72
TINDER AND CHAR
GERALD FORBES WAS A SUCCESSFUL lawyer, and normally looked the part. Even dressed in his campaigning gear, and with the soot of gunpowder staining his face, he still had an air of solid assurance that served him well as a captain of militia. This air had not quite deserted him, but he seemed visibly uneasy, curling and uncurling the brim of his hat as he stood in the doorway of the tent.
At first I assumed that it was merely the discomfort that afflicts many people in the presence of illness—or perhaps awkwardness over the circumstances of Roger’s injury. But evidently it was something else; he barely nodded toward Brianna, who sat by Roger’s bed.
“My sympathies for your misfortune, ma’am,” he said, then turned at once to Jamie. “Mr. Fraser. If I might—a word? And Mrs. Fraser, too,” he added, with a grave bow in my direction.
I glanced at Jamie, and at his nod, got up, reaching by reflex for my medical kit.
There was not a great deal I could do; that much was obvious. Isaiah Morton lay on his side in Forbes’s tent, his face dead-white and sheened with sweat. He still breathed, but slowly, and with a horrible gurgling effect that reminded me unpleasantly of the sound when I had pierced Roger’s throat. He wasn’t conscious, which was a small mercy. I made a cursory examination, and sat back on my heels, wiping sweat from my face with the hem of my apron; the evening had not cooled much, and it was close and hot in the tent.
“Shot through the lung,” I said, and both men nodded, though they both clearly knew as much already.
“Shot in the back,” Jamie said, a grim tone to his voice. He glanced at Forbes, who nodded, not taking his eyes from the stricken man.
“No,” he said quietly, answering an unspoken question. “He wasn’t a coward. And it was a clean advance—no other companies in the line behind us.”
“No Regulators behind you? No sharpshooters? No ambush?” Jamie asked, but Forbes was shaking his head before the questions were finished.
“We chased a few Regulators as far as the creek, but we stopped there and let them go.” Forbes still held the hat between his fingers, and he mechanically rolled and unrolled the brim, over and over. “I had no stomach for killing.”
Jamie nodded, silent.
I cleared my throat, and drew the bloody remnants of Morton’s shirt gently over him.
“He was shot twice in the back,” I said. The second bullet had only grazed his upper arm, but I could plainly see the direction of the furrow it had left.
Jamie closed his eyes briefly, then opened them.
“The Browns,” he said, in grim resignation.
Gerald Forbes glanced at him, surprised.
“Brown? That’s what he said.”
“He spoke?” Jamie squatted beside the injured man, a frown drawing his ruddy brows together. He glanced at me, and I shook my head mutely. I was holding Isaiah Morton’s wrist, and could feel the flutter and stumble in his pulse. He would not likely speak again.
“When they brought him in.” Forbes squatted by Jamie, at last setting down the maltreated hat. “He asked for you, Fraser. And then he said, ‘Tell Ally. Tell Ally Brown.’ He said that several times, before he—” He gestured mutely at Morton, whose half-closed lids showed slices of white, his eyes rolled up in agony.
Jamie said something obscene, very softly, under his breath in Gaelic.
“Do you really think they did this?” I asked, equally softly. The pulse thumped and shuddered under my thumb, struggling.
He nodded, looking down at Morton.
“I shouldna have let them go,” he said, as though to himself. Morton and Alicia Brown, he meant.
“You couldn’t have stopped them.” I reached my free hand toward him, to touch him in reassurance, but couldn’t quite reach him, tethered as I was to Morton’s pulse.
Gerald Forbes was looking at me in puzzlement.
“Mr. Morton . . . eloped with the daughter of a man named Brown,” I explained delicately. “The Browns weren’t happy about it.”
“Oh, I see.” Forbes nodded understandingly. He glanced down at Morton’s body and clicked his tongue, a sound mingling reproof with sympathy. “The Browns—do you know which company they belong to, Fraser?”
“Mine,” Jamie said shortly. “Or they did. I havena seen either of them, since the end of the battle.” He turned to me. “Is there aught to do for him, Sassenach?”
I shook my head, but didn’t let go of his wrist. The pulse hadn’t improved, but it hadn’t gotten worse, either.
“No. I thought he might be gone already, but he isn’t sinking yet. The ball must not have struck a major vessel. Even so . . .” I shook my head again.
Jamie sighed deeply and nodded.
“Aye. Will ye stay with him, then, until . . . ?”
“Yes, of course. Will you go back to our tent, though, and make sure everything’s under control there? If Roger—I mean, come and fetch me if I’m needed.”
He nodded once more and left. Gerald Forbes came near, and put a tentative hand on Morton’s shoulder.
“His wife—I shall see that she has help. If he should come round again, will you tell him that?”
“Yes, of course,” I said again, but my hesitation made him look up, brows raised.
“It’s just that he . . . um . . . has two wives,” I explained. “He was already married when he eloped with Alicia Brown. Hence the difficulty with her family, you see.”
Forbes’s face went comically blank.
“I see,” he said, and blinked. “The . . . ah . . . first Mrs. Morton. Do you know her name?”
“No, I’m afraid I—”
“Jessie.”
The word was barely more than a whisper, but it might have been a gunshot, for its effect in stopping the conversation.
“What?” My grip on Morton’s wrist must have tightened, for he flinched slightly, and I loosened it.
His face was still dead white, but his eyes were open, fogged with pain but definitely conscious.
“Jessie . . .” he whispered again. “Jeze . . . bel. Jessie Hatfield. Water?”
“Wat—oh, yes!” I let go of his wrist and reached at once for the water jug. He would have glugged it, but I let him have only small sips, for the present.
“Jezebel Hatfield, and Alicia Brown,” Forbes said carefully, evidently noting the names in his neatly-docketed lawyer’s mind. “That is correct? And where do these women live?”
Morton took a breath, coughed, and interrupted the cough abruptly with a gasp of pain. He struggled for a moment, then found speech.
“Jessie—in Granite Falls. Ally’s—in Greenboro.” He breathed very shallowly, gasping between words. And yet I heard no gurgling of blood in his throat, saw none oozing from nose or mouth. I could still hear the sucking sound from the wound in his back, and moved by inspiration, I pulled him slightly forward and jerked back the pieces of his shirt.
“Mr. Forbes, have you a sheet of paper?”
“Why . . . yes. I . . . that is . . .” Forbes had thrust his hand into his coat in automatic response, and come out with a folded sheet of paper. I snatched this from him, unfolded it, poured water over it, and plastered it flat against the small hole beneath Morton’s shoulder blade. The ink mixed with blood and ran in little dark runnels over the pasty skin, but the sucking noise abruptly stopped.
Holding the paper in place with my hand, I could feel the beating of his heart. It was still faint, but steadier—yes, it was steadier.
“I’ll be damned,” I said, leaning to the side to look at his face. “You aren’t going to die, are you?”
Sweat poured from his face, and the rags of his shirt hung dark and sodden against his chest, but the edge of his mouth trembled in an attempt at a smile.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I ain’t.” He was still breathing in short gasps, but the breaths were deeper. “Ally. Baby’s . . . next . . . month. Told her . . . I be there.”
I picked up the edge of the blanket with my free hand, and wiped some of the sweat from his face.
“We’ll do our best to see that you are,” I assured him, then glanced up at the lawyer, who had been watching these proceedings with his mouth hanging slightly open.
“Mr. Forbes. I think perhaps we had better take Mr. Morton back to my tent. Will you find a couple of men to carry him?”
He closed his mouth abruptly.
“Oh. Yes. Of course, Mrs. Fraser. At once.” He didn’t move right away, though, and I saw his eyes dart toward the wet sheet of paper plastered over Morton’s back. I glanced down at it. I could read only a few indistinct words between my fingers, but those were enough to tell me that Jamie’s casually insulting references to Forbes as a sodomite were likely inaccurate. “My darling Valencia,” the letter began. I knew only one woman named Valencia in the vicinity of Cross Creek—in the colony of North Carolina, for that matter. Farquard Campbell’s wife.
“I’m terribly sorry about your paper,” I said, looking up at Forbes. Holding his gaze with my own, I carefully rubbed the palm of my hand over the sheet of paper, irrevocably smearing every word on it into a mess of blood and ink. “I’m afraid it’s quite ruined.”
He took a deep breath, and clapped his hat back on his head.
“That is quite all right, Mrs. Fraser. Perfectly all right. I’ll—go and fetch some men.”
EVENING BROUGHT RELIEF from the flies, as well as the heat. Drawn by sweat, blood, and manure, they swarmed over the encampment, biting, stinging, crawling, and buzzing in maddening fashion. Even after they had gone, I kept slapping absentmindedly at arms and neck, imagining I felt the tickle of feet.
But they were gone, at last. I glanced round my small kingdom, saw that everyone was breathing—if with an astounding variety of sound effects—and ducked out of the tent for a breath of cool air, myself.
A highly undervalued activity, breathing. I stood for a moment, eyes closed, appreciating the easy rise and fall of my bosom, the soft inrush, the cleansing flux. Having spent the last several hours in keeping air out of Isaiah Morton’s chest, and getting it into Roger’s, I was inclined to cherish the privilege. Neither of them would draw a single breath without pain for some time—but they were both breathing.
They were my only remaining patients; the other seriously wounded had all been claimed by the surgeons of their own companies, or taken to the Governor’s tent to be tended by his personal physician. Those with minor injuries had gone back to their fellows, to boast of their scars or nurse their pains with beer.
I heard a ruffle of drums in the distance, and stood still, listening. A solemn cadence played, and stopped abruptly. There was a moment’s silence, in which all motion seemed suspended, and then the boom of a cannon.
The Lindsay brothers were nearby, sprawled on the ground by their fire. They too had looked up at the sound of drums.
“What is it?” I called to them. “What’s happening?”
“They’re bringin’ up the dead, Mrs. Fraser,” Evan called back. “Ye’ll no be worrit, aye?”
I waved to them in reassurance, and began to walk toward the creek. The frogs were singing, a descant to the distant drums. Full military honors for the battle dead. I wondered whether the two hanged ringleaders would be buried in the same place, or whether some separate and less honorable grave would be set aside for them, if their families didn’t claim them. Tryon wasn’t the sort to leave even an enemy to the flies.
He would know by now, surely. Would he come, to apologize for his mistake? What apology was possible, after all? It was only by the fluke of fortune and a new rope that Roger was alive.
And he might still die.
When I set my hand on Isaiah Morton, I could feel the burning of the bullet lodged in his lung—but I could feel the stronger burning of his ferocious will to live in spite of it, too. When I set my hand on Roger, I felt that same burning . . . but it was a feeble spark. I listened to the whistle of his breath and in my mind I saw charred wood, with a tiny patch of white-hot ember still alight, but trembling on the verge of abrupt extinction.
Tinder, I thought, absurdly. That’s what you did with a fire that threatened to go out. You blew on the spark—but then there must be char; something for the spark to catch, to feed on and grow.
A creaking of wagon wheels made me look up from my contemplation of a patch of reeds. It was a small wagon, with a single horse, and a single driver.
“Mrs. Fraser? Is that you?”
It took a moment for me to recognize the voice.
“Mr. MacLennan?” I asked, astonished.
He pulled up alongside me, and touched a hand to his hat. By starlight, his face was dim and grave in its shadow.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, drawing close and lowering my voice, though there was no one anywhere near to hear me.
“I came to find Joe,” he replied, with a slight motion of his head toward the wagonbed. It should have been no great shock; I had been seeing death and destruction all day, and I was no more than slightly acquainted with Joe Hobson. I hadn’t known he was dead, though, and the hairs rippled on my forearms.
Without speaking further, I went round to the back of the wagon. I felt the small jerk and vibration through the wood as Abel put on the wagon-brake, and got down to join me.
The body wasn’t shrouded, though someone had laid a large half-clean kerchief over the face. Three huge black flies rested on it, still and bloated. It made no difference, but I dashed them away with the back of my hand. They drifted up buzzing, and settled again, out of my reach.
“Were you in the fighting?” I asked, not looking at Abel MacLennan. He must have been with the Regulators, but there was no smell of gunpowder on him.
“No,” he said softly behind my shoulder. “I’d no wish to fight. I came wi’ Joe Hobson, Mr. Hamilton, and the others—but when it looked as though there would be fighting, I came awa’. I walked away, as far as the mill on the other side of the town. And then, when the sun went down, and no sign of Joe . . . I came back,” he finished simply.
“What now?” I asked. We both spoke softly, as though we might disturb the dead man’s slumber. “Shall we give you help to bury him? My husband—”
“Och, no,” he interrupted, still softly. “I’ll be takin’ him home, Mrs. Fraser. Though I thank ye for the kindness. If ye might spare a bit o’ water, though, or food for the way . . .”
“Of course. Wait here—I’ll get it.”
I hurried back toward our tent, thinking as I went of the distance to Drunkard’s Spring from Alamance. Four days, five, six? And the sun so hot, and the flies . . . but I knew the sound of a Scot whose mind was made up, and went without argument.
I took a moment to check the two men; both breathing. Noisily, painfully—but breathing. I had replaced the wet paper on Morton’s wound with a bit of oiled linen, stuck down round the edges with honey, which made an excellent seal. No leakage; very good.
Brianna still sat by Roger. She had found a wooden comb, and was combing out his tumbled hair, gently removing burs and twigs, working at the tangles, slowly and patiently. She was singing something under her breath—“Frère Jacques.” The bodice of her dress showed wet circles. She had gone out once or twice during the day to relieve the growing pressure of milk, but obviously it was time again. The sight made my own breasts ache with remembered strain.
She looked up and I caught her eye. I touched my breast briefly and nodded toward the tent-flap, eyebrow raised. She gave me a nod and a tiny smile, meant to be bravely reassuring, but I could see the bleakness in her eyes. I supposed it had occurred to her that while Roger might live, he would likely never sing—or perhaps even talk—again.
I couldn’t speak past the lump in my own throat; only nodded to her and hurried out again, the parcel under my arm.
A figure stepped out of the darkness in front of me, and I nearly ran bang into it. I stopped short with an exclamation, clutching the parcel to my chest.
“My apologies, Mrs. Fraser. I did not realize that you didn’t see me.” It was the Governor. He took another step, into the glow of light from the tent.
He was alone, and looked very tired, the flesh of his face furrowed and loose. He smelt of drink; his Council and the militia officers would have been toasting his victory, I supposed. His eyes were clear, though, and his step firm.
“Your son-in-law,” he said, and glanced toward the tent behind me. “Is he—”
“He is alive,” said a soft, deep voice behind the Governor. He whirled round with a smothered exclamation, and my head jerked up.
I saw a shadow move and take shape, and Jamie rose up slowly out of the night; he had been sitting at the base of a hickory tree, invisible in the dark. How long had he been there? I wondered.
“Mr. Fraser.” The Governor had been startled, but he firmed his jaw, hands folded into fists at his sides. He was obliged to tilt his head back to look up at Jamie, and I could see that he didn’t like it. Jamie could see it, too, and plainly didn’t care. He stood close to Tryon, looming over him, with an expression on his face that would have rattled most people.
It appeared to rattle Tryon, too, but he lifted his chin, determined to say whatever he had come to say.
“I have come to make my apologies for the injury done to your son-in-law,” he said. “It was a most regrettable error.”
“Most regrettable,” Jamie repeated, with an ironic intonation. “And would ye care to say, sir, how this . . . error . . . came about?” He took a step forward, and Tryon automatically took a step back. I could see the heat rise in the Governor’s face, and his jaw clench.
“It was a mistake,” he said, through his teeth. “He was wrongly identified as one of the outlawed ringleaders of the Regulation.”
“By whom?” Jamie’s voice was polite.
Small hectic spots burned in the Governor’s cheeks.
“I do not know. By several people. I had no reason to doubt the identification.”
“Indeed. And did Roger MacKenzie say nothing in his own defense? Did he not say who he was?”
Tryon’s lower teeth fastened briefly in the flesh of his upper lip, then let go.
“He . . . did not.”
“Because he was bloody bound and gagged!” I said. I had pulled the gag from his mouth myself, when Jamie had cut him down from the hanging tree. “You didn’t let him speak, did you, you—you—”
The lamplight from the tent-flap gleamed off Tryon’s gorget, a crescent of silver that hung round his throat. Jamie’s hand rose slowly—so slowly that Tryon plainly perceived no threat—and very gently fitted itself around the Governor’s throat, just above the gorget.
“Leave us, Claire,” he said. There was no particular threat in his voice; he sounded merely matter-of-fact. A flash of panic lit Tryon’s eyes, and he jerked backward, gorget flashing in the light.
“You dare to lay hands on me, sir!” The panic subsided at once, replaced by fury.
“Oh, I do, aye. As ye laid hands on my son.”
I didn’t think Jamie actually intended to harm the Governor. On the other hand, this was by no means merely an act of intimidation; I could feel the core of cold rage inside him, and see it like an ice-burn in his eyes. So could Tryon.
“It was a mistake! And one I have come to rectify, so far as I may!” Tryon was standing his ground, jaw tight as he glared upward.
Jamie made a sound of contempt, low in his throat.
“A mistake. And is the loss of an innocent man’s life no more than that to ye? You will kill and maim, for the sake of your glory, and pay no heed to the destruction ye leave—save only that the record of your exploits may be enlarged. How will it look in the dispatches ye send to England—sir? That ye brought cannon to bear on your own citizens, armed with no more than knives and clubs? Or will it say that ye put down rebellion and preserved order? Will it say that in your haste to vengeance, ye hanged an innocent man? Will it say there that ye made ‘a mistake’? Or will it say that ye punished wickedness, and did justice in the King’s name?”
Tryon’s jaw muscles bulged, and his limbs trembled, but he kept his temper in check. He breathed deeply through his nose, in and out, before he spoke.
“Mr. Fraser. I will tell you something that is known to a few, but is not yet public knowledge.”
Jamie didn’t reply, but raised one brow, glinting red in the light. His eyes were cold, dark and unblinking.
“I am made Governor of the colony of New York,” Tryon said. “The letter of appointment arrived more than a month past. I shall leave by July to take up the new appointment; Josiah Martin is made Governor here in my room.” He glanced from Jamie to me, and back. “So you see. I had no personal stake in this; no need to glorify my exploits, as you put it.” His throat moved as he swallowed, but fear had been replaced now by a coldness equal to Jamie’s own.
“I have done what I have done as a matter of duty. I would not leave this colony in a state of disorder and rebellion, for my successor to deal with—though I might rightfully have done so.”
He took a deep breath, and stepped back, forcing his hands to relax from the fists into which they had been clenched.
“You have experience of war, Mr. Fraser, and of duty. And if you are an honest man, you will know that mistakes are made—and made often—in both realms. It cannot be otherwise.”
He met Jamie’s eyes straight on, and they stood in silence, looking at each other.
My attention was jerked away from this confrontation quite suddenly, by the distant sound of a baby crying. I turned, head up, just as Brianna emerged from the tent-flap behind me, in a rustle of agitated skirts.
“Jem,” she said. “That’s Jemmy!”
It was, too. A disturbance of voices at the far side of the camp came closer, resolving itself into the round, flounced shape of Phoebe Sherston, looking frightened but determined, followed by two slaves: a man carrying two huge baskets, and a woman, with a wrapped and squirming bundle in her arms that was making a terrible racket.
Brianna made for the bundle like a compass needle swinging north, and the racket ceased as Jemmy emerged from his blankets, hair sticking up in red tufts and feet churning in paroxysms of joyous relief. Mother and child disappeared promptly into the shadows under the trees, and a certain amount of confusion ensued, with Mrs. Sherston explaining disjointedly to a gathering crowd of interested onlookers that she had just become so distraught, hearing reports of the battle, so terrible, and she feared . . . but Mr. Rutherford’s slave had come to say all was well . . . and she thought perhaps . . . and so . . . and the child would not give over shrieking . . . so . . .
Jamie and the Governor, shaken out of their nose to nose confrontation, had also retired to the shadows; I could see them, two stiff shadows, one tall and one shorter, standing close together. The element of danger had gone out of their tête-à-tête, though; I could see Jamie’s head bent slightly toward Tryon’s shadow, listening.
“. . . brought food,” Phoebe Sherston was telling me, her round face pink with excited self-importance. “Fresh bread, and butter, and some blackberry jam and cold chicken and . . .”
“Food!” I said, abruptly reminded of the parcel I held under my arm. “Do pardon me!” I gave her a quick, bright smile, and ducked away, leaving her open-mouthed in front of the tent.
Abel MacLennan was where I had left him, waiting patiently under the stars. He brushed aside my apologies, thanking me for the food and jug of beer.
“Is there anything—?” I began, then broke off. What else could I possibly do for him?
And yet it seemed there was something.
“Young Hugh Fowles,” he said, tidily tucking the parcel beneath the wagon’s seat. “They said he was taken prisoner. Would—would your husband maybe speak for him, d’ye think? As he did for me?”
“I expect he would. I’ll ask him.”
It was quiet here, far enough from the camp that the sounds of conversation didn’t carry above the song of frogs and crickets, and the rushing of the creek.
“Mr. MacLennan,” I said, moved by impulse, “where will you go? After you’ve taken Joe Hobson back, I mean.”
He took off his hat and scratched his balding head, quite unself-consciously, though the gesture was not one of puzzlement, but merely of one preparing to state something already settled in his mind.
“Och,” he said. “I dinna mean to go anywhere. There are the women there, aye? And the weans. They’ve no man, with Joe dead and Hugh prisoner. I shall stay.”
He bowed to me then, and put on his hat. I shook his hand—surprising him—and then he climbed aboard his wagon and clicked his tongue to the horse. He lifted his hand to me in farewell, and I waved back, realizing the difference in him as I did so.
There was still grief in his voice, and sorrow on his shoulders; and yet he sat upright on his errand, the starlight shining on his dusty hat. His voice was firm, and his hand likewise. If Joe Hobson had left for the land of the dead, Abel MacLennan had come back from there.
Things had settled somewhat by the time I came back to the tent. The Governor and Mrs. Sherston were gone, with her slaves. Isaiah Morton slept, moaning now and then, but without fever. Roger lay still as a tomb-figure, face and hands black with bruises, the faint whistle of his breathing tube a counterpoint to Brianna’s murmured song as she rocked Jemmy.
The little boy’s face was slack, mouth pinkly open in the utter abandonment of sleep. With sudden inspiration, I held out my arms, and Bree, looking surprised, let me take him. Very carefully, I laid the limp, heavy little body on Roger’s chest. Bree made a small movement, as though to catch the baby and stop him sliding off—but Roger’s arm moved up, stiff and slow, and folded across the sleeping child. Tinder, I thought, satisfied.
Jamie was outside the tent, leaning against the hickory tree. When I had made sure of things inside, I came out to join him in the shadows. He raised his arms without speaking, and I came inside them.
We stood together in the shadows, listening to the crackle of campfires and the crickets’ songs.
Breathing.
Great Alamance Camp
Friday 17th May 1771
Parole - Granville
Countersign - Oxford
The Governor impressed with the most affectionate sense of Gratitude gives Thanks to both Officers and Soldiers of the Army for the Vigorous and Generous support they afforded Him Yesterday in the Battle near Alamance, it was to their Valour and steady Conduct that he owed under the Providence of Almighty God, the signal Victory obtained over obstinate and infatuated Rebels,—His Excellency simpathises with the Loyalists for the brave Men that fell and suffered in the Action, but when he reflects that the fate of Constitution depended on the success of the Day, and the important Services thereby rendered to their King and Country, He considers this Loss (though at present the Cause of Affliction to their Relations and Friends) as a Monument of lasting Glory and Honor to themselves and Families.
The Dead to be interred at five OClock this Evening in the Front of the Park of Artillery, Funeral Service to be performed with Military Honors to the deceased—after the Ceremony, Prayers and Thanksgiving for the signal Victory it has pleased Divine Providence Yesterday to Grant the Army over the Insurgents.