“Mmphm.” That sound indicated agreement, but with reservations, and I glanced up at him.
“What?”
“Aye, well,” he said, rather diffidently. “When wee Fergus lost his hand, we … well, it was Jenny’s notion. But we held a bit of a funeral, ken?”
I bit my lip. “Well, why not? Will it be a family affair, or shall we invite everyone?”
Before he could answer this, I heard Ian’s voice outside, talking to someone, and an instant later his disheveled head pushed through the flap. One of his eyes was black and swollen and there was a sizable lump on his head, but he was grinning from ear to ear.
“Uncle Jamie?” he said. “There’s someone here to see ye.”
“HOW IS IT that ye come to be here, a charaid?” Jamie asked, somewhere after the third bottle. We had had supper long since, and the campfire was burning low.
Hamish wiped his mouth and handed the new bottle back.
“Here,” he repeated. “Here in the wilderness, d’ye mean? Or here, fighting against the King?” He gave Jamie a direct blue look, so like one of Jamie’s own that Jamie smiled, recognizing it.
“Is the second of those questions the answer to the first?” he said, and Hamish gave him the shadow of a smile in return.
“Aye, that would be it. Ye were always quick as the hummingbird, a Sheaumais. In body and mind.” Seeing from my expression that I was perhaps not quite so swift in my perceptions, he turned to me.
“It was the King’s troops who killed my uncle, the King’s soldiers who killed the fighting men of the clan, who destroyed the land, who left the women and the bairns to starve—who battered down my home and exiled me, who killed half the people left to me with cold and hunger and the plagues of the wilderness.” He spoke quietly, but with a passion that burned in his eyes.
“I was eleven years old when they came to the castle and put us out. I turned twelve on the day that they made me swear my oath to the King—they said I was a man. And by the time we reached Nova Scotia… I was.”
He turned to Jamie.
“They made ye swear, too, a Sheaumais?”
“They did,” Jamie said softly. “A forced oath canna bind a man, though, or keep him from his knowledge of right.”
Hamish put out a hand, and Jamie gripped it, though they did not look at each other.
“No,” he said, with certainty. “That it cannot.”
Perhaps not; but I knew they were both thinking, as I was, of the language of that oath: May I lie in an unconsecrated grave, separated forever from my friends and kin. And both thinking—as I was—how great the odds were that that fate was exactly what would happen to them.
And to me.
I cleared my throat.
“But the others,” I said, impelled by the memory of so many I had known in North Carolina, and knowing the same was true of many in Canada. “The Highlanders who are Loyalists?”
“Aye, well,” Hamish said softly, and looked into the fire, the lines of his face cut deep by its glow. “They fought bravely, but the heart of them was killed. They want only peace now and to be left alone. But war doesna leave any alone, does it?” He looked suddenly at me, and for a startling instant I saw Dougal MacKenzie looking out of his eyes, that impatient, violent man who had hungered for war. Not waiting for an answer, he shrugged and went on.
“War’s found them again; they’ve nay choice but to fight. But anyone can see what a pitiful rabble the Continental army is—or was.” He lifted his head, nodding a little, as though to himself, at sight of the campfires, the tents, the vast cloud of starlit haze that hung above us, full of smoke and dust and the scent of guns and ordure. “They thought the rebels would be crushed, and quickly. Oath notwithstanding, who but a fool would join such risky business?”
A man who had had no chance to fight before, I thought.
He smiled crookedly at Jamie.
“I am surprised we were not crushed,” he said, sounding in fact faintly surprised. “Are ye not surprised as well, a Sheaumais?”
“Amazed,” Jamie said, a faint smile on his own face. “Glad of it, though. And glad of you… a Sheaumais.”
They talked through most of the night. When they lapsed into Gaelic, I got up, put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder in token of good night, and crawled into my blankets. Exhausted by the day’s work, I drifted into sleep at once, soothed by the sound of their quiet talk, like the sound of bees in the heather. The last thing I saw before sleep took me was Young Ian’s face across the fire, rapt at hearing of the Scotland that had vanished just as he himself was born.
A GENTLEMAN CALLER
MRS. FRASER?” A pleasant masculine voice spoke behind me, and I turned to see a stocky, broad-shouldered officer in the doorway of my tent, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, a box cradled in one arm.
“I am. May I help you?”
He didn’t look sick; in fact, he was healthier-looking than most of the army, his face very weathered but well-fleshed and ruddy. He smiled, a sudden, charming smile that quite transformed his big beaky nose and heavy brows.
“I was in hopes that we might transact a little business, Mrs. Fraser.” He raised one of the bushy brows and, at my gesture of invitation, came into the tent, ducking only a little.
“I suppose that depends what you’re looking for,” I said, with a curious look at his box. “If it’s whisky, I can’t give you that, I’m afraid.” There was in fact a small keg of this valuable substance hidden under the table at the moment, along with a larger keg of my raw medicinal alcohol—and the smell of the latter was strong in the air, as I was steeping herbs in it. This gentleman was not the first to have been drawn by the scent—it attracted soldiers of all ranks like flies.
“Oh, no,” he assured me, though casting an interested look at the table behind me, where I had several large jars in which I was growing what I hoped was penicillin. “I’m told, though, that you possess a stock of cinchona bark. Is that so?”
“Well, yes. Please, sit.” I waved him to my patient stool and sat down myself, knee to knee. “Do you suffer from malaria?” I didn’t think so—the whites of his eyes were clear; he wasn’t jaundiced.
“No, may the Lord be thanked for His mercy. I have a gentleman in my command—a particular friend—who does, though, very badly, and our surgeon has no Jesuit bark. I hoped that you might be induced, perhaps, to make a trade … ?”
He had laid the box on the table beside us, and at this flipped it open. It was divided into small compartments and contained a remarkable assortment of things: lace edging, silk ribbon, a pair of tortoiseshell hair combs, a small bag of salt, a pepperbox, an enameled snuffbox, a pewter brooch in the shape of a lily, several bright hanks of embroidery silk, a bundle of cinnamon sticks, and a number of small jars filled apparently with herbs. And a glass bottle, whose label read…
“Laudanum!” I exclaimed, reaching for it involuntarily. I stopped myself, but the officer gestured to me to go ahead, and I pulled it carefully from its resting place, drew the cork, and moved the bottle warily past my nose. The pungent, sickly-sweet scent of opium drifted out, a genie in a bottle. I cleared my throat and put the cork back in.
He was watching me with interest.
“I was not sure what might best suit you,” he said, waving at the box’s contents. “I used to run a store, you see—a great deal of apothecary’s stuff, but luxurious dry goods in general. I learnt in the course of my business that it is always best to give the ladies a good deal of choice; they tend to be much more discriminating than do the gentlemen.”
I gave him a sharp glance, but it wasn’t flummery; he smiled at me again, and I thought that he was one of those unusual men—like Jamie—who actually liked women, beyond the obvious.
“I imagine we can accommodate each other, then,” I said, returning the smile. “I ought not to ask, I suppose—I don’t intend to hold you up; I’ll give you what you need for your friend—but with thought of possible future trade, have you got more laudanum?”
He continued to smile, but his gaze sharpened—he had rather unusual eyes, that pale gray often described as “spit-colored.”
“Why, yes,” he said slowly. “I have quite a bit. Do you… require it regularly?”
It occurred to me that he was wondering whether I was an addict; it wasn’t at all uncommon, in circles where laudanum was easily obtainable.
“I don’t use it myself, no,” I replied equably. “And I administer it to those in need with considerable caution. But relief of pain is one of the more important things I can offer some of the people who come to me—God knows I can’t offer many of them cure.”
His brows went up at that. “That’s a rather remarkable statement. Most persons in your profession seem to promise cure to nearly everyone.”
“How does that saying go? ‘If wishes were horses, beggars might ride’?” I smiled, but without much humor. “Everyone wants a cure, and certainly there’s no physician who doesn’t want to give them one. But there are a lot of things beyond the power of any physician, and while you might not tell a patient that, it’s as well to know your own limits.”
“You think so?” He tilted his head, regarding me curiously. “Do you not think that the admission of such limits, a priori—and I do not mean only in the medical way, but in any arena of endeavor—that such an admission in itself establishes limits? That is, might that expectation prevent one from accomplishing all that is possible, because one assumes that something is not possible and therefore does not strive with all one’s power to achieve it?”
I blinked at him, rather surprised.
“Well… yes,” I said slowly. “If you put it that way, I rather think I agree with you. After all”—I waved a hand toward the tent flap, indicating the surrounding army—“if I didn’t—we didn’t—believe that one can accomplish things beyond all reasonable expectation, would my husband and I be here?”
He laughed at that.
“Brava, ma’am! Yes, an impartial observer would, I think, call this venture sheer madness. And they might be right,” he added, with a rueful tilt of the head. “But they’ll have to defeat us, nonetheless. We shan’t give up.”
I heard voices outside: Jamie, talking casually with someone, and in the next moment he had ducked inside the tent.
“Sassenach,” he began, “can ye come and—” He stopped dead, seeing my visitor, and drew up a bit, with a formal bow. “Sir.”
I glanced back at the visitor, surprised; Jamie’s manner made it clear that this was a superior officer of some sort; I’d thought him perhaps a captain or a major. As for the officer himself, he nodded, friendly but reserved.
“Colonel. Your wife and I have been discussing the philosophy of endeavor. What do you say—does a wise man know his limits, or a bold one deny them? And which way do you declare yourself?”