A TIDE IN THE AFFAIRS OF MEN
JAMIE WASN’T ALONE on the road. He’d been dimly aware of horses passing by, heard the distant talk of men on foot, but now that he’d come out of his red haze, he was startled to see how many there were. He saw what was plainly a militia company—not marching, but on the move as a body, knots and clumps of men, solitary riders—and a few wagons coming from the city, piled with goods, women and children afoot beside them.
He’d seen a few folk leaving Philadelphia when he’d come in the day before—God, was it only yesterday?—and thought to ask Fergus about it, but in the excitement of arrival and the later complications had quite forgotten.
His sense of disturbance increased and he kicked up his horse to a faster pace. It was no more than ten miles to the city; he’d be there long before nightfall.
Maybe just as well if it’s dark, he thought grimly. Easier to have things out with Claire alone and undisturbed—and whether the having-out led to beating or bed, he wanted no interference.
The thought was like the striking of one of Brianna’s matches. Just the word “bed” and he was aflame with fresh rage.
“Ifrinn!” he said aloud, and slammed his fist against the pommel. All the trouble to calm himself, and all to waste in an instant! God damn it—damn him, damn her, John Grey—damn everything!
“Mr. Fraser!”
He jerked as though shot in the back, and the horse slowed at once, snorting.
“Mr. Fraser!” came the loud, wheezy voice again, and Daniel Morgan came trotting up alongside on a small, sturdy bay, grinning all over his big scarred face. “Knew that was you, knew it! Ain’t no other rascal that size with that color hair, and if there is one, I don’t want to meet him.”
“Colonel Morgan,” he said, noting auld Dan’s unaccustomed uniform with the fresh insignia on the collar. “On your way to a wedding?” He did his best to smile, though the turmoil inside him was like the whirlpools off the rocks of Stroma.
“What? Oh, that,” said Dan, trying to look sideways down his own neck. “Pshaw. Washington’s a damned stickler for ‘proper dress.’ The Continental army got more generals than they got private soldiers, these days. An officer lives through more ’n two battles, they make him some kind of general on the spot. Now, gettin’ any pay for it, that’s a different kettle of fish.”
He tipped back his hat and looked Jamie up and down.
“Just come back from Scotland? Heard you went with Brigadier Fraser’s body—your kin, I suppose?” He shook his head regretfully. “Cryin’ shame. Fine soldier, good man.”
“Aye, he was that. We buried him near his home at Balnain.”
They continued together, auld Dan asking questions and Jamie replying as briefly as good manners—and his real affection for Morgan—would allow. They hadn’t met since Saratoga, where he’d served under Morgan as an officer of his Rifle Corps, and there was a good deal to say. Still, he was glad of the company, and even of the questions; they distracted him and kept his mind from catapulting him again into fruitless fury and confusion.
“I suppose we must part here,” Jamie said, after a bit. They were approaching a crossroads, and Dan had slowed his pace a bit. “I’m bound into the city myself.”
“What for?” Morgan asked, rather surprised.
“I—to see my wife.” His voice wanted to tremble on the word “wife,” and he bit it off sharp.
“Oh, yes? Could you maybe spare a quarter hour?” Dan was giving him a sort of calculating look that made Jamie instantly uneasy. But the sun was still high; he didn’t want to enter Philadelphia before dark.
“Aye, maybe,” he replied cautiously. “To do what?”
“I’m on my way to see a friend—want you to meet him. It’s right close, won’t take a moment. Come on!” Morgan veered right, waving at Jamie to follow, which, cursing himself for a fool, he did.
Number 17 Chestnut Street
I WAS SWEATING as freely as the duke was by the time the spasm eased enough for him to breathe without the positive-pressure exercise. I wasn’t quite as tired as he was—he lay back in the chair, exhausted, eyes closed, drawing slow, shallow—but free!—breaths—but close. I felt light-headed, too; it’s not possible to help someone breathe without doing a lot of it yourself, and I was hyperventilated.
“Here, a piuthar-chèile.” Jenny’s voice spoke by my ear, and it was only when I opened my eyes in surprise that I realized they’d been closed. She put a small glass of brandy in my hand. “There’s nay whisky in the house, but I expect this will help. Shall I give His Grace a dram, too?”
“Yes, you shall,” the duke said, with great authority, though he didn’t move a muscle or open his eyes. “Thank you, madam.”
“It won’t hurt him,” I said, drawing myself up and stretching my back. “Or you, either. Sit down and have a drink. You, too, Mrs. Figg.” Jenny and Mrs. Figg had worked nearly as hard as I had, fetching and grinding and brewing, bringing cool cloths to mop the sweat, spelling me now and then with the counting, and, by combining their not-inconsiderable force of will with mine, helping to keep him alive.
Mrs. Figg had very fixed notions of what was proper, and these didn’t include sitting down to share a dram with her employer, let alone a visiting duke, but even she was obliged to admit that the circumstances were unusual. Glass in hand, she perched primly on an ottoman near the parlor door, where she could deal with any potential invasions or domestic emergencies.
No one spoke for some time, but there was a great sense of peace in the room. The hot, still air carried that sense of odd camaraderie that binds people who have passed through a trial together—if only temporarily. I gradually became aware that the air was carrying noises, too, from the street outside. Groups of people moving hurriedly, shouts from the next block, and a rumble of wagons. And a distant rattle of drums.
Mrs. Figg was aware of it, too; I saw her head rise, the ribbons of her cap atremble with inquisitiveness.
“Baby Jesus, have mercy,” she said, setting down her empty glass with care. “Something’s coming.”
Jenny looked startled and glanced at me, apprehensive.
“Coming?” she said. “What’s coming?”
“The Continental army, I expect,” said Pardloe. He let his head fall back, sighing. “Dear God. What it is . . . to draw breath.” His breath was still short, but not very much constrained. He raised his glass ceremoniously to me. “Thank you, my . . . dear. I was . . . already in your debt for your . . . kind services to my son, but—”
“What do you mean, ‘the Continental army’?” I interrupted. I set down my own glass, now empty. My heart rate had calmed after the exertions of the last hour but now abruptly sped up again.
Pardloe closed one eye and regarded me with the other.
“The Americans,” he said mildly. “The Rebels. What else . . . would I mean?”
“And when you say, ‘coming . . .’” I said carefully.
“I didn’t,” he pointed out, then nodded at Mrs. Figg. “She did. She’s right, though. General Clinton’s . . . forces are with . . . drawing from Philadelphia. . . . I daresay Wa . . . Washington is . . . poised to rush in.”
Jenny made a small sputtering noise, and Mrs. Figg said something really blasphemous in French, then clapped a broad pink-palmed hand to her mouth.
“Oh,” I said, doubtless sounding as blank as I felt. I’d been so distracted during my meeting with Clinton earlier in the day that the logical consequences of a British withdrawal had not occurred to me at all.
Mrs. Figg stood up.
“I best go and be burying the silver, then,” she said in a matter-of-fact sort of way. “It’ll be under the laburnum bush by the cookhouse, Lady John.”
“Wait,” I said, raising a hand. “I don’t think we need do that just yet, Mrs. Figg. The army hasn’t yet left the city; the Americans aren’t precisely snapping at our heels. And we’ll need a few forks with which to eat our supper.”
She made a low rumbling noise in her throat but seemed to see the sense in this; she nodded and began to collect the brandy glasses instead.
“What’ll you be wanting for supper, then? I got a cold boiled ham, but I was thinking to make a chicken fricassee, William liking that so much.” She cast a bleak look at the hallway, where the bloody smudges on the wallpaper had now turned brown. “You think he’s coming back for his supper?” William had an official billet somewhere in the town, but frequently spent the night at the house—particularly when Mrs. Figg was making chicken fricassee.
“God knows,” I said. I hadn’t had time to contemplate the William situation, what with everything else. Might he come back, when he’d cooled down, determined to have things out with John? I’d seen a Fraser on the boil, many times, and they didn’t sulk, as a rule. They tended to take direct action, at once. I eyed Jenny speculatively; she returned the look and casually leaned her elbow on the table, chin in hand, and tapped her fingers thoughtfully against her lips. I smiled privately at her.
“Where is my nephew?” Hal asked, finally able to take note of something other than his next breath. “For that matter . . . where is my brother?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, putting my own glass on Mrs. Figg’s tray and scooping his up to add to it. “I really wasn’t lying about that. But I do expect he’ll be back soon.” I rubbed a hand over my face and smoothed my hair back as well as I could. First things first. I had a patient to tend.
“I’m sure John wants to see you as much as you want to see him. But—”
“Oh, I doubt it,” the duke said. His eyes traveled slowly over me, from bare feet to disheveled hair, and the faint look of amusement on his face deepened. “You must tell me how John . . . happened to marry you . . . when there’s time.”
“A counsel of desperation,” I said shortly. “But in the meantime we must get you to bed. Mrs. Figg, is the back bedroom—”
“Thank you, Mrs. Figg,” the duke interrupted, “I shan’t be . . . requiring . . .” He was trying to struggle up out of the chair and hadn’t enough breath to talk. I walked up to him and gave him my best piercing head-matron look.
“Harold,” I said in measured tones. “I am not merely your sister-in-law.” The term gave me an odd frisson, but I ignored it. “I am your physician. If you don’t—what?” I demanded. He was staring up at me with a most peculiar expression on his face, something between surprise and amusement. “You invited me to use your Christian name, didn’t you?”
“I did,” he admitted. “But I don’t think anyone has . . . actually called me Harold since . . . I was three years old.” He did smile then, a charming smile quite his own. “The family call me Hal.”
“Hal, then,” I said, smiling back but refusing to be distracted. “You’re going to have a nice refreshing sponge bath, Hal, and then you’re going to bed.”
He laughed—though he cut it short, as he began to wheeze. He coughed a little, fist balled under his ribs, and looked uneasy, but it stopped, and he cleared his throat and glanced up at me.
“You’d think I was . . . three years old. Sister-in-law. Trying to send me . . . to bed without my tea?” He pressed himself gingerly upright, getting his feet under him. I put a hand on his chest and pushed. He hadn’t any strength in his legs and fell back into the chair, astonished and affronted. And afraid: he hadn’t realized—or at least had not admitted—his own weakness. A severe attack usually left the victim completely drained, and often with the lungs still dangerously twitchy.
“You see?” I said, tempering my tone with gentleness. “You’ve had attacks like this before, haven’t you?”
“Well . . . yes,” he said unwillingly, “but . . .”
“And how long were you in bed after the last one?”
His lips compressed.
“A week. But the fool doctor—”
I put a hand on his shoulder and he stopped—as much because he’d temporarily run short of air as because of the touch.
“You. Cannot. Breathe. Yet. On. Your. Own,” I said, separating the words for emphasis. “Listen to me, Hal. Look what’s happened this afternoon, will you? You had a fairly severe attack in the street; had that crowd on Fourth Street decided to set upon us, you would have been quite helpless—don’t argue with me, Hal, I was there.” I narrowed my eyes at him. He did the same back at me but didn’t argue.
“Then the walk from the street to the door of the house—a distance of some twenty feet—threw you straight into a full-blown status asthmaticus; have you heard that term before?”
“No,” he muttered.
“Well, now you have, and now you know what it is. And you were in bed for a week the last time? Was it as bad as this?”
His lips were a thin line and his eyes sparking. I imagined most people didn’t speak to a duke—let alone the commander of his own regiment—like this. Be good for him, I thought.
“Bloody doctor . . . said it was my heart.” His fist had uncurled and the fingers were slowly rubbing his chest. “Knew it wasn’t that.”
“I think you’re probably right about that,” I conceded. “Was this the same doctor who gave you smelling salts? Complete quack, if so.”
He laughed, a brief, breathless sound.
“Yes, he is.” He paused to breathe for a moment. “Though in . . . justice, he . . . he didn’t give me . . . salts. Got them . . . myself. For fainting . . . told you.”
“So you did.” I sat down beside him and took hold of his wrist. He let me, watching curiously. His pulse was fine; it had slowed and was thumping along very steadily.
“How long have you been subject to fainting spells?” I asked, bending to look closely into his eyes. No sign of petechial hemorrhage, no jaundice, pupils the same size . . .
“A long time,” he said, and pulled his wrist abruptly away. “I haven’t time to chat about my health, madam. I—”
“Claire,” I said, and put a restraining hand on his chest, smiling amiably at him. “You’re Hal, I’m Claire—and you aren’t going anywhere, Your Grace.”
“Take your hand off me!”
“I’m seriously tempted to do just that and let you fall on your face,” I told him, “but wait until Mrs. Figg finishes brewing the tincture. I don’t want you thrashing about on the floor, gasping like a landed fish, and no way of getting the hook out of your mouth.”
I did in fact take my hand off his chest, though, and, rising, I went out into the hall before he could find breath to say anything. Jenny had taken up a stand by the open doorway, looking up and down the street.
“What’s going on out there?” I asked.
“I dinna ken,” she said, not taking her eyes off a couple of rough-looking men who were lounging down the other side of the street. “But I dinna like the feel of it a bit. D’ye think he’s right?”
“That the British army is leaving? Yes. They are. And very likely half the Loyalists in the city with them.” I knew exactly what she meant by not liking the feel of things. The air was hot and thick, buzzing with cicadas, and the leaves of the chestnut trees along the street hung limp as dishrags. But something was moving in the atmosphere. Excitement? Panic? Fear? All three, I thought.
“Had I best go to the printshop, d’ye think?” she asked, turning to me with a slight frown. “Would Marsali and the weans be safer if I fetched them here, I mean? If there was to be a riot or the like?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so. They’re well-known Patriots. It’s the Loyalists who will be in danger, if the British army is leaving. They won’t have any protection, and the Rebels may well . . . do things to them. And”—a very unpleasant feeling snaked down my backbone, like a cold, slimy finger—“this is a Loyalist household.” “Without even a door to shut and bolt,” I might have added, but didn’t.
There was a loud thump from the parlor, as of a body hitting the floor, but Jenny didn’t turn a hair, nor did I. We’d both had a lot of experience with stubborn men. I could hear him panting; if he started wheezing again, I’d go in.
“Will it put ye in danger, then, to have him here?” she asked, sotto voce, with a tilt of her head toward the parlor. “Maybe ye’d best come to the printshop.”
I grimaced, trying to evaluate the possibilities. The notes I’d sent with Germain would delay inquiries, and I could put off anyone who did come. But that also meant I could expect no immediate help from the army, if help was needed. And it might be; someone in that hostile crowd on Fourth Street might well have heard where I’d told the chairmen to come. That hostility now showed itself in a different light.
If the Rebels in the city were about to rise and turn upon the defenseless Loyalists—and the currents I sensed beginning to swirl through the streets were dark ones—
“Someone might just show up on your porch wi’ a keg of tar and a bag o’ feathers,” Jenny observed, preempting my thought in a most unnerving way.
“Well, that wouldn’t help His Grace’s asthma a bit,” I said, and she laughed.
“Had ye maybe better give him back to General Clinton?” she suggested. “I’ve had soldiers search my house, wi’ a wanted man hidin’ in the bottom o’ my wardrobe and my newborn bairn in his arms. I dinna think it would be a great deal easier on the nerves to have the Sons o’ Liberty come in here after His Grace, if half what Marsali told me about them is true.”
“It probably is.” A gunshot smacked through the heavy air, flat and dull, from somewhere near the river, and we both tensed. It wasn’t repeated, though, and after a moment I drew breath again.
“The thing is, he’s not stable. I can’t risk taking him through streets filled with dust and tree pollen and then leaving him in the care of an army surgeon, or even that quack Hebdy. Were he to have another attack and no one able to get him through it . . .”
Jenny grimaced.
“Aye, ye’re right,” she said reluctantly. “And ye canna leave him here and go yourself, for the same reason.”
“That’s right.” And Jamie would be coming here, to find me. I wouldn’t leave.
“Ken, if Jamie came and didna find ye here, he’d go to the printshop next thing,” Jenny observed, making the hair prickle on the back of my neck.
“Will you stop doing that!?”
“What?” she said, startled.
“Reading my mind!”
“Oh, that.” She grinned at me, blue eyes creasing into triangles. “Everything ye think shows on your face, Claire. Surely Jamie’s told ye that?”
A deep flush burned upward from my low-cut décolletage, and only then did I recall that I was still wearing the amber-colored silk, which was now soaked with sweat, rimed with dust, and altogether rather the worse for wear. And which had very tight stays. I rather hoped that everything I was thinking didn’t show on my face, because there was quite a bit of information I didn’t mean to share with Jenny just yet.
“Well, I canna tell everything ye think,” she admitted—doing it again, dammit!—“but it’s easy to tell when ye’re thinking about Jamie.”
I decided that I really didn’t want to hear what I looked like when thinking about Jamie and was about to excuse myself to look in on the duke, who I could hear coughing and swearing breathlessly to himself in German, when my attention was distracted by a boy sprinting down the street as though the devil were after him, his coat on inside out and shirttails streaming.
“Colenso!” I exclaimed.
“What?” Jenny said, startled.
“Not what. Who. Him,” I said, pointing at the grubby little creature panting up the walk. “Colenso Baragwanath. William’s groom.”
Colenso, who always looked as though he should be squatting atop a toadstool, came hurtling toward the door with such violence that Jenny and I both leapt out of the way. Colenso tripped on the doorsill and fell flat on his face.
“Ye look as though Auld Hornie himself was after ye, lad,” Jenny said, bending down to hoick him to his feet. “And whatever’s become of your breeks?”
Sure enough, the boy was barefoot and wearing only his shirt beneath his coat.
“They took ’em,” he blurted, gasping for breath.
“Who?” I said, pulling his coat off and turning it right side out again.
“Them,” he said, gesturing hopelessly toward Locust Street. “I put me head into the ordinary, to see was Lord Ellesmere there—he is, sometimes—and there was a knot o’ men all buzzin’ like a hive o’ bees together. They was big lads with ’em, and one of ’em as knew me saw me and raises up a great cry, shoutin’ as I’m a-spyin’ on ’em and mean to take word back to the army, and then they grabbed me and they called me a turncoat and put me coat on backward and the one man said he’d beat me and teach me not to do such as that and pulled off me breeches and . . . and . . . anyway, I squirmed out of his hand and fell down on the floor and crawled out under the tables and took off a-runnin’.” He wiped a sleeve under his runny nose. “His lordship here, ma’am?”
“No,” I said. “Why do you want him?”
“Oh, I don’t, ma’am,” he assured me, with evident sincerity. “Major Findlay wants him. Now.”
“Hmm. Well . . . wherever he is at the moment, he’ll likely go back to his regular billet this evening. You know where that is, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am, but I’m not a-goin’ back in the street ’thout my breeches!” He looked both horrified and indignant, and Jenny laughed.
“Dinna blame ye a bit, lad,” she said. “Tell ye what, though—my eldest grandson’s likely got an old pair of breeches he could spare. I’ll step round to the printshop,” she said to me, “fetch the breeches, and tell Marsali what’s ado.”
“All right,” I said, a little reluctant to see her go. “But hurry back. And tell her not to print any of this in the newspaper!”