye?” Kenny said dispassionately. “There’s naught else to care for, in a place like that.”
Among the groups had been a small obdurate knot of Calvinists, headed by Thomas Christie. Mindful of their own, they shared food and blankets, defended each other—and behaved with a dour self-righteousness that roused the Catholics to fury.
“If one of us was to catch afire—and now and then, someone would, bein’ pushed into the hearth whilst sleepin’—they wouldna piss on him to put it out,” Kenny said, shaking his head. “They wouldna be stealing food, to be sure, but they would stand in the corner and pray out loud, rattlin’ on and on about whore-mongers and usurers and idolaters and the lot—and makin’ damn sure we kent who was meant by it!”
“And then came Mac Dubh.” The late autumn sun was sinking; Kenny’s stubbled face was blurred with shadow, but Roger could see the slight softening that came across it, relaxing the grimness of expression that accompanied Lindsay’s reminiscence.
“Something like the Second Coming, was it?” Roger said. He spoke half under his breath, and was surprised when Kenny laughed.
“Only if ye mean some of us kent Sheumais ruaidh already. No, man, they’d brought him by boat. Ye’ll ken Jamie Roy doesna take to boats, aye?”
“I’d heard something of the sort,” Roger answered dryly.
“Whatever ye heard, it’s true,” Kenny assured him, grinning. “He staggered into the cell green as a lass, vomited in the corner, then crawled under a bench and stayed there for the next day or two.”
Upon his emergence, Fraser had kept quiet for a time, watching to see who was who and what was what. But he was a gentleman born, and had been both a laird and a fierce warrior; a man much respected among the Highlanders. The men deferred to him naturally, seeking his opinion, asking his judgment, and the weaker sheltering in his presence.
“And that griped Tom Christie’s arse like a saddle-gall,” Kenny said, nodding wisely. “See, he’d got to thinking as how he was the biggest frog in the pond, aye?” Kenny ducked his chin and puffed his throat, popping his eyes in illustration, and Roger burst out laughing.
“Aye, I see. And he didn’t care for the competition, was that it?”
Kenny nodded, off-hand.
“It wouldna have been so bad, maybe, save that half his wee band of salvationers started creepin’ off from their prayers to hear Mac Dubh tell stories. But the main thing was the new governor.”
Bogle, the prison’s original governor, had left, replaced by Colonel Harry Quarry. Quarry was a relatively young man, but an experienced soldier, who had fought at Falkirk and at Culloden. Unlike his predecessor, he viewed the prisoners under his command with a certain respect—and he knew Jamie Fraser by repute, regarding him as an honorable, if defeated, foe.
“Quarry had Mac Dubh brought up to see him, soon after he took command at Ardsmuir. I couldna say what happened between them, but soon it was a matter of course; once a week, the guards would come and take Mac Dubh off to shave and wash himself, and he would go take a bit of supper with Quarry, and speak to him of whatever was needed.”
“And Tom Christie didn’t like that, either,” Roger guessed. He was forming a comprehensive picture of Christie; ambitious, intelligent—and envious. Competent himself, but lacking Fraser’s fortunate birth and skill at warfare—advantages that a self-made merchant with social aspirations might well have resented, even before the catastrophe of Culloden. Roger felt a certain sneaking sympathy for Christie; Jamie Fraser was stiff competition for the merely mortal.
Kenny shook his head, and tilted back to drain his cup. He set it down with a sigh of repletion, raising his brows with a gesture toward the jug. Roger waved a hand, dismissing it.
“No, no more, thanks. But the Freemasons . . . how did that happen? You said it was to do with Christie?” The light was nearly gone. He would have to walk home in the dark—but that was no matter; his curiosity wouldn’t let him leave without learning what had happened.
Kenny grunted, rearranging his kilt over his thighs. Hospitality was all very well, but he had chores to do as well. Still, courtesy was courtesy, and he liked the Thrush for himself, not only that he was Mac Dubh’s good son.
“Aye, well.” He shrugged, resigning himself. “No, Christie didna like it a bit, that Mac Dubh should be the great one, when he felt it his own place by right.” He cast a shrewd glance at Roger, assessing. “I dinna think he kent what it might cost to be chief in a place like that—not ’til later. But that’s naught to do with it.” He flapped a hand, waving off irrelevancy.
“The thing was, Christie was a chief himself; only not just so good at it as was Mac Dubh. But there were those who listened to him, and not only the God-naggers.”
If Roger was a trifle taken aback at hearing this characterization of his co-religionists, he disregarded it in his eagerness to hear more.
“Aye, so?”
“There was trouble again.” Kenny shrugged again. “Small things, aye, but ye could see it happening.”
Shifts and schisms, the small faults and fractures that result when two land masses come together, straining and shoving until either mountains rise between them or one is subsumed by the other, in a breaking of earth and a shattering of stone.
“We could see Mac Dubh thinking,” Kenny said. “But he’s no the man to be telling anyone what’s in his mind, aye?”
Almost no one, Roger thought suddenly, with the memory of Fraser’s voice, so low as barely to be heard beneath the whining autumn wind. He told me. The thought was a small sudden warmth in his chest, but he pushed it aside, not to be distracted.
“So one evening Mac Dubh came back to us, quite late,” Kenny said. “But instead of lying down to his rest, he came and summoned us—me and my brothers, Gavin Hayes, Ronnie Sinclair . . . and Tom Christie.”
Fraser had roused the six men quietly from their sleep, and brought them to one of the cell’s few windows, where the light of the night sky might shine upon his face. The men had gathered round him, heavy-eyed and aching from the day’s labors, wondering what this might mean. Since the last small clash—a fight between two men over a meaningless insult—Christie and Fraser had not exchanged a word, but had kept each man to himself.
It was a soft spring night, the air still crisp, but smelling of fresh green things from the sprouting moor and the salt scent of the distant sea; a night to make a man yearn to run free upon the earth and feel the blood humming dark in his veins. Tired or not, the men roused to it, alive and alert.
Christie was alert; wary-eyed and watchful. Here he was, called face-to-face with Fraser and five of his closest allies—what might they intend? True, they stood in a cell with fifty men sleeping round them, and some of those would come to Christie’s aid if he called; but a man could be beaten or killed before anyone knew he was threatened.
Fraser had spoken not a word to start, but smiled and put out his hand to Tom Christie. The other man had hesitated for a moment, suspicious—but there was no choice, after all.
“Ye would have thought Mac Dubh held a bolt of lightning in his hand, the way the shock of it went through Christie.” Kenny’s own hand lay open on the table between them, the palm hard as horn with calluses. The short, thick fingers curled slowly closed, and Kenny shook his head, a broad grin creasing his face.
“I dinna ken how it was Mac Dubh found out that Christie was a Freemason, but he knew it. Ye should have seen the look on Tom’s face when he realized that Jamie Roy was one besides!
“It was Quarry did it,” Kenny explained, seeing the question still on Roger’s face. “He was a Master himself, see.”
A Master Mason, that was, and head of a small military lodge, composed of the officers of the garrison. One of their members had died recently, though, leaving them one man short of the required seven. Quarry had considered the situation, and after some cautiously exploratory conversation on the matter, invited Fraser to join them. A gentleman was a gentleman, after all, Jacobite or no.
Not precisely an orthodox situation, Roger thought, but this Quarry sounded the type to adjust regulations to suit himself. For that matter, so was Fraser.
“So Quarry made him, and he moved from Apprentice to Fellow Craft in a month’s time, and was a Master himself a month after that—and that was when he chose to tell us of it. And so we founded a new lodge that night, the seven of us—Ardsmuir Lodge Number Two.”
Roger snorted in wry amusement, seeing it.
“Aye. You six—and Christie.” Tom Christie the Protestant. And Christie, stiff-necked but honorable, sworn to the Mason’s oaths, would have had no choice, but been obliged to accept Fraser and his Catholics as brethren.
“To start with. Within three months, though, every man in the cells was made Apprentice. And there wasna so much trouble after that.”
There wouldn’t have been. Freemasons held as basic principles the notions of equality—gentleman, crofter, fisherman, laird; such distinctions were not taken account of in a lodge—and tolerance. No discussion of politics or religion among the brothers, that was the rule.
“I can’t think it did Jamie any harm to belong to the officers’ lodge, either,” Roger said.
“Oh,” said Kenny, rather vaguely. “No, I dinna suppose it did.” He pushed back his stool and made to rise; the story was done; the dark had come and it was time to light a candle. He made no move toward the clay candlestick that stood on the hearth, but Roger glanced toward the glow of the banked fire, and noticed for the first time that there was no smell of cooking food.
“It’s time I was away home for supper,” he said, rising himself. “Come with me, aye?”
Kenny brightened noticeably.
“I will, then, a Smeòraich, and thanks. Give me a moment to milk the goats, and I’ll be right along.”