PART THREE
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.
My own nose had begun to run rather freely, but I hoped it was merely the result of eating hot food. I swallowed experimentally, but there was no sign of sore throat, nor rattling of congestion in my chest. Jamie rattled; he had finished eating and come to stand beside me, warming his backside at the blaze.
“All right, Sassenach?” he asked hoarsely.
“Just vasomotor rhinitis,” I replied, dabbing at my nose with a handkerchief.
“Where?” He cast a suspicious look at the forest. “Here? I thought ye said they lived in Africa.”
“What—oh, rhinoceroses. Yes, they do. I just meant my nose is running, but I haven’t got la grippe.”
“Oh, aye? That’s good. I have,” he added unnecessarily, and sneezed three times in succession. He handed me his emptied bowl, in order to use both hands to blow his nose, which he did with a series of vicious honks. I winced slightly, seeing the reddened, raw look of his nostrils. I had a bit of camphorated bear grease in my saddlebag, but I was sure he wouldn’t let me anoint him in public.
“Are you sure we oughtn’t to push on?” I asked, watching him. “Geordie says the village isn’t far, and there is a road—of sorts.”
I knew the answer to that; he wasn’t one to alter strategy for the sake of personal comfort. Besides, camp was already made and a good fire going. Still, beyond my own longing for a warm, clean bed—well, any bed, I wasn’t fussy—I was worried for Jamie. Close to, the sigh in his breath had a deeper, wheezing note to it that troubled me.
He knew what I meant. He smiled, tucking away the sodden kerchief in his sleeve.
“I’ll do, Sassenach,” he said. “It’s no but a wee cold in the neb. I’ve been a deal worse than this, many times.”
Paul Mueller heaved another log onto the fire; a big ember broke and roared up with a flare that made us step away in order to avoid the spray of sparks. Well baked in the rear by this time, I turned to face the fire. Jamie, though, stayed facing outward, a slight frown on his face as he surveyed the shadows of the looming wood.
The frown relaxed, and I turned to see two men emerging from the woods, shaking needles and bits of bark from their clothes. Jack Parker, and a new man—I didn’t yet know his name, but he was plainly a recent immigrant from somewhere near Glasgow, judging from his speech.
“All quiet, sir,” said Parker, touching his hat in brief salute. “Cold as charity, though.”
“Aye, Ah hivny felt ma privates anytime since dinner,” the Glaswegian chimed in, grimacing and rubbing himself as he headed for the fire. “Might as well be gone aetegither!”
“I take your meaning, man,” Jamie said, grinning. “Went for a piss a moment ago, but I couldna find it.” He turned amid the laughter and went to check the horses, a half-finished second bowl of stew in one hand.
The other men were already making ready their bedrolls, debating the wisdom of sleeping with feet or head near the fire.
“It’ll scorch the soles o’ your boots, and ye get too close,” argued Evan Lindsay. “See? Charred the pegs right out, and now look!” He lifted one large foot, exhibiting a battered shoe with a wrapping of rough twine tied round it to hold it together. The leather soles and heels were sometimes stitched, but more often fastened with tiny whittled pegs of wood or leather, glued with pine gum or some other adhesive. The pine gum in particular was flammable; I’d seen occasional sparks burst from the feet of men who slept with their feet too near the fire, when a shoe peg suddenly ignited from the heat.
“Better than settin’ your hair on fire,” Ronnie Sinclair argued.
“I dinna think the Lindsays need worry about that owermuch.” Kenny grinned at his elder brother, and tugged down the knit cap he wore—like his two brothers—over a balding head.
“Aye, headfirst every time,” Murdo agreed. “Ye dinna want to chill your scalp; it’ll go right to your liver, and then you’re a dead man.” Murdo was tenderly solicitous of his exposed scalp, being seldom seen without either his knitted nightcap or a peculiar hat made from the hairy skin of a possum, lined and rakishly trimmed with skunk fur. He glanced enviously at Roger, who was tying back his own thick black hair with a bit of leather string.
“MacKenzie needna worry; he’s furred like a bear!”
Roger grinned in response. Like the others, he had stopped shaving when we left the Ridge; now, eight days later, a thick scurf of dark stubble did give him a fiercely ursine look. It occurred to me that beyond convenience, a heavy beard undoubtedly kept the face warm on nights like this; I tucked my own bare and vulnerable chin down into the sheltering folds of my shawl.
Returning from the horses in time to hear this, Jamie laughed, too, but it ended in a spasm of coughing. Evan waited ’til it ended.
“How say ye, Mac Dubh? Heads or tails?”
Jamie wiped his mouth on his sleeve and smiled. Hairy as the rest, he looked a proper Viking, with the fire glinting red, gold, and silver from his sprouting beard and loosened hair.
“Nay bother, lads,” he said. “I’ll sleep warm enough nay matter how I’m laid.” He tilted his head in my direction, and there was a general rumble of laughter, with a spattering of mildly crude remarks in Scots and Gaelic from the Ridge men.
One or two of the new recruits eyed me with a brief, instinctive speculation, quickly abandoned after a glance at Jamie’s height, breadth, and air of genial ferocity. I met one man’s eyes and smiled; he looked startled, but then smiled back, ducking his head in shyness.
How the hell did Jamie do that? One brief, crude joke, and he’d laid public claim to me, removed me from any threat of unwanted advances, and reasserted his position as leader.
“Just like a bloody baboon troop,” I muttered under my breath. “And I’m sleeping with the head baboon!”
“Baboons are the monkeys with no tails?” Fergus asked, turning from an exchange with Ewald about the horses.
“You know quite well they are.” I caught Jamie’s eye, and his mouth curled up on one side. I knew what he was thinking, and he knew I did; the smile widened.
Louis of France kept a private zoo at Versailles, among the inhabitants of which were a small troop of mandrill baboons. One of the most popular Court activities on spring afternoons was to visit the baboon quarters, there to admire both the sexual prowess of the male, and his splendidly multicolored bottom.
One M. de Ruvel had offered—in my hearing—to have his posterior similarly tattooed, if it would result in such a favorable reception by the ladies of the Court. He had, however, been firmly informed by Madame de la Tourelle that his physique was in every way inferior to that of the mandrill, and coloring it was unlikely to improve matters.
The firelight made it difficult to tell, but I was reasonably sure that Jamie’s own rich color owed as much to suppressed amusement as to heat.
“Speakin’ of tails,” he murmured in my ear. “Have ye got those infernal breeks on?”
“Yes.”
“Take them off.”
“What, here?” I gave him a wide-eyed look of mock innocence. “You want me to freeze my arse off?”
His eyes narrowed slightly, with a blue cat-gleam in the depths.
“Oh, it wilna freeze,” he said softly. “I’ll warrant ye that.”
He moved behind me, and the fierce shimmer of the blaze on my flesh was replaced by the cool solidness of his body. No less fierce, though, as I discovered when he put his arms round my waist and drew me back against him.
“Oh, you found it,” I said. “How nice.”
“Found what? Had you lost something?” Roger paused, coming from the horses with a lumpy roll of blankets under one arm, his bodhran under the other.
“Oh, just a pair of auld breeks,” Jamie said blandly. Under cover of my shawl, one hand slid inside the waistband of my skirt. “D’ye mean to give us a song, then?”
“If anyone likes, sure.” Roger smiled, the firelight ruddy on his features. “Actually, I’m meaning to learn one; Evan’s promised to sing me a silkie-song his grannie knew.”
Jamie laughed.
“Oh, I ken that one, I think.”
One of Roger’s eyebrows shot up, and I twisted slightly round, to look up at Jamie in surprise.
“Well, I couldna sing it,” he said mildly, seeing our amazement. “I ken the words, though. Evan sang it often and again, in the prison at Ardsmuir. It’s a bit bawdy,” he added, with that faintly prim tone that Highlanders often adopt, just before telling you something truly shocking.
Roger recognized it, and laughed.
“I’ll maybe write it down, then,” he said. “For the benefit of future generations.”
Jamie’s fingers had been working skillfully away, and at this point, the breeks—which were his, and thus about six sizes too large for me—came loose and dropped silently to the ground. A cold draft whooshed up under my skirt and struck my newly bared nether portions. I drew in my breath with a faint gasp.
“Cold, isn’t it?” Roger hunched his shoulders, smiling as he shivered exaggeratedly in sympathy.
“Yes, indeed,” I said. “Freeze the balls off a brass monkey, wouldn’t it?”
Jamie and Roger burst into simultaneous coughing fits.
SENTRY IN PLACE and horses bedded down, we retired to our own resting place, a discreet distance from the circle by the fire. I had dug the largest rocks and twigs out of the leaf mold, cut spruce branches, and spread our blankets over them by the time Jamie finished his last round of the camp. The warmth of food and fire had faded, but I didn’t begin to shiver in earnest until he touched me.
I would have moved at once to get under the blankets, but Jamie still held me. His original intent appeared intact—to say the least—but his attention was momentarily distracted. His arms were still clasped round me, but he was standing quite still, head up as though listening, looking into the murk of the wood. It was full dark; no more showed of the trees than the glow of fire reflected from the few trunks that stood nearest the camp—the last shadow of twilight had faded, and everything beyond was a depthless black.
“What is it?” I drew back a little, pressing instinctively against him, and his arms tightened round me.
“I dinna ken. But I do feel something, Sassenach.” He moved a little, lifting his head in restless query, like a wolf scenting the wind, but no message reached us save a distant rattling of leafless branches.
“If it’s no rhinoceroses, it’s something,” he said softly, and a whisper of unease raised the hairs on the back of my neck. “A moment, lass.”
He left me, the wind blowing suddenly cold about me with the loss of his presence, and went to speak quietly with a couple of the men.
And what might he feel, out there in the dark? I had the greatest respect for Jamie’s sense of danger. He had lived too long as hunter and as hunted, not to sense the edgy awareness that lay between the two—invisible or not.
He returned a moment later, and squatted beside me as I burrowed shivering into the blankets.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve said we’ll have two guards tonight, and each man to keep his piece loaded and to hand. But I think it’s all right.” He looked beyond me, into the wood, but his face now was merely thoughtful.
“It’s all right,” he repeated again, more certainly.
“Is it gone?”
He turned his head, his lips curling slightly. His mouth looked soft, tender and vulnerable amid the stiff, ruddy wires of his starting beard.
“I dinna ken if it was ever there, Sassenach,” he said. “I thought I felt eyes upon me, but it could have been a passing wolf, an owl—or nay more than a restless spiorad, a-roaming in the wood. But aye, it’s gone now.”
He smiled at me; I saw the flicker of the light that rimmed his head and shoulders as he turned, silhouetted by the fire. Beyond, the sound of Roger’s voice drifted to me above the crackle of the fire, as he learned the melody of the silkie-song, following Evan’s voice, hoarse but confident. Jamie slid into the blankets beside me and I turned to him, cold hands fumbling to return the favor he had done me earlier.
We shivered convulsively, urgent for each other’s warmth. I found him, and he turned me, ruffling up the layers of fabric between us, so that he lay behind me, his arm secure around me, the small secret patches of our nakedness joined in warmth beneath the blankets. I lay facing the darkness of the wood, watching the firelight dance among the trees, as Jamie moved behind me—behind, between, within—warm and big, and so slowly as scarcely to rustle the branches beneath us. Roger’s voice rose strong and sweet above the murmur of the men, and the shivering slowly stopped.