Written in My Own Heart's Blood

47 SOMETHING SUITABLE IN WHICH TO GO TO WAR

June 19, 1778

Philadelphia

I WOKE COMPLETELY disoriented, to the splat of water dripping into a wooden bucket, the sharp smells of wood pulp and printer’s ink, the softer musk of Jamie’s body and frying bacon, the clank of pewter plates, and the loud braying of a mule. The latter noise brought back memory at once, and I sat up, sheet clutched to my bosom.

I was naked, and I was in the loft of Fergus’s printshop. When we had left Kingsessing the day before, during a brief pause in the rain, we had found Fergus patiently sheltering in a toolshed near the gates, Clarence the mule and two horses tethered under its eaves.

“You haven’t been out here all this time!” I’d blurted upon seeing him.

“Did it take that long?” he inquired, cocking a dark brow at Jamie and giving him the sort of knowing look that Frenchmen appear to be born with.

“Mmphm,” Jamie replied ambiguously, and took my arm. “I rode Clarence out, Sassenach, but I asked Fergus to come on a wee bit later wi’ a horse for you. The mule canna carry us both, and my back willna stand walking that far.”

“What’s the matter with your back?” I asked, suspicious.

“Nothing that a night’s sleep in a good bed willna cure,” he replied, and, stooping so I could put a foot in his hands, tossed me up into the saddle.

It had been past dark when we made it back to the printshop. I’d sent Germain at once to Jenny at Number 17 with word where I was but had gone to bed with Jamie before he came back. I wondered vaguely who else was at the house on Chestnut Street and what they were doing: was Hal still a captive, or had Young Ian decided to release him? If not, had Hal assassinated Denny Hunter, or had Mrs. Figg shot him?

Jamie had told me he’d left Ian in charge of the situation—or situations; there seemed to have been a great deal going on the day before. All of it seemed unreal and dreamlike, both the events I’d participated in and the ones Jamie had told me about on the ride back. The only vividly real recollection I had was of our conversation in the garden—and what followed it, in the potting shed. My flesh still felt the echoes.

Breakfast was plainly preparing below; besides the delectable scent of frying bacon, I could smell toasted yeast bread and fresh honey. My stomach gave a loud gurgle at this, and as though the sound had caused it, the ladder leading up into the loft began to shake. Someone was coming up, moving slowly, and in case it wasn’t Jamie, I seized my shift and pulled it hastily over my head.

It wasn’t. A pewter tray rose slowly into sight, laid with a plate piled with food, a bowl of porridge, and a pottery mug of something steaming; it couldn’t be tea and didn’t smell like coffee. As the tray levitated, Henri-Christian’s beaming face appeared below it; he was balancing the thing on his head.

I held my breath until he’d stepped off the ladder, and then, as he removed the tray from his head and presented it to me with a ceremonious little bow, applauded.

“Merveilleux!” I told him, and he grinned from ear to ear.

“Félicité wanted to try,” he told me proudly, “but she can’t do it with a full tray yet. She spills.”

“Well, we can’t have that. Thank you, sweetheart.” I leaned forward to kiss him—his dark wavy hair smelled of woodsmoke and ink—and took the mug. “What’s this?”

He looked at it dubiously and shrugged. “It’s hot.”

“So it is.” I cradled the mug in my hands. The loft had been warm the night before, the day’s heat trapped under the roof, but it had rained most of the night, and the chilly damp had come through the holes in the roof—four or five vessels placed under the leaks made a symphony of plinking sounds. “Where’s Grand-père?”

Henri-Christian’s face at once went bright red, his lips pressed tight together, and he shook his head vigorously.

“What?” I said, surprised. “Is it a secret?”

“Don’t you tell her!” Joanie’s shrill voice floated up from the shop below. “Grand-père said not to!”

“Oh, a surprise, is it?” I asked, smiling. “Well, perhaps you’d best go down and help your mama, then, so you don’t give it away by mistake.”

He giggled, hands pressed over his mouth, then reached up over his head, gave a convulsive leap, and flipped over backward, landing adroitly on his hands. He walked on them to the ladder, stocky little legs splayed to keep his balance, and for an instant my heart was in my mouth as he reached the edge and I thought he might try to go down the ladder upside down. He flipped over again, though, landing neatly on the top rung, and scampered out of sight like a squirrel, giggling all the way down.

Smiling, I plumped up the sparse bedding—we had slept on a flattened pallet of worn straw from the stable, which smelled rather strongly of Clarence, and on our half-dried cloaks, covered with a spare sheet and a ragged blanket, though Joanie and Félicité had given us one of their feather pillows, they sharing the other—and sat back against the wall, the tray perched on a keg of ink powder. I was surrounded by stacks of paper, these shielded by oilcloth from the leaks. Some of it was blank reams awaiting the press, some of it pamphlets, circulars, posters, or the guts of unbound books, awaiting delivery to customers or to the bookbinder.

I could hear Marsali’s voice below, back in the living quarters behind the shop, raised in maternal command. No male voices but Henri-Christian’s, though; Fergus and Germain must have gone out with Clarence the mule to make the morning deliveries of L’Oignon, the satirical newspaper started by Fergus and Marsali in North Carolina.

Normally, L’Oignon was a weekly paper, but there was a copy on my tray of the special edition for today, with a large cartoon on the first page, showing the British army as a horde of cockroaches, fleeing Philadelphia with tattered flags dragging behind them and trailing ribbon banners filled with speeches of futile threat. A large buckled shoe labeled General Washington was squashing some of the more laggard roaches.

There was a large glob of opaque yellow-white honey melting slowly in the middle of the porridge; I stirred it in, poured a bit of cream over it, and settled down to enjoy breakfast in bed, along with an article noting the imminent entrance into Philadelphia of General Arnold, who was taking office as the military governor of the city, welcoming him and praising his military record and gallant exploits at Saratoga.

How long? I thought then, setting down the paper with a small shiver. When? I had the feeling that it had been—would be—much later in the war, when circumstance turned Benedict Arnold from patriot to traitor. But I didn’t know.

It didn’t matter, I told myself firmly. I couldn’t change it. And long before that happened, we would be safely back on the Ridge, rebuilding our house and our lives. Jamie was alive. Everything would be all right.

The bell over the shop door below rang, and there was an excited gabble as the children stampeded out of the kitchen. The soft rumble of Jamie’s voice floated up over the confusion of shrill greetings, and I caught Marsali’s voice among them, stunned.

“Da! What have ye done?”

Alarmed, I scrambled out of my nest and went on hands and knees to the edge of the loft to look down. Jamie stood in the middle of the shop, surrounded by admiring children, his loose hair spangled with raindrops, cloak folded over his arm—dressed in the dark blue and buff of a Continental officer.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I exclaimed. He looked up and his eyes met mine like those of a guilty puppy.

“I’m sorry, Sassenach,” he said apologetically. “I had to.”

HE’D COME UP to the loft and pulled the ladder up behind him, to prevent the children coming up. I was dressing quickly—or trying to—as he told me about Dan Morgan, about Washington and the other Continental generals. About the coming battle.

“Sassenach, I had to,” he said again, softly. “I’m that sorry.”

“I know,” I said. “I know you did.” My lips were stiff. “I—you—I’m sorry, too.”

I was trying to fasten the dozen tiny buttons that closed the bodice of my gown, but my hands shook so badly that I couldn’t even grasp them. I stopped trying and dug my hairbrush out of the bag he’d brought me from the Chestnut Street house.

He made a small sound in his throat and took it out of my hand. He threw it onto our makeshift couch and put his arms around me, holding me tight with my face buried in his chest. The cloth of his new uniform smelled of fresh indigo, walnut hulls, and fuller’s earth; it felt strange and stiff against my face. I couldn’t stop shaking.

“Talk to me, a nighean,” he whispered into my tangled hair. “I’m afraid, and I dinna want to feel so verra much alone just now. Speak to me.”

“Why has it always got to be you?” I blurted into his chest.

That made him laugh, a little shakily, and I realized that all the trembling wasn’t coming from me.

“It’s no just me,” he said, and stroked my hair. “There are a thousand other men readying themselves today—more—who dinna want to do it, either.”

“I know,” I said again. My breathing was a little steadier. “I know.” I turned my face to the side in order to breathe, and all of a sudden began to cry, quite without warning.

“I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I don’t mean—I don’t want t-to make it h-harder for you. I—I—oh, Jamie, when I knew you were alive—I wanted so much to go home. To go home with you.”

His arms tightened hard round me. He didn’t speak, and I knew it was because he couldn’t.

“So did I,” he whispered at last. “And we will, a nighean. I promise ye.”

The sounds from below floated up around us: the sounds of children running back and forth between the shop and the kitchen, Marsali singing to herself in Gaelic as she made fresh ink for the press from varnish and lamp-black. The door opened, and cool, rainy air blew in with Fergus and Germain, adding their voices to the cheerful confusion.

We stood wrapped in each other’s arms, taking comfort from our family below, yearning for the others we might never see again, at once at home and homeless, balanced on a knife edge of danger and uncertainty. But together.

“You’re not going off to war without me,” I said firmly, straightening up and sniffing. “Don’t even think about it.”

“I wouldna dream of it,” he assured me gravely, went to wipe his nose on his uniform sleeve, thought better of it, and stopped, looking at me helplessly. I laughed—tremulous, but it was a laugh nonetheless—and gave him the handkerchief I’d tucked automatically into my bosom when I fastened my stays. Like Jenny, I always had one.

“Sit down,” I said, swallowing as I picked up the hairbrush. “I’ll plait your hair for you.”

He’d washed it this morning; it was clean and damp, the soft red strands cool in my hands and smelling—oddly—of French soap, scented with bergamot. I rather missed the scent of sweat and cabbage that had surrounded me all night.

“Where did you bathe?” I asked curiously.

“At the house on Chestnut Street,” he answered, a little tersely. “My sister made me. She said I couldna turn up to be a general smelling like a stale dinner, and there was a tub and hot water to spare.”

“Did she?” I murmured. “Um . . . speaking of Chestnut Street . . . how is His Grace, the Duke of Pardloe?”

“Gone before dawn, Jenny said,” he said, bending his head to aid in the plaiting. His neck was warm under my fingers. “According to Ian, Denny Hunter said he was well enough to go, provided that he took along a flask of your magic potion. So Mrs. Figg gave him back his breeches—wi’ some reluctance, I understand—and he went.”

“Went where?” I asked. His hair was more heavily traced with silver than it had been. I didn’t mind that; I minded that I hadn’t been there to see it slowly change, day by day.

“Ian didna ask him. But he said Mrs. Figg told the duke the names of some friends of Lord John’s—Loyalists that might be still in the city. And his son’s staying in a house here, no? Dinna be worrit on his account, Sassenach.” He turned his head to smile sideways at me. “His Grace is a man who’s hard to kill.”

“I suppose it takes one to know one,” I said tartly. I didn’t ask why Jamie had gone to Chestnut Street; Hal, Jenny, and all other concerns notwithstanding, I knew he wanted to know whether John had reappeared. Apparently not, and a small chill frosted my heart.

I was groping in my pocket for a ribbon with which to club his queue, when a fresh draft swept through the loft, lifting the oilcloth and fluttering the papers beneath. I turned to see the source of the breeze and beheld Germain, swinging off the pulley rope to come in by the shuttered doors through which bales and kegs could be lowered from the loft to wagons below.

“Bonjour, Grand-père,” he said, wiping a cobweb off his face as he landed and bowing to Jamie with great formality. He turned and bowed to me, as well. “Comment ça va, Grand-mère?”

“Fi—” I began automatically, but was interrupted by Jamie.

“No,” he said definitely. “Ye’re not coming.”

“Please, Grandda!” Germain’s formality disappeared in an instant, replaced by pleading. “I could be a help to ye!”

“I know,” Jamie said dryly. “And your parents would never forgive me if ye were. I dinna even want to know what your notion of help involves, but—”

“I could carry messages! I can ride, ye ken that, ye taught me yourself! And I’m nearly twelve!”

“Ye ken how dangerous that is? If a British sharpshooter didna take ye out of the saddle, someone from the militia would club ye over the head to steal the horse. And I can count, ken? Ye’re no even eleven yet, so dinna be tryin’ it on with me.”

Obviously, danger held no fears whatever for Germain. He shrugged, impatient.

“Well, I could be an orderly, then. I can find food anywhere,” he added, cunning. He was in fact a very accomplished scrounger, and I looked at him thoughtfully. Jamie intercepted my glance and glowered at me.

“Dinna even think about it, Sassenach. He’d be taken up for theft and hanged or flogged within an inch of his life, and I couldna do a thing to stop it.”

“Nobody’s ever caught me!” Germain said, his professional pride outraged. “Not once!”

“And they’re not going to,” his grandfather assured him, fixing him with a steely eye. “When ye’re sixteen, maybe—”

“Oh, aye? Grannie Janet says ye were eight when ye first went raiding with your da!”

“Lifting cattle’s no the same as war, and I wasna anywhere near the fighting,” Jamie said. “And your Grannie Janet should keep her mouth shut.”

“Aye, I’ll tell her ye said so,” Germain retorted, disgruntled. “She says ye got bashed on the head with a sword.”

“I did. And with luck ye’ll live to be an auld man with your brains unscrambled, unlike your grandsire. Leave us, lad, your grannie needs to put her stockings on.” He stood up and, lifting the ladder, slid it down from the loft and pushed Germain firmly onto it.

He stood looking sternly down until Germain had reached the floor below, marking his displeasure by skipping the last few rungs and landing with a loud thud.

Jamie sighed, straightened up, and stretched himself gingerly, groaning a little.

“God knows where we’ll sleep tonight, Sassenach,” he remarked, glancing at our rude couch as he sat down for me to finish clubbing his hair. “For the sake of my back, I hope it’s a bit softer than this.” He grinned at me suddenly. “Did ye sleep well?”

“Never better,” I assured him, smoothing out the ribbon. In fact, I ached in almost every place it was possible to ache, save perhaps the top of my head. For that matter, I’d barely slept, and neither had he; we’d passed the hours of darkness in slow and wordless exploration, finding again each other’s body . . . and, toward dawn, had touched each other’s soul again. I touched the back of his neck now, gently, and his hand rose to mine. I felt simultaneously wonderful and wretched, and didn’t know from moment to moment which feeling was uppermost.

“When will we leave?”

“As soon as ye put your stockings on, Sassenach. And tidy your hair. And do up your buttons,” he added, turning and catching sight of my excessive décolletage. “Here, I’ll do that.”

“I’ll need my medicine box,” I said, going cross-eyed as I watched his nimble fingers flicking down my chest.

“I brought it,” he assured me, and frowned a bit, eyes intent on a recalcitrant button. “It’s a bonny bit of furniture. I expect his lordship bought it for ye?”

“He did.” I hesitated a moment, rather wishing he had said “John” rather than “his lordship.” I also wished I knew where John was—and that he was all right. But this didn’t seem the moment to say any of those things.

Jamie leaned forward and kissed the top of my breast, his breath warm on my skin.

“I dinna ken whether I’ll have a bed at all tonight,” he said, straightening up. “But whether it’s feathers or straw, promise ye’ll share it with me?”

“Always,” I said, and, picking up my cloak, shook it out, swirled it round my shoulders, and smiled bravely at him. “Let’s go, then.”

JENNY HAD SENT my medicine chest from Chestnut Street and with it the large parcel of herbs from Kingsessing, which had been delivered there the night before. With the forethought of a Scottish housewife, she’d also included a pound of oatmeal, a twist of salt, a package of bacon, four apples, and six clean handkerchiefs. Also a neat roll of fabric with a brief note, which read:

Dear Sister Claire,

You appear to own nothing suitable in which to go to war. I suggest you borrow Marsali’s printing apron for the time being, and here are two of my flannel petticoats and the simplest things Mrs. Figg could find amongst your wardrobe.

Take care of my brother, and tell him his stockings need darning, because he won’t notice until he’s worn holes in the heel and given himself blisters.

Your Good-sister,

Janet Murray

“And just how is it that you own something suitable in which to go to war?” I asked, eyeing Jamie in his indigo splendor. His uniform appeared to be complete, from coat with epaulets and a brigadier general’s insignia to buff waistcoat and cream silk stockings. Tall and straight, with auburn hair neatly clubbed and ribboned in black, he distinctly drew the eye.

He drew his chin back and looked down his nose at himself.

“Well, the sark and smallclothes were mine already; I had them when I came from Scotland. But when I came back to Philadelphia to find ye yesterday, I found Jenny first, and I told her about General Washington and asked her would she see to it. So she took my measurements and found a tailor and his son who do uniforms and browbeat them into working all night to make the coat and waistcoat—poor wretches,” he added, gingerly pulling a loose thread from the edge of his cuff. “How is it that ye don’t, Sassenach? Did his lordship think it unseemly for ye to doctor folk and make ye burn your working clothes?”

This was said with the sort of jesting tone that’s meant to suggest perfect innocence on the part of the speaker while making it perfectly apparent that malice is intended. “I don’t say that I’ll no make a fuss about it later.” I looked pointedly at the medical chest John had given me, then back at him, narrowing my eyes ever so slightly.

“No,” I said, with great casualness. “I spilled vitriol on them, making— making ether.” The memory made my hands shake slightly, and I had to set down the cup of nettle tea I was drinking.

“Jesus, Sassenach.” Jamie spoke under his breath—Félicité and Joan were kneeling at his feet, arguing with each other as they busily burnished his brass shoe buckles—but he met my eyes over their heads, appalled. “Tell me ye werena doing that drunk.”

I took a deep breath, at once reliving the experience and trying not to. Standing in the hot, semi-dark shed behind the house, the rounded glass slick in my sweating hands . . . then the flying liquid—it had barely missed my face—and the sickly smell and magically widening, smoking holes that burned straight through my heavy canvas apron and the skirt beneath. I hadn’t really cared at the time whether I lived or died—until it looked as though I was going to die in the next few seconds. That made rather a difference. It hadn’t convinced me not to commit suicide—but the shock of the near accident did make me think more carefully about how. Slitting one’s wrists was one thing; dying in slow, disfiguring agony was another.

“No, I wasn’t,” I said, and, taking up the cup, managed a deliberate mouthful. “I—it was a hot day. My hands were sweating, and the flask slipped.”

He closed his eyes briefly, all too clearly envisioning the scene himself, then reached across Félicité’s sleek dark head to cup my cheek.

“Dinna be doing that again, aye?” he said softly. “Don’t make it anymore.”

To be honest, the thought of making ether again made my palms sweat. It wasn’t chemically difficult, but it was terribly dangerous. One wrong move, a little too much vitriol, a few degrees of heat too much . . . And Jamie knew as well as I did just how explosive the stuff was. I could see the memory of flames in his eyes, the Big House going up around us. I swallowed.

“I don’t want to,” I said honestly. “But—without it, Jamie, I can’t do things that I can do with it. If I hadn’t had it, Aidan would be dead—so would John’s nephew Henry.”

He compressed his lips and looked as though he considered that Henry Grey might be disposable—but he was fond of little Aidan McCallum Higgins, whose appendix I’d removed on the Ridge with the assistance of my first batch of ether.

“Grannie has to help people feel better, Grand-père,” Joanie said reproachfully, rising from her spot at Jamie’s feet and frowning up at him. “It’s her callin’, Mam says. She can’t just not.”

“I ken that fine,” he assured her. “But she needna blow herself to kingdom come doing it. After all, who’s going to look after all the sick folk, if your grannie’s lying about in pieces?”

Félicité and Joanie both thought that image hilarious; I was less amused, but didn’t say anything further until they’d taken their rags and vinegar back to the kitchen. We were left in the sleeping part of the living quarters, assembling our bags and bundles for departure, and momentarily alone.

“You said you were afraid,” I said quietly, eyes on the spools of coarse thread and twists of silk floss I was stowing in a wooden box with several suture needles. “But that won’t stop you doing what you think you have to do, will it? I’m afraid for you—and that certainly won’t stop you, either.” I was careful to speak without bitterness, but he was as sensitive to tones of voice this morning as I was.

He paused for a moment, regarding his shining shoe buckles, then lifted his head and looked at me straight.

“Do ye think that because ye’ve told me the Rebels will win, I am free to walk away?”

“I—no.” I slid the box lid shut with a snick, not looking at it. I couldn’t look away from him. His face was still, but his eyes held mine, intent. “I know you have to. I know it’s part of what you are. You can’t stand aside and still be what you are. That was more or less my point, about—”

He interrupted me, stepping forward and seizing me by the wrist.

“And what is it that ye think I am, Sassenach?”

“A bloody man, that’s what!” I pulled loose and turned away, but he put a hand on my shoulder and turned me back to face him.

“Aye, I am a bloody man,” he said, and the faintest trace of rue touched his mouth, but his eyes were blue and steady.

“Ye’ve made your peace with what I am, ye think—but I think ye dinna ken what that means. To be what I am doesna mean only that I’ll spill my own blood when I must. It means I must sacrifice other men to the ends of my own cause—not only those I kill as enemies, but those I hold as friends . . . or as kin.”

His hand dropped away, and the tension left his shoulders. He turned toward the door, saying, “Come when ye’re ready, Sassenach.”

I STOOD THERE for an instant, blinking, then ran after him, leaving my half-packed bag behind.

“Jamie!” He was standing in the printshop, Henri-Christian in his arms, bidding goodbye to the girls and Marsali. Germain was nowhere in sight, doubtless sulking. Jamie looked up, startled, then smiled at me.

“I wasna going to leave ye behind, Sassenach. And I didna mean to hurry ye, either. Do ye—”

“I know. I just—I have to tell you something.”

All the little heads turned toward me like a nestful of baby birds, soft pink mouths open in curiosity. It occurred to me that I might better have waited until we were on the road, but it had seemed urgent that I tell him now—not only to relieve his anxieties, but to make him know I did understand.

“It’s William,” I blurted, and Jamie’s face clouded for an instant, like a breathed-on mirror. Yes, I had understood.

“Come to me, a bhalaich,” Marsali said, taking Henri-Christian from Jamie and setting him on the floor. “Oof! Ye weigh more than I do, wee man! Come away now, lassies, Grandda isn’t going just yet. Help me fetch out Grannie’s things.”

The children obediently scampered off behind her, though still looking back at us in frustrated curiosity. Children hate secrets, unless they’re the ones keeping them. I glanced after them, then turned back to Jamie.

“I didn’t know if they knew about William. I suppose Marsali and Fergus do, since—”

“Since Jenny told them. Aye, they do.” He rolled his eyes in brief resignation, then fixed them on my face. “What is it, Sassenach?”

“He can’t fight,” I said, letting out a half-held breath. “It doesn’t matter what the British army is about to do. William was paroled after Saratoga—he’s a conventioner. You know about the Convention army?”

“I do.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “Ye mean he’s not allowed to take up arms unless he’s been exchanged—and he hasn’t been, is that it?”

“That’s it. Nobody can be exchanged, until the King and the Congress come to some agreement about it.”

His face was suddenly vivid with relief, and I was relieved to see it.

“John’s been trying to have him exchanged for months, but there isn’t any way of doing it.” I dismissed Congress and the King with a wave of my free hand and smiled up at him. “You won’t have to face him on a battlefield.”

“Taing do Dhia,” he said, closing his eyes for an instant. “I’ve been thinking for days—when I wasna fretting about you, Sassenach—” he added, opening his eyes and looking down his nose at me, “—the third time’s the charm. And that would be an evil charm indeed.”

“Third time?” I said. “What do you—would you let go my fingers? They’ve gone numb.”

“Oh,” he said. He kissed them gently and let go. “Aye, sorry, Sassenach. I meant—I’ve shot at the lad twice in his life so far and missed him by no more than an inch each time. If it should happen again—ye canna always tell, in battle, and accidents do happen. I was dreaming, during the night, and . . . och, nay matter.” He waved off the dreams and turned away, but I put a hand on his arm to stop him. I knew his dreams—and I’d heard him moan the night before, fighting them.

“Culloden?” I said softly. “Has it come back again?” I actually hoped it was Culloden—and not Wentworth. He woke from the Wentworth dreams sweating and rigid and couldn’t bear to be touched. Last night, he hadn’t waked, but had jerked and moaned until I’d got my arms around him and he quieted, trembling in his sleep, head butted hard into my chest.

He shrugged a little and touched my face.

“It’s never left, Sassenach,” he said, just as softly. “It never will. But I sleep easier by your side.”

48 JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT

IT WAS A PERFECTLY ordinary red-brick building. Modest—no pediments, no carved stone lintels—but solid. Ian looked at it warily. The home of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the weightiest meeting of the Society of Friends in the Americas. Aye, very solid.

“Will this be like the Vatican?” he asked Rachel. “Or more like an archbishop’s palace?”

She snorted.

“Does it look like any sort of palace to thee?” She spoke normally, but he could see the pulse beat quick in the soft spot just beneath her ear.

“It looks like a bank,” he said, and that made her laugh. She cut it short, though, glancing over her shoulder as though afraid someone might come out and scold her for it.

“What do they do in there?” he asked, curious. “Is it a great meetinghouse?”

“It is,” she said. “But there is also business to be done, thee knows. The yearly meetings deal with matters of . . . I suppose thee would call it principle. We call it Faith and Practice; there are books, rewritten every so often, to reflect the present sense of the meeting. And queries.” She smiled suddenly, and his heart gave a small extra thump. “I think thee would recognize the queries—they’re much like thee has described the examination of conscience before thy confession.”

“Och, aye,” he said agreeably, but declined to pursue the subject. He hadn’t been to confession in some years and didn’t feel sufficiently wicked at present to trouble about it. “This Faith and Practice—is that where they say ye mustn’t join the Continental army, even if ye dinna take up arms?”

He was immediately sorry he’d asked; the question dimmed the light in her eyes, but only momentarily. She drew a deep breath through her nose and looked up at him.

“No, that would be an opinion—a formal opinion. Friends talk over every possible point of consideration before they give an opinion—whether it’s a positive one or not.” There was the barest hesitation before “not,” but he heard it and, reaching out, pulled out her hatpin, gently straightened her straw hat, which had slid a little askew, and pushed the pin back in.

“And if in the end it’s not, and we canna find a meeting that will have us, lass—what will we do?”

Her lips pressed together, but she met his eyes straight on.

“Friends are not married by their meeting. Or by priest or preacher. They marry each other. And we will marry each other.” She swallowed. “Somehow.”

The small bubbles of misgiving that had been rising through his wame all morning began to pop, and he put a hand over his mouth to stifle a belch. Being nervous took him in the innards; he’d not been able to eat breakfast. He turned a little away, from politeness, and spied two figures coming round the far corner. “Och! There’s your brother now, and lookin’ gey fine for a Quaker, too.”

Denzell was dressed in the uniform of a Continental soldier and looked self-conscious as a hunting dog with a bow tied round its neck. Ian suppressed his amusement, though, merely nodding as his future brother-in-law drew to a stop before them. Denny’s betrothed had no such compunctions.

“Is he not beautiful?” Dottie crowed, standing back a little to admire him. Denzell coughed and pushed his spectacles up his nose. He was a tidy man, not over-tall, but broad in the shoulder and strong in the forearm. He did look fine in the uniform, Ian thought, and said so.

“I will try not to let my appearance engorge my vanity,” Denzell said dryly. “Is thee not also to be a soldier, Ian?”

Ian shook his head, smiling.

“Nay, Denny. I shouldna be any kind of soldier—but I’m a decent scout.” He saw Denzell’s eyes fix on his face, tracing the double line of tattooed dots that looped across both cheekbones.

“I expect thee would be.” A certain tenseness in Denny’s shoulders relaxed. “Scouts are not required to kill the enemy, are they?”

“No, we’ve our choice about it,” Ian assured him, straight-faced. “We can kill them if we like—but just for the fun of it, ken. It doesna really count.”

Denzell blinked for an instant at that, but Rachel and Dottie both laughed, and he reluctantly smiled.

“Thee is late, Denny,” Rachel said, as the public clock struck ten. “Was Henry in difficulty?” For Denzell and Dottie had gone to take farewell of Dottie’s brother, Henry, still convalescent from the surgery Denny and Ian’s auntie Claire had done.

“Thee might say so,” Dottie said, “but not from any physical ill.” The look of amusement faded from her face, though a faint gleam still lingered in her eyes. “He is in love with Mercy Woodcock.”

“His landlady? Love’s no usually a fatal condition, is it?” Ian asked, raising one brow.

“Not if thy name is neither Montague nor Capulet,” Denny said. “The difficulty is that while Mercy loves him in return, she may or may not still have a husband living.”

“And until she finds out he’s dead . . .” Dottie added, lifting one slim shoulder.

“Or alive,” Denny said, giving her a look. “There is always the possibility.”

“Not much of one,” Dottie replied bluntly. “Auntie—I mean Friend—Claire doctored a man called Walter Woodcock who’d been badly wounded at Ticonderoga, and she said he was near death then and taken p-prisoner.” She stumbled slightly on the last word, and Ian was reminded suddenly that her eldest brother, Benjamin, was a prisoner of war.

Denzell saw the cloud cross her face and gently took her hand in his.

“Both thy brothers will survive their trials,” he said, and warmth touched his eyes behind the glass. “So will we, Dorothea. Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them—but not for love.”

“Hmph!” said Dottie, but gave him a small, grudging smile. “All right, then—go ahead. There’s such a lot to do before we go.”

To Ian’s surprise, Denzell nodded, took a folded sheaf of papers from his bosom, and, turning, went up the step to the door of the meetinghouse.

Ian had supposed the place was only a convenient spot to meet—he would be catching up his uncle and Auntie Claire on the road to Coryell’s Ferry but had lingered to help with the loading, for Denny, Dottie, and Rachel were driving a wagon filled with medical supplies—but evidently Denny had business with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

Was he seeking advice in how to be married as a Quaker even while flouting their . . . what would you call it, edict—no, Rachel had said it was an opinion, but a “weighty” opinion—regarding support of the rebellion?

“He’s giving them his witness—his testimony,” Dottie said matter-of-factly, seeing the puzzlement in Ian’s face. “He wrote it all out. Why he thinks it’s right to do what he’s doing. He’s going to give it to the clerk of the yearly meeting and request that his views be mentioned and discussed.”

“D’ye think they will?”

“Oh, yes,” Rachel said. “They may disagree with him, but they won’t stifle him. And good luck to them if they thought to try,” she added, half under her breath. She pulled a handkerchief out of her bosom, very white against the soft brown of her skin, and patted tiny droplets of sweat away from her temples.

Ian felt a sudden and profound longing for her and glanced involuntarily toward the clock tower. He’d need to be on the road soon and hoped there’d be time for a precious hour alone with Rachel first.

Dorothea’s eyes were still fixed on the door through which Denny had passed.

“He is so lovely,” she said softly, as though to herself. Then glanced self-consciously at Rachel. “He felt badly for wearing his uniform to see Henry,” she said, a tone of apology in her voice. “But the time was so short . . .”

“Was thy brother upset?” Rachel asked sympathetically. Dottie’s brows drew down.

“Well, he didn’t like it,” she said frankly. “But it’s not as though he didn’t know that we’re Rebels; I told him some time ago.” Her expression relaxed a little. “And he is my brother. He won’t disown me.”

Ian wondered whether the same was true of her father, but didn’t ask. She hadn’t mentioned the duke. He wasn’t really attending to Dottie’s family concerns, though—his mind was busy with thought of the coming battle and all that needed to be done immediately. Ian caught Rachel’s eye and smiled, and she smiled back, all worry melting from her face as she met his gaze.

He had concerns himself, certainly, annoyances and worries. At the bottom of his soul, though, was the solid weight of Rachel’s love and what she had said, the words gleaming like a gold coin at the bottom of a murky well. “We will marry each other.”

49 UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

AS JAMIE EXPLAINED to me on the way out of Philadelphia, the problem lay not in finding the British but in catching up to them with enough men and matériel to do some good.

“They left with several hundred wagons and a verra large number of Loyalists who didna feel quite safe in Philadelphia. Clinton canna be protecting them and fighting at the same time. He must make all the speed he can—which means he must travel by the most direct road.”

“I suppose he can’t very well be legging it cross-country,” I agreed. “Have you—meaning General Washington—got any idea how big a force he has?”

He lifted one shoulder and waved off a large horsefly with his hat.

“Maybe ten thousand men. Maybe more. Fergus and Germain watched them assemble to march out, but ye ken it’s not easy to judge numbers when they’re crawlin’ out of the side streets and all.”

“Mmm. And . . . um . . . how many men do we have?” Saying “we” gave me an odd sensation that rippled through my lower body. Something between tail-curling apprehension and an excitement that was startlingly close to sexual.

It wasn’t that I’d never felt the strange euphoria of war before. But it had been a very long time; I’d forgotten.

“Fewer than the British,” Jamie said, matter-of-fact. “But we willna ken how many until the militia have gathered—and pray it’s not too late when we do.”

He glanced aside at me, and I could see him wondering whether to say something further. He didn’t speak, though, just gave a little shrug and settled himself in the saddle, putting on his hat again.

“What?” I said, tilting my head to peer up at him from under the brim of my own broad straw. “You were about to ask me something.”

“Mmphm. Aye, well . . . I was, but then I realized that if ye did know anything about . . . what might happen in the next few days, ye’d surely have told me.”

“I would.” In fact, I didn’t know whether to regret my lack of knowledge or not. Looking back at those instances where I’d thought I knew the future, I hadn’t known nearly enough. Out of nowhere, I thought of Frank . . . and Black Jack Randall, and my hands gripped the reins so strongly that my mare jerked her head with a startled snort.

Jamie looked round, startled, too, but I waved a hand and leaned forward to pat the horse’s neck in apology.

“Horsefly,” I said, in explanation. My heart was thumping noticeably against the placket of my stays, but I took several deep breaths to quiet it. I wasn’t about to mention my sudden thought to Jamie, but it hadn’t left me.

I’d thought I knew that Jack Randall was Frank’s five-times-great-grandfather. His name was right there, on the genealogical chart that Frank had shown me many times. And, in fact, he was Frank’s ancestor—on paper. It was Jack’s younger brother, though, who had sired Frank’s bloodline but then had died before being able to marry his pregnant lover. Jack had married Mary Hawkins at his brother’s request and thus given his name and legitimacy to her child.

So many gory details didn’t show up on those tidy genealogical charts, I thought. Brianna was Frank’s daughter, on paper—and by love. But the long, knife-blade nose and glowing hair of the man beside me showed whose blood ran through her veins.

But I’d thought I knew. And because of that false knowledge, I’d prevented Jamie killing Jack Randall in Paris, fearing that if he did, Frank might never be born. What if he had killed Randall then? I wondered, looking at Jamie sidelong. He sat tall, straight in the saddle, deep in thought, but with an air now of anticipation; the dread of the morning that had gripped us both had gone.

Anything might have happened; a number of things might not. Randall wouldn’t have abused Fergus; Jamie wouldn’t have fought a duel with him in the Bois de Boulogne . . . perhaps I would not have miscarried our first child, our daughter Faith. Likely I would have—miscarriage was usually physiological in basis, not emotional, however romantic novels painted it. But the memory of loss was forever linked to that duel in the Bois de Boulogne.

I shoved the memories firmly aside, turning my mind away from the half-known past to the complete mystery of the waiting future. But just before the images blinked out, I caught the edge of a flying thought.

What about the child? The child born to Mary Hawkins and Alexander Randall—Frank’s true ancestor. He was, in all probability, alive now. Right now.

The ripple I’d experienced before came back, this time running from my tailbone up my spine. Denys. The name floated up from the parchment of a genealogical chart, calligraphic letters that purported to capture a fact, while hiding nearly everything.

I knew his name was Denys—and he was, so far as I knew, actually Frank’s four-times great-grandfather. And that was all I knew—likely all I ever would know. I fervently hoped so. I wished Denys Randall silently well and turned my mind to other things.

50 THE GOOD SHEPHERD

TWELVE. BLOODY. MILES! The train of baggage wagons stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction and raised a cloud of dust that nearly obscured the mules negotiating a bend in the road a half mile away. The people trudging beside the wagons on either side were coated with the fine brown stuff—and so was William, though he kept as much distance as he could from the slow-moving cavalcade.

It was mid-afternoon of a hot day, and they’d been on the march since before dawn.

He paused to slap dust from the skirts of his coat and take a mouthful of tin-tasting water from his canteen. Hundreds of refugees, thousands of camp followers, all with packs and bundles and handcarts, with here and there a laden horse or mule that had somehow escaped the army teamsters’ rapacity, were strung over the twelve miles between the two main bodies of the army. They spread out in a straggling mass that reminded him of the plague of locusts from the Bible. Was that the book of Exodus? Couldn’t recall, but it seemed apposite.

Some of them looked over their shoulders now and then. He wondered if it was fear of pursuit or thoughts of what they’d left behind—the city itself was long out of sight.

Well, if there was any danger of turning to a pillar of salt, it would be owing to sweat, not yearning, he thought, wiping his sleeve across his face for the dozenth time. He was himself eager to shake the dust of Philadelphia from his boots and never think of it again.

If it weren’t for Arabella–Jane, he’d likely have forgotten it already. He certainly wanted to forget everything else that had happened in the last few days. He twitched his reins and nudged his horse back toward the trudging horde.

It could be worse; nearly had been much worse. He’d come close to being dispatched back to England or sent north to join the other conventioners in Massachusetts. Thank Christ that Papa—that is, Lord John, he corrected himself firmly—had made him learn German, along with French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Besides the divisions commanded by Sir Henry and Lord Cornwallis, the army included a huge body of mercenary troops under General von Knyphausen—nearly all of them from Hesse-Kassel, whose dialect William could manage with no trouble.

It had still taken a good deal of persuasion, but in the end he’d landed up as one of Clinton’s dozen aides-de-camp, charged with the tedious chore of riding up and down the ponderously moving column, collecting reports, delivering dispatches, and dealing with any small difficulties that developed en route—a more or less hourly occurrence. He kept a running mental note of where the various surgeons and hospital orderlies were; he lived in horror of having to attend the delivery of one of the camp followers’ babies—there were at least fifty very pregnant women with the column.

Maybe it was the proximity of these ladies, gravid and pale, their swollen bellies borne like burdens, balanced with the ones on their backs, that made him think of . . .

Surely whores knew how to avoid pregnancy? He didn’t recall Arabella–Jane doing anything . . . but he wouldn’t have noticed, drunk as he was.

William thought of her whenever he touched the spot on his breast where his gorget should be. If asked, he would have said he put the thing on with his uniform and forgot about it—but from the number of times he found Arabella–Jane in his mind, he was apparently in the habit of fiddling with it constantly.

The loss of the gorget had cost him an unpleasant five-minute analysis of his character, dress, hygiene, and personal failings from Clinton’s chief aide, Captain Duncan Drummond, and a ten-shilling fine for being out of proper uniform. He didn’t grudge her the cost.

He did find himself keeping an eye out for Captain Harkness. He couldn’t recall enough of their encounter to have any idea of Harkness’s regiment, but there weren’t that many dragoon companies with the present army. He was working his way back along the column now, doing his daily round on Visigoth, a big bay gelding with good wind. The horse wasn’t pleased with the slow pace and kept twitching under him, wanting to break into a gallop, but William held him to a steady trot, nodding as he passed each company, looking to the corporals and sergeants to see if any were in difficulty or needed assistance.

“Water’s coming!” he called to a particularly wilted-looking group of Loyalist refugees who had stopped on the verge of the road, taking pause in the scant shade provided by a scatter of oak saplings and a handcart precariously piled with their belongings.

This reassurance made the women look up hopefully from under their bonnets, and the gentleman rose to his feet, waving William down.

He reined in and recognized Mr. Endicott, a well-to-do Philadelphia merchant, and his family. He’d been to dinner at their house and had danced with the two older Misses Endicott at several parties.

“Your servant, sir,” he said, sweeping off his hat with a bow and nodding in turn to the ladies. “And yours, Mrs. Endicott. Miss Endicott, Miss Sally . . . and your most humble and obedient, Miss Peggy.” Miss Peggy Endicott, aged nine, went pink as a young strawberry at being singled out, and her elder sisters exchanged raised brows over her head.

“Is it true, Lord Ellesmere,” Endicott said, “that we are closely pursued by the Rebels?” He was holding a large red-flannel handkerchief, with which he wiped a perspiring round face. “The . . . er . . . the ladies find themselves summat worried by the prospect.”

“The ladies have no cause for concern, sir,” William assured him. “You are under the protection of His Majesty’s army, you know.”

“Well, yes, we do know that,” Mr. Endicott said, rather testily. “Or so we hope, at least; certainly wouldn’t be here else, I can tell you. But have you any news of Washington’s whereabouts, is what I’d like to know?”

Visigoth shifted his weight and danced a little, eager to be off, but William pulled his head round, clicking his tongue in rebuke.

“Why, yes, sir,” he said respectfully. “We have had several deserters from the Rebel camp, come in last night. They say that Washington is gathering his troops, no doubt in hopes of catching up to us—but he has no more than two thousand regulars, with a few scrubby militia companies.”

Mr. Endicott looked somewhat reassured at this, but the girls and their mother didn’t. Mrs. Endicott plucked at her husband’s sleeve and murmured something. He flushed more deeply.

“I said I’ll deal with it, madam!” he snapped. He had taken off his wig because of the heat and wore a spotted silk handkerchief tied over his head against the sun; his grizzled hair was cropped short, and tiny bristles stuck out from the edge of the kerchief like the feelers of angry insects.

Mrs. Endicott’s lips pressed tight, but she stepped back, jerking her head in a small nod. Miss Peggy, though, emboldened by Captain Ellesmere’s particularity, scampered forward and seized hold of his stirrup. Visigoth, startled by the flying scrap of calico at the corner of his vision, shied violently; Peggy shrieked, stumbled back, and went flying. All of the Endicott ladies were shrieking, but William could do nothing about that; he fought the horse’s head round and held on grimly while Goth crow-hopped and whirled, then settled down gradually, snorting and jerking at the bit. He could hear passing infantrymen being profanely amused as their column swerved to go round him.

“Is Miss Peggy quite all right?” he inquired, breathing heavily as he finally brought the horse back to the verge. Miss Anne Endicott was standing near the edge of the road, waiting for him; the rest of her family had retreated, and he heard a loud howling coming from behind the handcart.

“Aside from being spanked by Papa for nearly being killed, yes,” Miss Endicott replied, looking amused. She drew a little closer, keeping a wary eye on Goth, but the horse was calm enough now, stretching his neck to grab a mouthful of grass.

“I’m sorry to have been the cause of her distress,” William said politely, and groped in his pocket, coming out with nothing but a crumpled handkerchief and a stray sixpence. He handed the coin down to Anne, smiling. “Give her that, will you, with my apologies?”

“She will be fine,” Anne said, but took the coin. She glanced over her shoulder, then drew a step closer and spoke rapidly, lowering her voice. “I . . . hesitate to ask, Lord Ellesmere . . . but, you see, the cart has broken a wheel, my father cannot fix it, he won’t abandon our belongings—and my mother is terrified that we will be overtaken and captured by Washington’s men.” Her dark eyes—very fine dark eyes—fixed on his with a brilliant intensity. “Can you help? Please? That was what my little sister meant to ask you.”

“Oh. What exactly is the trouble with—never mind. Let me have a look.” It would do Goth no harm to settle for a few minutes. He swung down and tied the horse to one of the saplings, then followed Miss Endicott to the handcart.

It was overflowing with the same higgledy-piggledy assortment of goods he’d seen on the docks two days ago—a tall clock stuck out of heaped clothing and linens, and a homely earthenware chamber pot was stuffed with handkerchiefs, stockings, and what was probably Mrs. Endicott’s jewel case. The sight of this particular mess gave him a sudden pang, though.

These were remnants of a real home, one he’d been a guest in—the rubbish and treasures of people he knew . . . and liked. He’d heard that very clock, with its pierced-work crown, strike midnight just before he’d stolen a kiss from Anne Endicott in the shadows of her father’s hallway. He felt the mellow bong, bong now, deep in his vitals.

“Where will you go?” he asked quietly, a hand on her arm. She turned to him, flushed and harried, her dark hair coming out of her cap—but still with dignity.

“I don’t know,” she said, just as quietly. “My aunt Platt lives in a small village near New York, but I don’t know that we can travel so far, as we are . . .” She nodded at the unwieldy cart, surrounded by bags and half-wrapped bundles. “Perhaps we can find a safe place closer and wait there while my father goes to make . . . arrangements.” Her lips pressed suddenly tight, and he realized that she was holding on to her composure by dint of great effort. And that it was unshed tears that made her eyes so bright. He took her hand and kissed it, gently.

“I’ll help,” he said.

Easier said than done. While the axle of the cart was intact, one wheel had struck a jagged rock and not merely popped off but had in the process lost the flat-iron tire that encircled the felloes—which in consequence had come apart, being badly glued. The wheel lay in pieces in the grass, and a gaudy orange-and-black butterfly perched on the disjunct hub, lazily fanning its wings.

Mrs. Endicott’s fears weren’t unfounded. Neither was Mr. Endicott’s anxiety—which he was attempting with little success to disguise as irritability. If they were stranded for too long, and left behind . . . even if Washington’s regular troops were moving too fast for looting, there were always scavengers on the outskirts of an army—any army.

A respectful period of inspection allowed Mr. Endicott, still red-faced but more settled, to emerge from his domestic imbroglio, followed by Peggy, also red-faced and downcast. William nodded to the merchant and gestured, summoning him to join in contemplation of the wreckage, out of hearing of the women.

“Are you armed, sir?” William asked quietly. Endicott’s face paled noticeably, and his Adam’s apple bobbed above his dirt-grimed stock.

“I have a fowling piece that belonged to my father,” he said, in a voice so low as to be scarcely audible. “I—it’s—not been fired in twenty years.” God, William thought, appalled. William felt himself naked and edgy without weapons. Endicott had to be fifty, at least, and alone here with four women to protect?

“I’ll find you help, sir,” William said firmly. Mr. Endicott drew a deep, deep breath. William thought the man might sob if obliged to speak, and turned without haste toward the women, talking as he went.

“There will be a cooper or wainwright somewhere along the column. Ah, and here’s the water carrier coming!” He extended a hand to Peggy. “Will you come with me to catch him, Miss Margaret? I’m sure he’ll stop for a pretty face.” She didn’t smile, but she sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, drew herself up, and took his hand. The Endicott ladies were nothing if not courageous.

A bored-looking mule pulled a cart with several barrels of water, passing slowly down the column, the driver pausing when hailed. William waded determinedly into the fray, lifting Peggy in his arms for safety—to her evident delight—and deflected the carrier to the Endicotts’ service. Then, with a sweep of his hat to the ladies, he mounted again and made his way down the road in search of a cooper.

The army traveled with the equivalent of several villages’ worth of artisans and those men called “supportives”: coopers, carpenters, cooks, smiths, farriers, wainwrights, drovers, hauliers, orderlies. To say nothing of the vast swarm of laundresses and sempstresses among the camp followers. It wouldn’t take long to find a cooper or a wainwright and persuade him to deal with the Endicotts’ trouble. William glanced at the sun; nearly three.

The army was proceeding briskly, but that didn’t mean it was moving at any great rate of speed. Clinton had given orders to march an additional two hours per day, though, a strain in the increasing heat. Another two hours before they made camp; with luck, the Endicotts might be whole again by then and able to keep up tomorrow.

A rumble of hooves and catcalls from the infantry caught his attention and made him glance over his shoulder, heart speeding up. Dragoons, plumes fluttering. He reined up and rode Goth straight at them, glancing from face to face as he passed down their double line. Several of them stared at him, and an officer made irritated motions at him, but he ignored that. A small voice in the back of his mind inquired what he meant to do if he found Harkness among them, but he ignored that, too.

He passed the end of the company, circled to the rear, and rode up the other side of the column, looking back over his shoulder at the rank of puzzled faces staring at him, some affronted, some amused. No . . . no . . . no . . . maybe? Would he even recognize the fellow? he wondered. He’d been very drunk. Still, he thought Harkness would recognize him. . . .

They were all staring at him by this time, but none with an aspect either of alarm or violence. Their colonel reined up a little and called to him.

“Ho, Ellesmere! Lost something, have you?”

He squinted against the sun and made out the vivid face of Ban Tarleton, red-cheeked and grinning under his flamboyant plumed helmet. He jerked his chin up in invitation, and William wheeled his horse and fell in beside him.

“Not lost, exactly,” he said. “Just looking for a dragoon I met in Philadelphia—named Harkness; you know him?”

Ban pulled a face.

“Yes. He’s with the Twenty-sixth. Randy bugger, always after women.”

“And you aren’t?” Ban wasn’t a close friend, but William had been out on the randan with him once or twice in London. He didn’t drink much, but he didn’t need to; he was the sort of man who always seemed a little intoxicated.

Tarleton laughed, face flushed with the heat and red-lipped as a girl.

“Yes. But Harkness doesn’t care about anything but women. Known him to have three at once, in a brothel.”

William considered that one for a moment.

“All right. I can see a use for two, maybe . . . but what’s the third one for?”

Ban, who was maybe four years older than William, gave him the sort of pitying look reserved for virgins and confirmed bachelors, then ducked back, laughing, when William punched him in the arm.

“Right,” William said. “That aside, I’m looking for a wainwright or a cooper. Any close by?”

Tarleton straightened his helmet and shook his head.

“No, but there’s bound to be one or two in that mess.” He gestured negligently at the train of baggage wagons. “Which regiment are you with, these days?” He frowned at William, seeming to realize that something was amiss with his dress. “Where’s your sword? And your gorget?”

William gritted his teeth—and they really did grit, there being so much coarse dust in the air—and apprised Tarleton of his situation in the minimum number of words. He didn’t mention where or under what circumstances he had lost his gorget, and with a brief salute of farewell to the colonel, reined round and went down the column again. He was breathing as though he’d run the length of London Bridge, and pulses of electricity were running down his arms and legs, jolting at the base of his spine.

His anger over his situation had been rekindled by his conversation with Tarleton and—unable to do any bloody thing about any of it—turned his mind to what he wanted to do to Harkness, should he meet the 26th Light Dragoons. He touched his chest by reflex, and his sudden urge to do violence changed at once to an equally sudden rush of desire that made him light-headed.

Then he recalled his original errand, and hot blood washed through his face. He rode more slowly, calming his mind. Harkness could wait. The Endicotts couldn’t.

Thought of the family pained him—and not only because he was ashamed of letting himself be distracted from their difficulty. But in recollecting them now, he realized that for those few moments with the Endicotts, concerned with their troubles, he’d forgotten. Forgotten the burden he’d been carrying like a pound of lead in his chest. Forgotten who he really was.

What would Anne Endicott have done, if she knew? Her parents? Even . . . well, no. He smiled, despite his disquiet. He didn’t think Peggy Endicott would mind if he told her he was secretly a cutpurse or a cannibal, let alone a—

Everyone else he knew, though . . . The Endicotts were only one Loyalist family who’d welcomed him into their home, and he’d not taken proper leave of any of those who chose to stay in Philadelphia, too ashamed to see them, knowing the truth.

He looked back over his shoulder; the Endicotts were barely visible, now sitting in the grass in a companionable circle, sharing food of some kind. He felt a keen pang at the sight of their companionability. He’d never be part of a decent family, couldn’t ever marry a woman even of such modest origins as Anne Endicott.

Her father might well be ruined, might have lost his wealth and business, the family might descend into poverty—but they would remain who they were, firm in their courage and the pride of their name. Not him. His name didn’t belong to him.

Well . . . he could marry, he grudgingly admitted to himself, making his way gingerly through a group of camp followers. But only a woman who wanted nothing but his title and money would have him, and to wed under such circumstances, knowing that your wife despised you . . . and to know that you passed the taint of your blood to your sons . . .

This morbid train of thought stopped abruptly with the appearance of a small group of artisans, trudging beside a large wagon that undoubtedly held their tools.

He came down on them like a wolf on a flock of startled sheep and ruthlessly cut out a fine, fat wainwright, whom he persuaded by threats and bribery to mount behind him and thus carried his prey back to the Endicotts.

With his spirit soothed by their gratitude, he turned northward again, toward the head of the army, camp, and his supper. Absorbed in thoughts of roast chicken and gravy—he ate with Clinton’s staff, and thus ate very well—he didn’t notice at once that another horseman had come up alongside him, matching his pace.

“Penny for your thoughts?” said a pleasant, half-familiar voice, and he turned to find himself looking into the smiling face of Denys Randall-Isaacs.

WILLIAM REGARDED Randall-Isaacs with something between annoyance and curiosity. The man had to all effects abandoned him in Quebec City a year and a half before and vanished, leaving him to spend the winter snowbound with nuns and voyageurs. The experience had improved both his French and his hunting abilities, but not his temper.

“Captain Randall-Isaacs,” he said in acknowledgment, rather coldly. The captain smiled sunnily at him, not at all put off by his tone.

“Oh, just Randall these days,” he said. “My father’s name, you know. The other bit was a courtesy to my stepfather, but as the old man’s passed on now . . .” He lifted one shoulder, leaving William to draw the obvious conclusion: that a Jewish-sounding surname couldn’t be an asset to an ambitious officer.

“Surprised to see you here,” Randall went on, chummy, as though they’d seen each other at a ball last month. “You were at Saratoga with Burgoyne, weren’t you?”

William’s hand tightened on the reins, but he patiently explained his peculiar status. For possibly the twentieth time.

Randall nodded, respectful.

“Certainly better than cutting hay in Massachusetts,” he said, with a glance at the marching columns they were passing. “Thought of going back to England, though?”

“No,” William said, somewhat startled. “Why? For one thing, I doubt I can, by the terms of parole. For another—why should I?” Why, indeed? he thought, with a fresh stab. He’d not even begun to think about what awaited him in England, at Helwater, at Ellesmere. In London, for that matter . . . oh, Jesus . . .

“Why, indeed?” Randall said, unconsciously echoing him. The man sounded thoughtful. “Well . . . not much opportunity for distinguishing yourself here, is there?” He glanced very briefly at William’s belt, bare of weapons, and away again directly, as though the sight was somehow shameful—which it was.

“And what is it you think I could do there?” William demanded, keeping his temper with some difficulty.

“Well, you are an earl,” Randall pointed out. William felt the blood rise up his neck, but couldn’t say anything. “You have a seat in the House of Lords. Why not use it to accomplish something? Take up politics. Doubt your parole says anything about that—and as long as you weren’t going back to rejoin the army, I shouldn’t think the travel itself would be a problem.”

“I’d never thought of it,” William said, striving for politeness. He couldn’t think of anything he’d less rather do than be political—unless it was be political while acting a sham.

Randall tilted his head amiably to and fro, still smiling. He was much as he’d been when William had seen him last: dark hair tied back without powder, good-looking rather than handsome, slender without being slight, graceful in movement, with a constant expression of sympathetic geniality. He hadn’t changed much—but William had. He was two years older now, much more experienced, and was both surprised and a little gratified to discover that he realized that Randall was playing him like a hand of bezique. Or trying to.

“I suppose there are other possibilities,” he said, guiding his horse around an enormous puddle of muddy urine that had collected in a dip in the road.

Randall’s horse had paused to add to it. Randall sat as composedly as one can in such a situation, but didn’t try to raise his voice over the noise. He picked his way out of the mud and caught William up before continuing the conversation.

“Possibilities?” He sounded genuinely interested, and probably was, William thought—but why? “What were you thinking of doing?”

“You recall Captain Richardson, of course?” William asked casually, but with an eye on Randall’s face. One dark brow rose a bit, but otherwise he showed no particular emotion at hearing the name.

“Oh, yes,” Randall replied, as casual as William. “Have you seen the good captain recently?”

“Yes, a couple of days ago.” William’s temper had abated, and he waited with interest to see what Randall might have to say to this.

The captain didn’t look taken aback, exactly, but his air of pleasant inconsequence had definitely sharpened into something else. William could actually see him wondering whether to ask bluntly what Richardson had wanted or to take another tack, and the perception gave him a small thrill.

“Is Lord John with Sir Henry?” Randall asked. That was enough of a non sequitur to make William blink, but there was no reason not to answer.

“No. Why should he be?”

The brow lifted again.

“You didn’t know? The Duke of Pardloe’s regiment is in New York.”

“It is?” William was more than startled by that, but hastened to collect himself. “How do you know?”

Randall waved a well-manicured hand, as though the answer to this was irrelevant—as perhaps it was.

“Pardloe left Philadelphia this morning with Sir Henry,” he explained. “As the duke has recalled Lord John to duty, I thought—”

“He what?” William’s horse jerked his head and snorted at the exclamation, and William stroked the big neck, using the gesture to avert his face for a moment. His father was here?

“I stopped at his lordship’s house in Philadelphia yesterday,” Randall explained, “and a rather odd Scotchwoman—she must be his lordship’s housekeeper, I collect?—told me that his lordship had been gone for several days. But if you haven’t seen him . . .”

Randall raised his head, looking ahead. A haze of woodsmoke was already showing above the trees, cook fires, wash fires, and watch fires all marking the growing camp, their tang a pleasant spice in the nostrils. It made William’s stomach growl.

“Hup! Hup! At the double, quick . . . march!” A sergeant’s bellow came from behind them, and they pulled aside for a double column of infantry, who hadn’t needed the exhortation; they were eager for their dinner and the chance to lay down their arms for the night.

The pause gave William room for a moment’s thought: ought he to ask Randall to sup with him later, try to draw him out? Or get the hell away from the man as quickly as possible, using his need to wait on Sir Henry as excuse? But what if Lord John really was with Sir Henry right this moment? And bloody Uncle Hal—all he needed in the present circumstance!

Randall had evidently used the pause for thought, as well, and come to his own decision. He came up close beside William, and after a quick glance to be sure no one was near them, leaned close and spoke in a low voice.

“I say this as a friend, Ellesmere—though I grant you’ve no reason to trust me, I hope you’ll listen. Don’t, for God’s sake, engage in any enterprise that Richardson suggests. Don’t go with him anywhere, no matter what the circumstances. If you can avoid it, don’t even talk to him again.”

And with that, he reined his horse’s head around, spurred up abruptly, and was off down the road at a gallop, heading away from the camp.

51 SCROUNGING

GREY WOULDN’T MIND, if it weren’t for the headaches. The ache in his side had faded to something tolerable; he thought a rib might be cracked, but as long as he didn’t have to run, that wouldn’t be a problem. The eye, though . . .

The injured eye stubbornly refused to move but jerked in its socket, pulling against whatever obstruction held it—an orbicularis muscle? Was that what Dr. Hunter had called it?—in an attempt to focus with its fellow. This was painful and exhausting in itself but also led to double vision and crushing headaches, and he found himself often unable to eat when they halted, wanting only to lie down in darkness and wait for the throbbing to cease.

By the time they stopped to make camp on the evening of the second day of march, he could barely see out of his good eye, and his stomach was heaving with nausea.

“Here,” he said, thrusting his hot journeycake at one of his fellows, a tailor from Morristown named Phillipson. “You take it. I can’t, not just . . .” He couldn’t go on, but pressed the heel of his hand hard against his closed eye. Green and yellow pinwheels and brilliant flashes of light erupted behind his eyelid, but the pressure eased the pain for a moment.

“You save it for later, Bert,” Phillipson said, tucking the journeycake into Grey’s rucksack. He bent close and peered at Grey’s face in the firelight. “You need a patch for that eye,” he declared. “Keep you from rubbing at it, at least; it’s red as a whore’s stocking. Here.”

And with that, he took off his own battered felt hat and, whipping a small pair of scissors from his bosom, cut a neat round patch from the brim, rubbed a bit of spruce gum round the edge to make it stick, and then bound it carefully in place over the injured orb with a spotted handkerchief contributed by one of the other militiamen. All of them clustered round to watch, with the kindest expressions of concern, offers of food and drink, suggestions as to which company had a surgeon that might come to let his blood, and so on. Grey, in the weakness of pain and exhaustion, thought he might weep.

He managed to thank them all for their concern, but at last they left off, and after a swig of something unidentifiable but strongly alcoholic from Jacobs’s canteen, he sat on the ground, shut his good eye, leaned his head back against a log, and waited for the throbbing in his temples to lessen.

Despite his bodily discomfort, he felt comforted in spirit. The men with him weren’t soldiers, and God knew they weren’t an army—but they were men, engaged in common purpose and mindful of one another, and that was a thing he knew and loved.

“. . . and we bring our needs and desires before thee, O great Lord, and implore thy blessing upon our deeds . . .”

The Reverend Woodsworth was conducting a brief service of prayers. He did this every evening; those who wished might join him; those who didn’t occupied themselves in quiet conversation or small tasks of mending or whittling.

Grey had no real idea where they were, save somewhere to the northeast of Philadelphia. Messengers on horseback met them now and then, and confused bits of news and speculation spread like fleas through the group. He gathered that the British army was heading north—clearly to New York—and that Washington had left Valley Forge with his troops and was intending to attack Clinton somewhere en route, but no one knew where. The troops were to muster at a place called Coryell’s Ferry, at which point they might, possibly, be told where they were going.

He didn’t waste energy on thinking about his own position. He could escape easily enough in the darkness, but there was no point in doing so. Wandering around the countryside in the midst of converging militia companies and regular troops, he ran more risk of ending up back in the custody of Colonel Smith, who would probably hang him out of hand, than he did in remaining with Woodsworth’s militia.

The danger might increase when they did join Washington’s troops—but large armies really couldn’t hide from each other, nor did they try to avoid notice. If Washington got anywhere near Clinton, Grey could at that point easily desert—if one considered it desertion—and cross the lines into British hands, risking only being shot by an overenthusiastic sentry before he could surrender and make himself known.

Gratitude, he thought, hearing Mr. Woodsworth’s prayer through a haze of growing drowsiness and fading pain. Well, yes, there were a few more things he could count on his list of blessings.

William was still on parole and thus a noncombatant. Jamie Fraser had been released from the Continental army to escort Brigadier Fraser’s body back to Scotland. Though he’d returned, he was no longer in the army; he wouldn’t be in this fight, either. His nephew Henry was healing, but in no way fit for combat. There was no one likely to be involved in the coming battle—if there was one—over whom he need worry. Though come to think. . . . His hand found the empty pocket of his breeches. Hal. Where the bloody hell was Hal?

He sighed, but then relaxed, breathing in the scents of woodsmoke, pine needles, and roasted corn. Wherever Hal was, he’d be safe enough. His brother could take care of himself.

The prayers over, one of his companions had started to sing. It was a song he knew, but the words were quite different. His version, picked up from an army surgeon who’d fought with the Colonials during the French and Indian war, went:

Brother Ephraim sold his Cow

And bought him a Commission;

And then he went to Canada

To fight for the Nation;

But when Ephraim he came home

He proved an arrant Coward,

He wouldn’t fight the Frenchmen there

For fear of being devour’d.

Dr. Shuckburgh hadn’t had much opinion of the colonials, and neither had the composer of the newer version, used as a marching song. He’d heard that one in Philadelphia and hummed along under his breath.

Yankee Doodle came to town,

For to buy a firelock,

We will tar and feather him,

And so we will John Hancock!

His present companions were now singing—with gusto—the latest evolution:

Yankee Doodle went to town

A-riding on a pony,

Stuck a feather in his cap

And called it Macaroni!

He wondered, yawning, whether any of them knew that the word dudel meant “simpleton” in German. He doubted Morristown, New Jersey, had ever seen a macaroni, those affected young men who went in for pink wigs and a dozen face patches.

As his headache eased, he began to appreciate the simple pleasure of reclining. The shoes with their makeshift laces fit him badly and, as well as rubbing his heels raw, gave him shooting pains in the shins from the effort of constantly clenching his toes in order to keep the bloody things on. He stretched his legs gingerly, almost enjoying the tenderness in his muscles, so near bliss by contrast with walking.

He was distracted from his catalog of meager blessings by a small, hungry gulp near his ear, followed by a young, low voice.

“Mister . . . if ye’re not meanin’ to eat that journeycake yourself . . .”

“What? Oh . . . yes. Of course.”

He struggled to sit up, one hand pressed protectively over his bad eye, and turned his head to see a boy of eleven or twelve sitting on the log just beside him. He had his hand inside his sack, rummaging for the food, when the boy let out a gasp, and he looked up, vision wavering in the firelight, to discover himself face-to-face with Claire’s grandson, fair hair in a tousled halo round his head and a look of horror on his face.

“Hush!” he said in a whisper, and grabbed the child’s knee in such a sudden grip that the boy gave a small yelp.

“Why, what’s that you’ve got there, Bert? Caught you a thief?” Abe Shaffstall, distracted from a desultory game of knucklebones, looked over his shoulder, peering shortsightedly at the boy—Christ, what was his name? His father was French; was it Claude? Henri? No, that was the younger boy, the dwarf. . . .

“Tais-toi!” he said under his breath to the boy, and turned to his companions. “No, no—this is a neighbor’s son from Philadelphia—er . . . Bobby. Bobby Higgins,” he added, grabbing at the first name that offered itself. “What’s brought you out here, son?” he asked, hoping that the boy was as quick-witted as his grandmother.

“Lookin’ for my grandda,” the boy replied promptly, though his eyes shifted uneasily round the circle of faces, now all aimed in his direction as the singing died away.

“My mam sent me with some clothes and food for him, but some wicked fellows in the wood pulled me off my mule and . . . and t-took everything.” The boy’s voice trembled realistically, and Grey noticed that, in fact, his dirty cheeks showed the tracks of tears.

This provoked a rumble of concern round the circle and the immediate production from pokes and pockets of hard bread, apples, dried meat, and dirty handkerchiefs.

“What’s your grandpa’s name, son?” Joe Buckman inquired. “What company is he with?”

The boy looked nonplussed at this and shot a quick glance at Grey, who answered for him.

“James Fraser,” he said, with a reassuring nod that made his head throb. “He’d be with one of the Pennsylvania companies, wouldn’t he, Bobby?”

“Aye, sir.” The boy wiped his nose on the proffered handkerchief and gratefully accepted an apple. “Mer—” He interrupted himself with an artful coughing fit and amended this to “Thank ye kindly, sir. And you, sir.” He handed back the handkerchief and set himself to ravenous consumption, this limiting his replies to nods and shakes of the head. Indistinct mumbles indicated that he had forgotten the number of his grandfather’s company.

“No matter, boy,” Reverend Woodsworth said comfortingly. “We’re all a-going to the same place to muster. You’ll find your grandpa with the troops there, surely. You think you can keep up with us, though, a-foot?”

“Oh, aye, sir,” Germain—that was it! Germain!—said, nodding fast. “I can walk.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Grey said hastily, and that seemed to settle it.

He waited impatiently until everyone had forgotten the boy’s presence and begun to ready themselves for sleep, then rose, muscles protesting, and jerked his head at Germain to follow him, muffling an exclamation of pain at the movement.

“Right,” he said in a low voice, as soon as they were out of earshot. “What the devil are you doing out here? And where is your bloody grandfather?”

“I was lookin’ for him,” Germain replied, unbuttoning his flies to piss. “He’s gone to—” He paused, obviously unsure what his relationship with Grey now was. “Beg pardon, my lord, but I dinna ken should I tell ye that or not. I mean . . .” The boy was no more than a silhouette against the darker black of the undergrowth, but even the outline of his body expressed an eloquent wariness. “Comment se fait-il que vous soyez ici?”

“How did I come to be here,” Grey repeated under his breath. “Comment, indeed. Never mind. I’ll tell you where we’re going, shall I? I gather we’re bound for a place called Coryell’s Ferry to join General Washington. Does that ring a bell?”

Germain’s slender shoulders relaxed, and a soft pattering on the earth indicated that apparently it did. Grey joined him, and, finished, they turned back toward the glow of the campfire.

Still in the shelter of the woods, Grey put his hand on Germain’s shoulder and squeezed. The boy stopped dead.

“Attendez, monsieur,” Grey said, low-voiced. “If the militia learn who I am, they’ll hang me. Instantly. My life is in your hands from this moment. Comprenez-vous?”

There was silence for an unnerving moment.

“Are you a spy, my lord?” Germain asked softly, not turning round.

Grey paused before answering, wavering between expediency and honesty. He could hardly forget what he’d seen and heard, and when he made it back to his own lines, duty would compel him to pass on such information as he had.

“Not by choice,” he said at last, just as softly.

A cool breeze had risen with the setting of the sun, and the forest murmured all around them.

“Bien,” Germain said at last. “And thank ye for the food.” He turned then, and Grey could see the glint of firelight on one fair brow, arched in inquisitiveness.

“So I am Bobby Higgins. Who are you, then?”

“Bert Armstrong,” Grey replied shortly. “Call me Bert.”

He led the way then toward the fire and the blanket-humped rolls of sleeping men. He couldn’t quite tell, above the rustling of the trees and the snoring of his fellows, but he thought the little bugger was laughing.

52 MORPHIA DREAMS

WE SLEPT THAT NIGHT in the public room of an ordinary in Langhorne. Bodies were sprawled on tables and benches, curled under the tables, and laid in haphazard arrangements on pallets, folded cloaks, and saddlebags, as far away from the hearth as they could get. The fire was banked, but it still radiated considerable heat. The room was filled with the bitter scents of burning wood and boiling bodies. I estimated the temperature in the room at something like ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, and the slumbering bodies on display were largely unclad, pale haunches, shoulders, and bosoms glimmering in the sullen glow of the embers.

Jamie had been traveling in shirt and breeches, his new uniform and its dazzling smallclothes carefully folded into a portmanteau until we got within range of the army, so his disrobing was a simple matter of unbuttoning his flies and pulling off his stockings. Mine was complicated by the fact that my traveling stays had leather laces, and over the course of a sweat-drenched day, the knot had tightened into a stubborn nodule that resisted all attempts.

“Are ye no coming to bed, Sassenach?” Jamie was already lying down, having found a remote corner behind the bar counter and spread out our cloaks.

“I’ve broken a fingernail trying to get this bloody thing loose, and I can’t bloody reach it with my teeth!” I said, on the verge of breaking into tears of frustration. I was swaying with weariness, but couldn’t bring myself to sleep in the clammy confines of my stays.

Jamie reached up an arm out of the darkness, beckoning.

“Come lie down wi’ me, Sassenach,” he whispered. “I’ll do it.”

The simple relief of lying down, after twelve hours in the saddle, was so exquisite that I nearly changed my mind about sleeping in my stays, but he’d meant it. He squirmed down and bent his head to nuzzle at my laces, an arm round my back to steady me.

“Dinna fash,” he murmured into my midsection, voice somewhat muffled. “If I canna nibble it loose, I’ll prise it wi’ my dirk.”

He looked up with an inquiring noise, as I’d uttered a strangled laugh at the prospect.

“Just trying to decide whether being accidentally disemboweled would be worse than sleeping in my stays,” I whispered, cupping his head. It was warm, the soft hair at his nape damp to the touch.

“My aim’s no that bad, Sassenach,” he said, pausing in his labors for an instant. “I’d only risk stabbin’ ye in the heart.”

As it was, he accomplished his goal without recourse to weapons, gently jerking the knot loose with his teeth until he could finish the job with his fingers, opening the heavy seamed canvas stays like a clamshell to expose the whiteness of my shift. I sighed like a grateful mollusk opening at high tide, plucking the fabric out of the creases the stays had made in my flesh. Jamie pushed away the discarded stays but remained where he was, his face near my breasts, rubbing his hands gently over my sides.

I sighed again at his touch; he’d done it by habit, but it was a habit I’d missed for the last four months, and a touch I’d thought never to feel again.

“Ye’re too thin, Sassenach,” he whispered. “I can feel every rib. I’ll find ye food tomorrow.”

I had been too much preoccupied in the last few days to think about food, and was much too tired at the moment to be hungry, but made an agreeable sound in response and stroked his hair, tracing the curve of his skull.

“I love you, a nighean,” he said, very softly, his breath warm on my skin.

“I love you,” I answered just as softly, taking the ribbon from his hair and loosening his plait between my fingers. I pressed his head closer to me, not in invitation, but out of the sudden urgent need to keep him close to me, to protect him.

He kissed my breast and turned his head, laying it in the hollow of my shoulder. He took one deep breath, one more, and then was asleep, the relaxing weight of his body against me both protection and trust.

“I love you,” I said, almost soundless, my arms wrapped tight about him. “Oh, dear God, I love you.”

IT MIGHT HAVE been the sense of overwhelming fatigue, or the smell, the mingling of alcohol and unwashed bodies, that made me dream of the hospital.

I was walking down the little hall beyond the men’s ward at the hospital where I’d done my nurse’s training, the tiny bottle of morphia grains in my hand. The walls were dingy gray; so was the air. At the end of the hall was the alcohol bath where the syringes were kept.

I lifted one out, cold and slippery, careful not to drop it. But I did drop it; it slid from my hand and shattered on the floor, spraying glass shards that cut my legs.

I couldn’t worry about that; I had to get back with the morphine injection—men were calling out behind me, desperate, and somehow it was the sound of the operating tent in France back there, men moaning, screams and hopeless sobbing, and my fingers shook with urgency, groping in the cold steel bath among glass syringes that rattled like bones.

I pulled one out, gripping it so tightly that it, too, broke in my hand, and blood ran down my wrist, but I wasn’t conscious of pain. Another, I must have another; they were in dreadful pain and I could stop it, if only . . .

Somehow I had a clean syringe and had got the top off the tiny bottle of morphia grains, but my hand was shaking, the grains spilling like salt; Sister Amos would be furious. I needed tweezers, forceps; I couldn’t grasp the tiny pellets with my fingers and, in a panic, shook several of them into the syringe, a whole grain, not the quarter grain called for, but I had to get to the men, had to stop their pain.

Then I was running back down the endless gray hall toward the cries, shards of glass glinting among the red blood drops on the floor, both as bright as dragonfly wings. But my hand was growing numb, and the last syringe fell from my fingers before I reached the door.

And I woke up with a jolt that seemed to stop my heart. I gulped smoke and the fug of beer and bodies, not knowing where I was.

“Jesus, Sassenach, are ye all right?” Jamie, startled out of sleep, rolled up onto his elbow above me, and I came back into the present with as much of a jolt as my awakening had been. My left arm was numb from the shoulder down, and there were tears on my cheeks; I felt the coolness on my skin.

“I . . . yes. Just a . . . a bad dream.” I felt ashamed to confess it, as though it were his privilege alone to suffer nightmares.

“Ah.” He lowered himself beside me with a sigh and gathered me to him with one arm. He ran a thumb over my face and, finding wetness, blotted it matter-of-factly with his shirt. “All right now?” he whispered, and I nodded, thankful that I needn’t talk about it.

“Good.” He stroked the hair off my face and rubbed my back gently, the circles of his hand growing gradually slower until he fell asleep again.

It was deep night, and a deep sleep lay upon the room. The whole of it seemed to breathe in unison, snores and gasps and grunts all fading into something like the waves of a receding tide, rising and falling and bearing me with them, safely back into the depths of sleep.

Only the pins and needles of feeling returning to my dead arm kept me from it, and that only momentarily.

I could still see the blood and the shards of glass and heard against the susurrus of snores the crash of falling crystal, saw the bloody smudges on the wallpaper at Number 17.

Dear Lord, I prayed, listening to Jamie’s heart under my ear, slow and steady. Whatever happens, let him have a chance to talk to William.

53 TAKEN AT A DISADVANTAGE

WILLIAM LED HIS HORSE down among the rocks to a level place where both of them could drink. It was midafternoon, and after a day spent riding to and fro along the column in the blazing sun, he was parched as a piece of last year’s venison jerky.

His present horse was Madras, a cob with a deep chest and a steady, stolid disposition. The horse waded purposefully into the stream, hock-deep, and sank his nose into the water with a blissful snort, shivering his coat against the cloud of flies that appeared instantly out of nowhere whenever they stopped.

William waved a couple of insects away from his own face and took off his coat for a moment’s relief from the heat. He was tempted to wade in, too—up to his neck, if the creek was deep enough—but . . . well . . . He looked cautiously over his shoulder, but he was well out of sight, though he could hear the sounds of the baggage train on the distant road. Why not? Just for a moment. It wasn’t as though the dispatch he was carrying was urgent; he’d seen it written, and it contained nothing more than an invitation for General von Knyphausen to join General Clinton for supper at an inn with a reputation for good pork. Everyone was wringing with sweat; dampness would be no telltale.

He hastily shucked shoes, shirt, stockings, breeches, and smalls, and walked naked into the purling water, which barely reached his waist but was wet and cool. He closed his eyes in blissful relief—and opened them abruptly a half second later.

“William!”

Madras flung up his head with a startled snort, showering William with droplets, but he barely noticed in the shock of seeing two young women standing on the opposite bank.

“What the devil are you doing here?” He tried to squat a little lower in the water without being conspicuous about it. Though a dim voice in the back of his mind wondered aloud why he bothered: Arabella–Jane had already seen anything he had. “And who’s that?” he demanded, jerking his chin at the other girl. Both of them were flushed as summer roses, but he thought—he hoped—it was the result of the heat.

“This is my sister, Frances,” Jane said, with the elegance of a Philadelphia matron, and gestured to the younger girl. “Curtsy to his lordship, now, Fanny.”

Fanny, a very lovely young girl with dark curls peeping out under her cap—what was she, eleven, twelve?—bobbed him a sweet curtsy, blue-and- red-calico petticoats outspread, and dropped long lashes modestly over the big, soft eyes of a young doe.

“Your most humble servant, mademoiselle,” he said, bowing with as much grace as possible, which, judging from the expressions on the girls’ faces, was probably a mistake. Fanny clapped a hand over her mouth and went much redder from the effort not to laugh.

“I am charmed to meet your sister,” he said to Jane, rather coldly. “But I fear you take me at something of a disadvantage, madam.”

“Yes, that’s a piece of luck,” Jane agreed. “I couldn’t think how we were to find you in that moil, and when we saw you ride past like the fiend was after you—we’d got a ride on a baggage wagon—I didn’t think we’d ever catch you. But we took the chance, and . . . voilà! Fortuna favet audax, you know.” She wasn’t even trying to pretend she wasn’t laughing at him!

He scrabbled for some cutting rejoinder in Greek, but the only thing that came to his inflamed mind was a humiliating echo from his past, something his father had said to him on the occasion when he’d accidentally fallen into a privy: “What news from the underworld, Persephone?”

“Turn your backs,” he said curtly. “I’m getting out.”

They didn’t. Gritting his teeth, he turned his own back on them and deliberately climbed the bank, feeling the itch of four interested eyes focused on his dripping backside. He grabbed his shirt and wrestled his way into it, feeling that even that much shelter would enable him to carry on the conversation in a more dignified manner. Or maybe he’d just tuck his breeches and boots under his arm and leave without further chat.

The sound of heavy splashing whilst he was still enveloped in the folds of his shirt made him whirl round, head popping free just in time to see Madras lunge up out of the creek on the girls’ side, lips already reaching for the apple Jane was holding out to him.

“Come back here, sir!” he shouted. But the girls had more apples, and the horse paid no attention whatever—nor did he object when Arabella–Jane took his reins and looped them casually round the trunk of a young willow.

“I noticed that you didn’t ask how we came to be here,” she said. “Doubtless surprise has deprived you of your usual exquisite manners.” She dimpled at him and he eyed her severely.

“I did,” he said. “I distinctly recall saying, ‘What. The. Devil. Are. You. Doing. Here.’”

“Oh, so you did,” she said, without a blush. “Well, not to put too fine a point on the matter, Captain Harkness came back.”

“Oh,” he said, in a slightly different tone. “I see. You, um, ran away, then?”

Frances nodded solemnly.

William cleared his throat. “Why? Captain Harkness is doubtless with the army. Why would you come here, of all places, instead of staying safe in Philadelphia?”

“No, he isn’t,” Jane said. “He was detained on business in Philadelphia. So we came away. Besides,” she added carelessly, “there are thousands of women with the army. He’d never find us, even if he was looking—and why should he be?”

That was reasonable. Still . . . he knew what the life of an army whore was like. He also had a strong suspicion that the girls had run out on their contract with the brothel; very few saved enough from their wages to buy their way out, and both of these girls were much too young to have made much money. To abandon the reasonable comfort of clean beds and regular meals in Philadelphia in order to accommodate filthy, sweating soldiers amidst mud and flies, paid in blows as often as in coin . . . Yet he was obliged to admit that he’d never been buggered by a vicious sod like Harkness and thus had no true basis for comparison.

“I expect you want money, to assist in your escape?” he said, an edge in his voice.

“Well, perhaps,” said Jane. Reaching into her pocket, she held up something shiny. “Mostly, I wanted to give this back to you.”

His gorget! He took an involuntary step toward her, toes squelching in the mud.

“I—thank you,” he said abruptly. He’d felt its lack every time he dressed, and felt even more the weight of his fellow officers’ eyes on the empty spot where it should rest. He’d been obliged to explain to Colonel Desplains what had happened—more or less—saying that he’d been robbed in a bawdy house. Desplains had chewed him bloody, but then had given him reluctant leave to appear without a gorget until he might get another in New York.

“What I—we, I mean—really want is your protection,” Jane said, doing her best to look winsomely earnest, and doing it damned well.

“You what?”

“I don’t think I should have any difficulty in making a living with the army,” she said frankly, “but ’tisn’t really what I want for my dear sister, that sort of life.”

“Er . . . no. I imagine not,” William said warily. “What else did you have in mind?” “Lady’s maid?” he wanted to suggest sarcastically, but in light of the return of his gorget, he refrained.

“I haven’t quite made up my mind,” she said, fastening her gaze on the ripples where the creek ran over rocks. “But if you could help us to get safely to New York—and maybe find us a place there . . .”

William ran a hand down his face, wiping away a layer of fresh sweat.

“Don’t want much, do you?” he said. On the one hand, if he didn’t give her some assurance of help, he wouldn’t put it past her to fling his gorget into the water in a fit of pique. And on the other . . . Frances was a lovely child, delicate and pale as a morning-glory blossom. And on the third hand, he hadn’t any more time to spare in argument.

“Get on the horse and come across,” he said abruptly. “I’ll find you a new place with the baggage train. I have to ride a dispatch to von Knyphausen just now, but I’ll meet you in General Clinton’s camp this evening—no, not this evening, I won’t be back until tomorrow. . . .” He fumbled for a moment, wondering where to tell her to find him; he could not have two young whores asking for him at General Clinton’s headquarters. “Go to the surgeons’ tent at sundown tomorrow. I’ll—think of something.”

54 IN WHICH I MEET A TURNIP

DURING THE NEXT DAY’S ride, we encountered a messenger, sent back from Washington’s command with a note for Jamie. He read this leaning against a tree, while I made an unobtrusive visit to a nearby clump of brush.

“What does he say?” I asked, straightening my clothes as I emerged. I was still rather awed that Jamie had actually spoken with George Washington, and the fact that he was frowning at a letter presumably written by the future Father of the Country . . .

“Two or three things,” he replied with a shrug, and, refolding the note, stuffed it into his pocket. “The only important bit o’ news is that my brigade is to be under the command of Charles Lee.”

“Do you know Charles Lee?” I got my foot into the stirrup and heaved myself into the saddle.

“I know of him.” What he knew appeared to be rather problematic, judging from the line between his brows. I raised my own; he glanced at me and smiled.

“I met him, ken, when I first met General Washington. I made it my business to learn a bit more about him since.”

“Oh, so you didn’t like him,” I observed, and he gave me a small snort.

“No, I didn’t,” he said, nudging his horse into a walk. “He’s loud and unmannerly and a sloven—I could see that much for myself—but from what I’ve heard since, he’s also jealous to the bone and doesna trouble to hide it verra well.”

“Jealous? Of whom?” Not Jamie, I hoped.

“Of Washington,” he answered matter-of-factly, surprising me. “He thought he should have command o’ the Continental army and doesna like playin’ second fiddle.”

“Really?” I’d never once heard of General Charles Lee, which seemed odd, if he had such prominence as to have made that a reasonable expectation. “Why does he think that, do you know?”

“I do. He feels he has a good deal more in the way of military experience than Washington—and that’s maybe true: he was in the British army for some time and fought a number of successful campaigns. Still—” He lifted one shoulder and dropped it, dismissing General Lee for the moment. “I wouldna have agreed to do this, had it been Lee who asked me.”

“I thought you didn’t want to do it, regardless.”

“Mmphm.” He considered for a moment. “It’s true I didna want to do this—I don’t now.” He looked at me, apologetic. “And I truly dinna want you to be here.”

“I’m going to be where you are for the rest of our lives,” I said firmly. “If that’s a week or another forty years.”

“Longer,” he said, and smiled.

We rode for a time in silence, but deeply aware of each other. We had been, since that conversation in the gardens at Kingsessing.

“I will love ye forever. It doesna matter if ye sleep with the whole English army—well, no, it would matter, but it wouldna stop me loving you.”

“I’ve taken ye to bed a thousand times at least, Sassenach. Did ye think I wasna paying attention?”

“There couldna be anyone like you.”

I hadn’t forgotten a word we’d said—and neither had he, though neither one of us had spoken of it again. We weren’t walking on tiptoe with each other, but we were feeling our way . . . finding our way into each other, as we’d done twice before. Once, when I’d returned to find him in Edinburgh—and at the beginning, when we’d found ourselves wed by force and joined by circumstance. Only later, by choice.

“What would you have wanted to be?” I asked, on impulse. “If you hadn’t been born the laird of Lallybroch?”

“I wasn’t. If my elder brother hadna died, ye mean,” he said. A small shadow of regret crossed his face, but didn’t linger. He still mourned the boy who had died at eleven, leaving a small brother to pick up the burden of leadership and struggle to grow into it—but he had been accustomed to that burden for a very long time.

“Maybe that,” I said. “But what if you’d been born elsewhere, maybe to a different family?”

“Well, I wouldna be who I am, then, would I?” he said logically, and smiled at me. “I may quibble wi’ what the Lord’s called me to do now and then, Sassenach—but I’ve nay argument wi’ how he made me.”

I looked at what he was—the strong, straight body and capable hands, the face so full of everything he was—and had no argument, either.

“Besides,” he said, and tilted his head consideringly, “if it had been different, I wouldna have you, would I? Or have had Brianna and her weans?”

If it had been different . . . I didn’t ask whether he thought his life as it was had been worth the cost.

He leaned over and touched my cheek.

“It’s worth it, Sassenach,” he said. “For me.”

I cleared my throat.

“For me, too.”

IAN AND ROLLO caught us up a few miles from Coryell’s Ferry. Darkness had fallen, but the glow of the camp was faintly visible against the sky, and we made our way cautiously in, being stopped every quarter mile or so by sentries who popped unnervingly out of the dark, muskets at the ready.

“Friend or foe?” the sixth of these demanded dramatically, peering at us in the beam of a dark lantern held high.

“General Fraser and his lady,” Jamie said, shielding his eyes with his hand and glaring down at the sentry. “Is that friendly enough for ye?”

I muffled a smile in my shawl; he’d refused to stop to find food along the way, and I’d refused to let him consume uncooked bacon, no matter how well smoked. Jenny’s four apples hadn’t gone far, we’d found no food since the night before, and he was starving. An empty stomach generally woke the fiend that slept within, and this was clearly in evidence at the moment.

“Er . . . yes, sir, General, I only—” The lantern’s beam of light shifted to rest on Rollo, catching him full in the face and turning his eyes to an eerie green flash. The sentry made a strangled noise, and Ian leaned down from his horse, his own face—Mohawk tattoos and all—appearing suddenly in the beam.

“Dinna mind us,” he said genially to the sentry. “We’re friendly, too.”

TO MY SURPRISE, there was actually a good-sized settlement at the Ferry, with several inns and substantial houses perched on the bank of the Delaware.

“I suppose that’s why Washington chose this as the rendezvous point?” I asked Jamie. “Good staging, I mean, and some supply.”

“Aye, there’s that,” he said, though he spoke abstractedly. He’d risen a little in his stirrups, looking over the scene. Every window in every house was lit, but a large American flag, with its circle of stars, flapped above the door of the largest inn. Washington’s headquarters, then.

My chief concern was to get some food into Jamie before he met with General Lee, if the aforementioned indeed had a reputation for arrogance and short temper. I didn’t know what it was about red hair, but many years’ experience with Jamie, Brianna, and Jemmy had taught me that while most people became irritable when hungry, a redheaded person with an empty stomach was a walking time bomb.

I sent Ian and Rollo with Jamie to find the quartermaster, discover what we might have in the way of accommodation, and unload the pack mule, then followed my nose toward the nearest scent of food.

The dug-in camp kitchens would long since have banked their fires, but I’d been in many army camps and knew how they worked; small kettles would be simmering all night, filled with stew and porridge for the morning—the more so as the army was in hot pursuit of General Clinton. Amazing to think that I had met him socially only a few days before—

I’d been so focused on my quest that I hadn’t seen a man come out of the half dark and nearly ran into him. He seized me by the arms and we waltzed a dizzy half-turn before coming to rest.

“Pardon, madame! I am afraid I have stepped upon your foot!” said a young French voice, very concerned, and I looked straight into the very concerned face of a very young man. He was in shirtsleeves and breeches, but I could see that his shirtsleeves sported deep, lace-trimmed cuffs. An officer, then, in spite of his youth.

“Well, yes, you have,” I said mildly, “but don’t worry about it. I’m not damaged.”

“Je suis tellement désolé, je suis un navet!” he exclaimed, striking himself in the forehead. He wore no wig, and I saw that despite his age, his hair was receding at a rapid pace. What was left of it was red and inclined to stand on end—possibly owing to his apparent habit of thrusting his fingers through it, which he was now doing.

“Nonsense,” I said in French, laughing. “You aren’t a turnip at all.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, switching to English. He smiled charmingly at me. “I once stepped on the foot of the Queen of France. She was much less gracious, sa Majesté,” he added ruefully. “She called me a turnip. Still, if it hadn’t happened—I was obliged to leave the court, you know—perhaps I would never have come to America, so we cannot bemoan my clumsiness altogether, n’est-ce pas?”

He was exceedingly cheerful and smelled of wine—not that that was in any way unusual. But given his exceeding Frenchness, his evident wealth, and his tender age, I was beginning to think—

“Have I the, um, honor of addressing—” Bloody hell, what was his actual title? Assuming that he really was—

“Pardon, madame!” he exclaimed, and, seizing my hand, bowed low over it and kissed it. “Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, a votre service!”

I managed to pick “La Fayette” out of this torrent of Gallic syllables and felt the odd little thump of excitement that happened whenever I met someone I knew of from historical accounts—though cold sober realism told me that these people were usually no more remarkable than the people who were cautious or lucky enough not to end up decorating historical accounts with their blood and entrails.

I gathered sufficient composure to inform him that I was Madame General Fraser and that I was sure my husband would shortly be along to pay his respects, directly I had located some supper.

“But you must come and dine with me, madame!” he said, and, having not let go of my hand, was in a position to tuck it cozily into his elbow and tow me off toward a large building that looked like an inn of some sort. An inn was precisely what it was, but an inn that had been commandeered by the Rebel forces and was now General Washington’s headquarters—as I discovered when le marquis led me under a fluttering banner, through the taproom, and into a large back room where a number of officers were sitting at table, presided over by a large man who did not look precisely like the image on a dollar bill, but close enough.

“Mon Général,” the marquis said, bowing to Washington and then gesturing to me. “I have the honor to present to you Madame General Fraser, the personification of grace and loveliness!”

The table rose as one, with a screeching of wooden benches, and the men—in fact, there were only six of them—rose and bowed to me in turn, murmuring, “Your servant,” and “Your most obedient, ma’am.” Washington himself stood up at the head of the table—My God, he’s as tall as Jamie, I thought—and gave me a very graceful bow, hand on his bosom.

“I am honored by your presence, Mrs. Fraser,” he said, in a soft Virginia drawl. “Dare I hope that your husband accompanies you?”

I had a moment’s insane impulse to reply, “No, he sent me to fight instead,” but managed not to say it.

“He does,” I replied instead. “He’s . . . er . . .” I gestured helplessly toward the doorway, where—with remarkably good timing—Jamie himself now appeared, brushing pine needles off his sleeve and saying something to Young Ian, behind him.

“There ye are!” he exclaimed, spotting me. “Someone told me ye’d gone off with a strange Frenchman. What—” He stopped abruptly, having suddenly realized that I wasn’t merely in the company of a strange Frenchman.

The table fell about laughing, and La Fayette rushed up to Jamie and seized his hand, beaming.

“Mon frère d’armes!” He clicked his heels together, doubtless by reflex, and bowed. “I must apologize for having stolen your lovely wife, sir. Allow me, please, to make recompense by inviting you to dinner!”

I’d met Anthony Wayne before, at Ticonderoga, and was pleased to see him again. I was also delighted to see Dan Morgan, who gave me a hearty buss on both cheeks, and I admitted to a certain thrill at having my hand kissed by George Washington, though noticing the halitosis that accompanied his notorious dental problems. I wondered how I might make an opportunity to inspect his teeth, but gave such speculations up immediately with the arrival of a procession of servants with trays of fried fish, roast chicken, buttermilk biscuits with honey, and an amazing selection of ripe cheeses, these having been—he told me—brought by the marquis himself from France.

“Try this one,” he urged me, cutting a slab of an extremely fragrant Roquefort, green-veined and crumbly. Nathanael Greene, who sat on the other side of the marquis, pinched his nose unobtrusively and gave me a small private smile. I smiled back—but in fact I quite liked strong cheese.

I wasn’t the only one. Rollo, who had come in—naturally—with Young Ian and was sitting behind him, across the table from me, lifted his head and poked a long, hairy snout between Ian and General Lee, sniffing interestedly at the cheese.

“Good Christ!” Lee apparently hadn’t noticed the dog before this and flung himself to one side, nearly ending in Jamie’s lap. This action distracted Rollo, who turned to Lee, sniffing him with close attention.

I didn’t blame the dog. Charles Lee was a tall, thin man with a long, thin nose and the most revolting eating habits I’d seen since Jemmy had learned to feed himself with a spoon. He not only talked while he ate and chewed with his mouth open, but was given to wild gestures while holding things in his hand, with the result that the front of his uniform was streaked with egg, soup, jelly, and a number of less identifiable substances.

Despite this, he was an amusing, witty man—and the others seemed to give him a certain deference. I wondered why; unlike some of the gentlemen at the table, Charles Lee never attained renown as a Revolutionary figure. He treated them with a certain . . . well, it wasn’t scorn, certainly—condescension, perhaps?

I was taken up in conversation—mostly with the marquis, who was putting himself out to be charming to me, telling me how much he missed his wife (Good Lord, how old was he? I wondered. He didn’t look more than twenty, if that), who had been responsible for the cheese. No, no, not making it herself, but it came from their estate at Chavaniac, which his wife ran most ably in his absence—but now and then caught a glimpse of Jamie. He took part in the conversation, but I could see his eyes flick round the table, appraising, judging. And they rested most often on General Lee, beside him.

Of course, he knew Wayne and Morgan quite well—and he knew what I’d been able to tell him about Washington and La Fayette. God, I hoped what I thought I knew about them was halfway accurate—but we’d find out soon enough if it wasn’t.

Port wine was brought—evidently the meal was being hosted by the marquis; I had the distinct feeling that the high command of the Continental army didn’t always eat this well. The men had largely avoided talking about the impending battle during the meal, but I could feel the subject looming like an approaching thunderstorm, bright-rimmed black clouds, excitingly shot with flickers of lightning. I began to rearrange my skirts and make gestures of incipient leave-taking, and saw Jamie, seated next to Lee across the table, notice and smile at me.

Lee noticed, too—he’d been gazing in an absent way at my décolletage—and broke off the anecdote he’d been telling Ian, seated on his other side.

“Such a pleasure to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” he said cordially. “Your husband obliges us extremely by allowing us the delight of your company. I—”

Lee stopped abruptly in mid-sentence—and mid-bite, staring at Rollo, who had unobtrusively moved closer and was now standing no more than a couple of feet from the general. Given the low bench on which Lee was sitting and Rollo’s size, this proximity placed them roughly eye-to-eye.

“Why is that dog looking at me like that?” Lee demanded, swinging round to glare at Ian.

“He’s waitin’ to see what ye drop next, I expect,” Ian said, chewing placidly.

“If I were you, sir,” Jamie put in politely, “I’d drop something quickly.”

IAN, ROLLO, AND I took our leave of the generals and went out into the dark to find our beds, escorted by an orderly with a lantern. Fires burned high all up and down the bank of the Delaware, and many of the boats on the river had lanterns or open fires as well, the lights reflecting in the water like shoals of glimmering fish.

“Do you know anything about the man who ate beside you?” I asked Ian, in my hesitant Gaelic. He laughed—he and Jamie always laughed when I spoke Gaelic—but lifted one shoulder in a negative shrug.

“I do not, but I will find out,” he said. “He is an Englishman, I can tell you that much.”

He used the word “Sassenach,” which gave me a mild shock. It had been a long time since I’d heard a Scot use that word in the way it was meant.

“Yes, he is. Do you think it makes a difference?” Technically, they were all still Englishmen—well, bar La Fayette, von Steuben, Kosciuszko, and similar oddities—but it was true that most of the Continental officers had been born and spent their lives in America. Lee hadn’t. Ian made a derisory Scottish noise, indicating that it did.

“But I hear that he was adopted into the Kahnyen’kehaka, too,” I objected.

Ian was silent for a moment, then took my arm, leaning close to speak in my ear.

“Auntie,” he said softly. “D’ye think I ever stopped bein’ a Scot?”

55 VESTAL VIRGINS

JAMIE AND I WERE billeted at the home of the Chenowyths, a pleasant—if understandably somewhat anxious—family whose home stood at the end of the single road that ran through Coryell’s Ferry. Mrs. Chenowyth was in her wrapper, but greeted me kindly with a candlestick and took me to a small bedroom at the back of the house—this showing the evidence of hasty evacuation by a number of young Chenowyths, these presumably now sharing their parents’ room, judging from the sounds of mixed heavy breathing.

The single bed was fairly large, though Jamie’s feet would still stick out by a good six inches. There was a washbasin and ewer full of fresh water; I picked this up carefully and drank from it; my throat was dry from too much French wine. I replaced the ewer and sat down on the bed, feeling rather strange.

Possibly it was the wine. Possibly it was the fact that the room had no windows, and Mrs. Chenowyth had thoughtfully closed the door behind her. It was a small room, perhaps ten feet by eight. The air was still and the candle’s flame burned high and steady, pure against the bricks of the wall. Perhaps it was the candle that brought to mind Uncle Lamb and the day he’d told me about vestal virgins, showing me a blue chalcedony carving from the temple of Vesta.

“Should a virgin betray her vows,” he’d said, waggling his eyebrows at me, “she’d be whipped, then sealed up alive in a small underground tomb, equipped with a table and chair, some water, and a single candle. And there she would die, when the air ran out.”

I’d considered that with a sort of morbid relish—I might have been ten—and then asked with interest just how a vestal might betray her vows. Which is how I learned what used to be called “the facts of life,” Uncle Lamb not being one to shirk any fact that wandered across his path, or mine. And while Uncle Lamb had assured me that the cult of Vesta had long since ceased operations, I had at that point resolved not to be a virgin, just in case. On the whole, a good resolution, though sleeping with men did have the most peculiar side effects.

Ian had brought along my saddlebags, which he’d dumped in the corner of the room before going off with Rollo to find his own sleeping place. I got up and fumbled for my toothbrush and tooth powder, though it seemed quite surreal to be brushing my teeth on what might be the eve of battle. Not quite rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic . . . or at least I hoped not.

I knew that Washington and the marquis were going to survive whatever happened—and spared a thought for the strangeness of now thinking of them as men and not names. The large pores on George Washington’s nose as he’d bent over my hand, and the shadowed pits of old smallpox scars across his lower cheeks; the smell of him, starch and sweat, wine and wig powder—for he wore his wig, hot as it was—the sweetly nasty smell of dental decay . . . I picked up my toothbrush, reminded, and set to work with some vigor. He’d smelled of blood, too; I wondered why—bleeding gums, perhaps?

I wriggled my way out of gown, jacket, and stays and stood for a bit flapping my shift, in hopes of admitting a little air. It made the candle flicker but didn’t have much effect beyond that, so I blew the candle out and lay down.

I didn’t expect to sleep. Adrenaline had been jolting through me like the current in a faulty circuit ever since we’d left Philadelphia, but now it was settling down to a steady humming in my blood. The conversation over dinner had been fairly general, but the atmosphere had been electric with anticipation. Clearly, once Ian and I had left and the plates had been removed . . . It was as close as I had ever been to a council of war, and the vibrations of it were still tingling through me.

There was anxiety tingling, too, to be sure—there had been amongst the men, as well. But given a suitable outlet, anxiety can be transformed into very effective action, and that’s plainly what Washington and his generals were now doing, hammering out plans, assigning troops, drawing up strategies . . . I wished I was amongst them. It would be much easier than lying in the pitch dark, staring up into a boring infinity—nasty way to die, that.

I sat up, gulping air, and went hastily to the door. No sounds, no light seeping under the door. I patted round on the floor ’til I located my shoes and the puddle of my cloak and, swinging this over my shoulders, slipped out and made my way silently through the half-dark house, past the smoldering hearth and out.

The door was unbolted and on the latch; perhaps Mr. Chenowyth was out and expected back. I supposed there was some danger of my being locked out, but at this point spending the night in the midst of a military camp in my shift seemed preferable to sleeping—or, rather, not sleeping—in a tomb. Besides, I was sure that one of the small Chenowyths had wee’d in the bed fairly recently.

No one took any notice of me as I walked back along the road. The taverns and ordinaries were crammed full and spilling customers all over the road. Continental regulars in their blue and buff, swaggering about, the envy—they hoped—of the militiamen. Any number of women, too, and not all whores, by any means. But above all . . . air.

The heat of the day had largely gone, and while the air wasn’t cold by any means, it wasn’t stifling, either. Having escaped entombment, I reveled in the feeling of freedom—and what amounted to invisibility, for tall as I was, with my cloak on and my hair tied back in a plait for bed, I looked much like many of the militiamen in the dark; no one glanced twice at me.

The street and the camp beyond were electric; I recognized the feeling, and it gave me the oddest sense of dislocation—for I recognized it in its various forms from half of the battlefields I’d served near, from France in 1944 to Prestonpans and Saratoga. It wasn’t always this way; often the sense of the occasion was one of dread—or worse. I remembered the night before Culloden and felt a wave of cold wash through me so strongly that I staggered and nearly fell against the wall of a building.

“Friend Claire?” said a voice, in amazement.

“Denzell?” Half-blinded by a number of torches being borne past, I blinked at the shape that had manifested before me.

“What is thee doing out here?” he said, alarmed. “Is anything wrong? Is it Jamie?”

“Well, you could say it’s Jamie,” I said, getting back my composure. “But there’s nothing wrong, no. I was just getting a bit of air. What are you doing here?”

“I was fetching a pitcher of beer,” he said, and took me firmly by the arm, steering me down the street. “Come with me. Thee ought not be in the street with the fighting men. Those that aren’t drunk now will be shortly.”

I didn’t argue. His hand on my arm felt good, steadying me against the strange currents of the night that seemed to carry me willy-nilly into the past—and the future—and back again without warning.

“Where are Rachel and Dottie?” I asked, as we turned right at the end of the street and began to thread our way through the campfires and rows of tents.

“Rachel’s gone somewhere with Ian; I didn’t inquire. Dottie’s in our medical tent, dealing with a case of acute indigestion.”

“Oh, dear. What did she eat?”

He laughed softly. “The indigestion isn’t hers. A woman named Peabody, who came in complaining of colic pains. Dorothea said she would administer something appropriate, if I would go and fetch her some beer—it being not safe for her to venture to the ordinary alone.”

I thought I detected a small note of reproach in his voice, but I made an indeterminate “hmm” in response and he said no more about my wandering the streets en déshabillé. Possibly because he hadn’t noticed that I was en déshabillé, until we entered the Hunters’ big medical tent and I took my cloak off.

Denny gave me one brief, shocked look, coughed, and, picking up a canvas apron, managed to hand it to me without looking directly at me. Dottie, who was massaging the massive back of a very large woman seated hunched over on a stool in front of her, grinned at me over the woman’s capped head.

“How are you, Auntie. Restless tonight?”

“Very,” I replied frankly, putting on the apron. “This is Mrs. Peabody?”

“Yes.” Dottie smothered a yawn with her shoulder. “The indigestion seems to be better—I gave her gripe water and peppermint,” she added, to Denny. “But she’s complaining of pains in her back, as well.”

“Hmm.” I came over and squatted down in front of the woman, who appeared to be half asleep—until I caught a whiff of her breath, which was eighty proof, at least. I put my hand on her belly to see if I could feel the location of the trouble, when she coughed thickly in a way I’d heard all too often before, choked—and I leapt back just in time.

“Thank you for the apron, Denny,” I said mildly, brushing off some of the higher flecks of mud and vomit that had spattered on me. “I don’t suppose you brought a birthing stool with you?”

“A birthing stool. To a battle?” he said faintly, his eyes bulging slightly behind his spectacles as he looked at the woman, now swaying ponderously to and fro, like a large bell making up its mind whether to ring or not.

“I rather think it may be one,” I said, glancing round. “If she’s in labor. Can you find a blanket, Dottie? I think we’ll have to lay her on the ground; she’ll collapse the cot.”

It took all three of us to wrestle Mrs. Peabody—who relapsed comfortably into unconsciousness the moment we touched her—onto a blanket spread on the ground under the lantern. There was an almost instant insurgence of moths, as they came fluttering in, attracted not only by the light but by the assorted smells thickening the air.

Mrs. Peabody had lapsed not merely into unconsciousness but into what appeared to be an alcoholic coma. After a certain amount of discussion, we’d turned her onto one side, in case she should vomit again, and the position had allowed her belly to flow away from the rest of her corpulent body, so that it lay on the ground in front of her, gravid and sac-like. She looked like the queen of some order of social insect, ready to deliver in the thousands, but I refrained from mentioning this, as Dottie was still pale.

Denzell had recovered from the shock and was keeping an eye—or rather a hand—on her wrist, keeping track of her pulse. “Amazingly strong,” he said at last, letting go, and looked up at me. “Does thee think she is near her time?”

“I really hope not,” I said, looking down. “But there’s no telling without . . . er . . . closer examination.” I took a deep breath and a grip on my more generous instincts. “Would you like me to . . . er . . .”

“I’ll go and find clean water,” he said, springing to his feet and seizing a bucket.

Given that Dottie was engaged to Denny, I refrained from calling him a coward in her presence and merely waved him off in a reserved manner. Mrs. Peabody made me uneasy on a number of scores. I had no idea whether she might be about to go into labor, or, if she did, how her comatose state might affect it. The level of alcohol in her blood was certainly affecting the child’s; would a drunken newborn be able to breathe? It wouldn’t vomit, as there wasn’t anything in its stomach to vomit, but might it void its bowels in utero and aspirate the material? That was a remarkably dangerous thing to happen even in a modern hospital with a full delivery-suite staff attending—most of the babies who did that died of suffocation, lung injury, or infection.

I was very much ashamed to admit to myself that my chief fear, though, was that something would happen during delivery that would require me to remain with mother and/or child for a prolonged period. I could not, by my oath as a physician—and what I conceived my responsibilities to be—abandon a patient in dire need of me.

But I would not abandon Jamie. I knew beyond all doubt that he was going into battle, and soon. He wasn’t going without me.

A slight noise jerked me out of my hypothetical moral quandary. Dottie had started unpacking and had dropped an amputation saw. She stooped to pick it up and said something under her breath in German that I thought was probably a bad word—John always swore in German; perhaps it was a family habit.

Thought of John added another layer of guilt to my complicated feelings—though the logical part of my brain firmly rejected this as undeserved. Still, the worry for him couldn’t be rejected so easily, though I did my best to tuck it away for the present.

“You needn’t stay up, Dottie,” I said. “I can take care of matters here. Nothing’s going to happen immediately, regardless—I can make up the surgical kits.”

“No, that’s all right,” she said, and then yawned involuntarily, gaping so widely that she startled herself and clapped a hand belatedly over her mouth. “Oh, dear. I do beg your pardon, Mrs. Fraser.” That made me smile; she had John’s elegant manners—perhaps Hal did, too, when he wasn’t engaging in undiluted bastardliness.

“Actually,” she said, fixing me directly with her striking gaze, “I’m pleased to have a chance to talk with you in privacy.”

“Oh?” I said, squatting to put a hand on Mrs. Peabody’s belly. I wasn’t feeling any movement from the baby, but they usually did go quiet if labor was impending. I could have used my stethoscope to listen for a fetal heartbeat, but it was in one of the boxes or bags that Ian and the orderly had carried off somewhere. Besides, whatever I heard or didn’t would make no difference to the immediate protocol.

“Yes.” Dottie sat down on a packing case as though it were a throne—like all the Greys I’d met, she had excellent posture. “I want to know the correct way of performing sexual intercourse.”

“Oh. Erm . . .”

She glanced down at Mrs. Peabody.

“And whether there is any way of preventing . . . er . . .”

“Pregnancy. To be sure.” I cleared my throat. I rather thought the sight of Mrs. Peabody would have put most young women off the idea of childbearing—if not sex—altogether. Dorothea Grey, though, was plainly a young woman of blood and iron.

“Don’t mistake me, Auntie,” she said earnestly. “Or do I mean Friend Claire? I do want children—want them terribly. But if there is any choice about giving birth on a battlefield or a moving ship, say—”

I seized on this last, in part to give myself time to compose something coherent in the way of advice. I’d rather thought Rachel might want to talk about such things at some point, having no mother, but . . .

“A ship? Are you thinking of going home to England, then?”

She grimaced in a way that brought her father vividly before me, and I nearly laughed but fortunately didn’t.

“I don’t know. I dearly want to see Mama again, of course, and Adam . . . and my . . . well, actually, I doubt I should see any of my friends again.” She waved a hand, dismissing the friends. “Not that there aren’t any Quakers in society, but they’re all very rich, and we won’t be.”

She bit her lip, but in a way indicating calculation rather than chagrin.

“If I can contrive to make Denny marry me here, so that we arrived in England as husband and wife already, it would be a simple matter to find a London meeting that would welcome us. Whereas here—” She flung out a hand toward the hum of the camp around us. “His involvement in the war would always stand in his way, you see?”

“Even after the war is over?”

She gave me a patient look, too old for her face.

“Papa says that wars take three generations to fade from the ground where they’re fought. And from what I’ve seen, Friends have quite long memories, as well.”

“He might just have a point.” Mrs. Peabody had begun to snore wetly, but I felt no sense of contraction. I rubbed a hand through my hair and braced my back more comfortably against one of the packing crates set against the wall. “All right. Perhaps . . . a little basic anatomy, to begin with.”

I really had no idea how much—if anything—a nobly born young woman might have been told, or found out by other means, so began with female reproductive anatomy, starting with the womb—for surely she knew what that was—and leading outward, part by part.

“You mean it has a name?” she exclaimed, charmed, when I got to the clitoris. “I’d always thought of it as just, you know . . . that bit.” Her tone of voice made it abundantly clear that I needn’t explain what that bit did, and I laughed.

“To the best of my knowledge, it’s the only structure of the human body that appears to have no function whatever save the pleasure of the owner.”

“But men . . . don’t they . . . ?”

“Well, yes, they do,” I said. “And very pleasurable they find theirs, too. But a penis is extremely functional, as well. You, er . . . do know how it . . . works? In terms of intercourse?”

“Denzell won’t let me touch his naked member, and I’m longing to see it at my leisure—not just the odd glimpse when he, well, you know.” Her eyes sparkled at the thought. “But I know what it feels like through his breeches. I was amazed, the first time it went stiff under my hand! However does it do that?”

I explained the concept of hydrostatic pressure as simply as possible, already seeing what was coming next. I cleared my throat and rose to my knees.

“I need to examine Mrs. Peabody for any sign of labor. And while we must be respectful of her privacy—so far as such a thing exists under these conditions”—for Dottie had snorted loudly—“since you’re assisting me here, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t observe what I’m doing, and I’ll explain it to you as we go. How things . . . work.”

She hummed with interest as I gingerly unveiled Mrs. Peabody’s nether regions, which were thickly forested but still identifiably—very identifiably—feminine.

“When the cervix—that’s the opening to the womb—when it begins to open in order for the baby to come out, there’s often some blood and mucus released, but it’s quite harmless. I don’t see any sign of it yet, though.” That heartened me.

“Oh,” said Dottie, rather faintly. But she leaned intently over my shoulder as I carefully inserted my freshly washed hand. “Oh!” Dottie said, in tones of extreme revelation. “That’s where it goes!”

“Well, yes, it is,” I said, trying not to laugh—and failing. “Denzell would have told you, I expect. Did you ask him?”

“No,” she said, sitting back a little on her heels but still watching closely as I put a hand on Mrs. Peabody’s abdomen and felt the cervix. Softened, but still firm. I began to breathe again.

“No?” I said, only half-attending.

“No.” She drew herself up. “I didn’t want to seem ignorant. Denny’s so—I mean, he’s educated. I can read, of course, and write, but only letters, and play music, but that’s useless. I bustle round after him and help where I can, of course, and he’s always so good about explaining things . . . but . . . well, I kept having this vision of our wedding night and him explaining it to me in just the same way he’d tell me how to suck the snot out of a child’s nose with a tube or hold the skin together so he could stitch a wound. And . . .” She made a graceful little moue, which had to be her mother’s legacy. “And I made up my mind it wasn’t going to be that way.”

“Very . . . um . . . commendable.” I withdrew my hand and wiped it, re-covered Mrs. Peabody, and checked her pulse again—slow, but strong as a tympani; the woman must have the heart of an ox. “How—er—how do you want it to be? Bearing in mind,” I hastened to add, “that this sort of thing is rather variable.” Another thought occurred to me. “Has Denzell ever . . . ? Though I don’t suppose you’d know.”

Her soft white brow wrinkled in thought.

“I don’t know; I never thought of asking him. I just assumed—well, I have brothers. I know they have, because they talk about it—whores, I mean—with their friends. I suppose I thought all men . . . but, come to think, perhaps Denny wouldn’t go to a prostitute. Do you think he might have?” Her brow furrowed a little, but she didn’t seem upset at the thought. Of course, it was probably commonly accepted in the Greys’ social circle that men, or soldiers at least, naturally would.

With very vivid memories of my own wedding night—and my stupefaction upon being informed that my bridegroom was a virgin—I temporized a bit.

“Possibly not. Now, being a medical man, plainly he must know the essential mechanics. But there is more to it than that.”

Her eyes grew brighter and she leaned forward, hands on her knees.

“Tell me.”

“RATHER LIKE EGG white mixed with a drop or two of civet. Theoretically good for the skin, though frankly—” I was saying, when I heard the sound of voices just outside the tent.

Rachel and Ian had returned, looking cheerful, flushed, and quite like young people who had just passed the last hour or two doing the sorts of things in which I’d been instructing Dottie. I saw her glance sideways at Rachel, then—very briefly—at Ian’s breeches. Her color went up a notch.

Rachel didn’t notice, her attention having fixed at once on Mrs. Peabody—well, everyone’s attention was fixed on Mrs. Peabody; it was really impossible to look at anything else. She frowned at the supine woman on the ground and then looked at me.

“Where’s Denzell?”

“An excellent question. He left a quarter of an hour ago to find water. There’s beer, though, if you’re thirsty.” I nodded at the neglected pitcher.

Ian poured a cup for Rachel, waited while she drank it, then refilled it for himself, eyes still fixed on Mrs. Peabody, who was emitting a remarkable variety of noises, though still out cold.

“Does Uncle Jamie ken where ye are, Auntie?” he asked. “He was lookin’ for ye just now. He said he’d put ye somewhere safe to sleep, but ye’d escaped. Again,” he added with a broad grin.

“Oh,” I said. “He’s finished with the generals for the night, then?”

“Aye, he went to make the acquaintance o’ some of the militia captains under him, but most had gone to sleep by then, so he went to join ye at the Chenowyths. Mrs. Chenowyth was a bit taken aback to find ye gone,” he added delicately.

“I just came out for a little air,” I said, defensive. “And then—” I gestured at the patient on the floor, who had now settled down to a rhythmic snore. Her color was looking better; that was heartening. “Er . . . is Jamie put out, do you think?”

Ian and Rachel both laughed at that.

“No, Auntie,” Ian said. “But he’s dead tired, and he wants ye bad.”

“Did he tell you to say that?”

“Not in precisely those words,” Rachel said, “but his meaning was plain.” She turned to Ian, with a quick squeeze of his arm. “Would thee go and find Denny, Ian? Claire can’t leave this woman alone—I think?” she asked, arching a brow at me.

“Not yet,” I said. “She doesn’t seem to be going into labor immediately”—I crossed my fingers against the possibility—“but she oughtn’t to be left alone in this state.”

“Aye, of course.” Ian yawned suddenly, widely, but then shook himself back into alertness. “If I come across Uncle Jamie, I’ll tell him where ye are, Auntie.”

He left, and Rachel poured another cup of beer, which she offered me. It was room temperature—and a warm room, at that—but refreshingly sour and strong. I hadn’t really thought I was tired, but the beer revivified me astonishingly.

Dottie, having checked Mrs. Peabody’s pulse and breathing, laid a ginger hand on the distended bulge of pregnancy. “Has thee attended a birth before, good-sister?” Dottie asked Rachel, being careful of her plain speech.

“Several,” Rachel replied, squatting down by Mrs. Peabody. “This looks somewhat different, though. Has she suffered some injur—oh!” The brewery reek hit her, and she reared back and coughed. “I see.”

Mrs. Peabody uttered a loud moan and everyone stiffened. I wiped my hands on my apron, just in case. She relaxed again, though, and after a few moments’ contemplative silence to see if Mrs. Peabody would do it again, Dottie took a deep breath.

“Mrs.—I mean, Friend Claire was just telling me some very interesting things. Regarding . . . er . . . what to expect on one’s wedding night.”

Rachel looked up with interest.

“I should welcome any such instruction myself. I know where the . . . um . . . parts go, because I’ve seen them go there fairly frequently, but—”

“You have?!?” Dottie gawked at her, and Rachel laughed.

“I have. But Ian assures me that he has more skill than the average bull or billy goat, and my observations are limited to the animal world, I’m afraid.” A small line showed between her brows. “The woman who cared for me after the death of my parents was . . . very dutiful in informing me of my womanly obligations, but her instructions consisted largely of ‘Spread thy legs, grit thy teeth, girl, and let him.’”

I sat down on the packing case and stretched to ease my back, suppressing a groan. God knew how long it might take Ian to find Jamie among the teeming hordes. And I did hope that Denny hadn’t been knocked on the head or trampled by a mule.

“Pour me another cup of beer, will you? And have some more yourselves. I suspect we may need it.”

“. . . and if he says, ‘Oh, God, oh, God,’ at some point,” I advised, “take note of what you were just doing, so you can do it again next time.”

Rachel laughed, but Dottie frowned a little, looking slightly cross-eyed.

“Do you—does thee—think Denny would take the Lord’s name in vain, even under those circumstances?”

“I’ve heard him do it on much less provocation than that,” Rachel assured her, stifling a burp with the back of her hand. “He tries to be perfect in thy company, thee knows, for fear thee will change thy mind.”

“He does?” Dottie looked surprised but rather pleased. “Oh. I wouldn’t, thee knows. Ought I to tell him?”

“Not until he says, ‘Oh, God, oh, God,’ for thee,” Rachel said, succumbing to a giggle.

“I wouldn’t worry,” I said. “If a man says, ‘Oh, God,’ in that situation, he nearly always means it as a prayer.”

Dottie’s fair brows drew together in concentration.

“A prayer of desperation? Or gratitude?”

“Well . . . that’s up to you,” I said, and stifled a small belch of my own.

Approaching male voices outside the tent made us all glance self-consciously at the empty beer pitcher and sit up straight, poking at our slightly disheveled hair, but none of the gentlemen who came in were in any condition to cast stones.

Ian had found Denzell and Jamie, and somewhere along the way they had acquired a small, stout companion in a cocked hat, with his hair in a stumpy pigtail. All of them were flushed and, while certainly not staggering, were surrounded by a distinct haze of fermented barleycorn.

“There ye are, Sassenach!” Jamie brightened still further at seeing me, and I felt a small rush of delight at it. “Are ye—who’s this?” He had been advancing toward me, hand outstretched, but stopped abruptly at sight of Mrs. Peabody, who was lying with her arms flung out, mouth wide open.

“That’s the lady I told ye about, Uncle Jamie.” Ian wasn’t staggering, either, but was distinctly swaying and took hold of the tent pole to steady himself. “The one that’s . . . ehm . . .” He gestured with his free hand to the gentleman in the cocked hat. “She’s his wife.”

“Oh? Aye, I see.” He edged gingerly around Mrs. Peabody’s recumbent form. “She’s no dead, is she?”

“No,” I said. “I think I would have noticed.” He might have been somewhat inebriated, but still caught the faint dubious emphasis I’d placed on “think.” He knelt down carefully and put a hand in front of her open mouth.

“Nay, only drunk,” he said cheerfully. “Shall we lend ye a hand to take her home, Mr. Peabody?”

“Better lend him a wheelbarrow,” Dottie whispered to Rachel, beside me, but luckily no one noticed.

“That would be kindly of you, sir.” Surprisingly, Mr. Peabody appeared to be the only sober one of the lot. He knelt and smoothed the damp hair tenderly off his wife’s brow. “Lulu? Wake up, darling. Time to be going now.”

To my surprise, she opened her eyes and, after blinking several times in confusion, appeared to fix her gaze on her husband.

“There you are, Simon!” she said, and, with a rapturous smile, fell soundly back asleep.

Jamie rose slowly, and I could hear the small bones in his back pop as he eased himself. He was still flushed and smiling, but Ian had been right—he was dead tired. I could see the deep lines of weariness in his face and the hollows under his bones.

Ian saw them, too.

“Auntie Claire’s in need of her bed, Uncle Jamie,” he said, squeezing Jamie’s shoulder and giving me a meaning look. “It’s been a long night for her. Take her along, aye? Denny and I can help Mr. Peabody.”

Jamie gave his nephew a sharp look and then turned the same look on me, but I obligingly yawned widely enough to make my jaw crack—no great effort—and with a final quick look at Mrs. Peabody to be sure she was neither dying nor going into labor, I took his arm and towed him determinedly outside, waving briefly in farewell.

Outside, we both drew deep breaths of fresh air, sighed in unison, and laughed.

“It has been rather a long night, hasn’t it?” I put my forehead against his chest and my arms around him, slowly rubbing the knobs of his vertebrae through his coat. “What happened?”

He sighed again and kissed the top of my head.

“I’ve command of ten companies of mixed militia from Pennyslvania and New Jersey; the marquis has command of a thousand men—including mine—and is in charge of a plan to go and bite the British army in the arse.”

“Sounds like fun.” The racket of the camp had died down considerably, but the thick air still held the vibrations of many men, awake or uneasily asleep. I thought I could feel that same expectant vibration pass through Jamie, in spite of his obvious tiredness. “You need sleep, then.”

His arm tightened round me and his free hand traveled slowly down my back. I’d left Denny’s apron in the tent, and my cloak was over my arm; the thin muslin of my shift might as well have not existed.

“Oh, God,” he said, and his big, warm hand cupped my buttock with a sudden urgency. “I need you, Sassenach. I need ye bad.”

The shift was just as thin in front as in back; I could feel his waistcoat buttons—and a few other things—through it. He did want me bad.

“Do you mind doing it in a crypt that smells of wee?” I asked, thinking of the Chenowyths’ back bedroom.

“I’ve taken ye in worse places, Sassenach.”

Before I could say, “Name three,” the tent flap opened to disgorge a small procession, this consisting of Denzell, Dottie, Rachel, and Ian, each couple carrying one end of a canvas sheet on which lay the protuberant form of Mrs. Peabody. Mr. Peabody led the way, lantern held high.

We were standing in shadow, and they passed without noticing us, the girls giggling at the occasional stumble, the young men grunting with effort, and Mr. Peabody calling out encouragement as they made their laborious way through the darkness, presumably heading for the Peabody abode.

The tent stood before us, dark and invitingly empty.

“Aye?”

“Oh, yes.”

The stretcher bearers had taken the lantern, and the setting moon was the barest sliver above the horizon; the inside of the tent was filled with a soft, dusty black that rose up around us in a fragrantly alcoholic cloud—with a faint tang of vomit—when we stepped inside.

I recalled exactly where things were, though, and we managed to push together four of the packing crates. I spread my cloak on these, he took off his coat and waistcoat, and we lay down precariously in the beery dark together.

“How long do you think we have?” I asked, undoing his flies. His flesh was warm and hard under my hand, and his skin there soft as polished silk.

“Long enough,” he said, and brushed my nipple with his thumb, slowly, in spite of his own apparent urgency. “Dinna hurry yourself, Sassenach. There’s no telling when we’ll have the chance again.”

He kissed me lingeringly, his mouth tasting of Roquefort and port. I could feel the vibration of the camp here, too—it ran through both of us like a fiddle string pegged tight.

“I dinna think I’ve got time to make ye scream, Sassenach,” he whispered in my ear. “But I’ve maybe time to make ye moan?”

“Well, possibly. It’s some time ’til dawn, isn’t it?”

Whether it was the beer and premarital explanations, the late hour and lure of secrecy—or only Jamie himself and our increasing need to shut out the world and know only each other—he had time, and to spare.

“Oh, God,” he said at last, and came down slowly on me, his heart beating heavy against my ribs. “Oh . . . God.”

I felt my own pulse throb in hands and bones and center, but couldn’t manage any response more eloquent than a faint “Ooh.” After a bit, though, I recovered enough to stroke his hair.

“We’ll go home again soon,” I whispered to him. “And have all the time in the world.”

That got me a softly affirmative Scottish noise, and we lay there for a bit longer, not wanting to come apart and get dressed, though the packing cases were hard and the possibility of discovery increasing with each passing minute.

At last he stirred, but not to rise.

“Oh, God,” he said softly, in another tone altogether. “Three hundred men.” And held me tighter.

56 STINKING PAPIST

THE SUN WASN’T YET above the horizon, but the horse park was busy as an anthill, full of grooms, foragers, teamsters, and farriers, all scurrying about their business in an incongruous soft pink light filled with the sound of hundreds of pairs of steadily champing jaws. William picked up the bay gelding’s hoof and held out his hand for the hoof pick his new, small groom was clutching nervously to his chest.

“Now, come here, Zeb,” he said coaxingly. “I’ll show you how it’s done; there’s nothing to it.”

“Yes, sir.” Zebedee Jeffers edged an inch closer, eyes flicking back and forth from the hoof to the towering mass of horseflesh. Jeffers did not like horses. He particularly didn’t like Visigoth. William thought it was just as well that Zeb likely didn’t know what a Visigoth was.

“All right. See there?” He tapped the pick against the shadow: the edge of a small rock that had trapped itself under the curve of the iron shoe during the night. “It’s only a little one, but it feels just like a pebble in your own shoe would feel, and he’ll go lame if we don’t take care of it. Here, it’s not stuck fast; do you want to try?”

“No, sir,” Zeb said honestly. Zebedee came from the shore of Maryland and knew about oysters, boats, and fish. Not horses.

“He won’t hurt you,” William said, with a touch of impatience. He’d be riding back and forth along the columns a dozen times a day, carrying dispatches and gathering reports; both his horses needed to be kept ready, his regular groom, Colenso Baragwanath, was down with a fever, and he hadn’t time to find another servant.

“Yes, he will. Sir,” Zeb added as an afterthought. “See?” He held out a scrawny arm, displaying what was undoubtedly a festering bite mark.

William suppressed the urge to ask what the devil the boy had been doing to the horse. Visigoth wasn’t a bad-tempered horse on the whole, but he could be irritable, and Zeb’s nervous fidgeting was enough to try anyone, let alone a tired and hungry horse.

“All right,” he said with a sigh, and pried the rock loose with one sharp dig. “Better, then?” he said to the horse, running a hand down the leg and then patting Goth’s flank. He felt in his pocket and drew out a bunch of limp carrots, bought the night before from a farmwoman who’d come through camp with baskets of produce on a yoke across her broad shoulders.

“Here. Give him that; make friends with him,” he suggested, handing a carrot to Zeb. “Hold it flat on your hand.” Before the boy could extend this putative olive branch, though, the horse reached down and snatched it from his fingers with an audible crunch of big yellow teeth. The boy uttered a small shriek and took several steps back, collided with a bucket, and fell over it, arse over teakettle.

Torn between annoyance and an unseemly urge to laugh, William smothered both and went to pick his groom out of a manure pile.

“Tell you what,” he said, dusting the boy off with a firm hand, “you see that all my dunnage is aboard the baggage wagon, see if Colenso needs anything, and make sure there’s something for me to eat tonight. I’ll ask Sutherland’s groom to tend the horses.”

Zeb sagged with relief.

“Thank you, sir!”

“And go see one of the surgeons and have that arm tended to!” William shouted after him, above the rising sound of braying and whickering. The boy’s shoulders rose up around his ears and he walked faster, pretending he hadn’t heard.

William saddled Goth himself—he always did, not trusting anyone else to check tack that his life might depend on—then left him with his other horse, Madras, and went to find Lord Sutherland’s groom. Despite the bustle, he had no trouble finding the string; Sutherland had ten horses, all prime creatures of sixteen hands or so, and at least a dozen grooms to tend them. William was just concluding negotiations with one of these when he caught sight of a familiar face among the throng.

“Shit,” he said, under his breath, but Captain Richardson had seen him and was coming toward him, smiling genially.

“Captain Lord Ellesmere. Your servant, sir.”

“Yours, sir,” William said, as pleasantly as he could. What did the scoundrel want now? he wondered. Not that Richardson was a scoundrel—or not necessarily one, despite Randall’s warning. It might, after all, be Randall who was the scoundrel. But he did hold rather a grudge against Richardson, on Mother Claire’s account, as well as his own. The thought of Mother Claire stabbed him unexpectedly, and he forced it back. None of it was her fault.

“I’m surprised to see you here, your lordship,” Richardson said, glancing round at the roiling camp. The sun was up, and bands of gold lit the fog of dust rising from the mules’ rough coats. “You are a conventioneer, are you not?”

“I am,” William said coldly. Richardson certainly knew he was. William felt obliged to defend himself, though against what, he wasn’t sure. “I cannot fight.” He spread his arms slightly. “As you see, I carry no weapons.” He made polite motions indicating his immediate need to be elsewhere, but Richardson went on standing there, smiling with that very ordinary face, so unremarkable that his own mother probably couldn’t pick him out of a crowd, save for a large brown mole on the side of his chin.

“Ah, to be sure.” Richardson drew a little closer, lowering his voice. “That being the case . . . I wonder whether—”

“No,” William said definitely. “I am one of General Clinton’s aides, and I cannot leave my duty. You will excuse me, sir; I am expected.”

He turned on his heel and made off, his heart hammering—and realized rather belatedly that he had left his horse behind. Richardson was still standing at the far side of the horse park, talking to a groom who was taking down the pickets, coiling the rope around one shoulder as he did so. The crowd of horses and mules was swiftly diminishing, but there were enough still near Visigoth to enable William to duck in and pretend to be fiddling with his saddlebags, head bent to hide his face until Richardson should go away.

The conversation had left him with an unsettling image of his erstwhile stepmother as he had last seen her, disheveled and en déshabillé but glowing with a radiant life he had never seen. He didn’t suppose she was his stepmother anymore, but he’d liked her. Belatedly, it occurred to him that Claire now-Fraser still was his stepmother—by a different father. . . . Bloody hell.

He set his teeth, rummaging in the saddlebag for his canteen. Now that that Scotch bugger had returned from his watery grave, throwing everything and everyone into confusion . . . why couldn’t he have drowned and never come back?

Never come back.

“You are a stinking Papist, and your baptismal name is James.” He froze as though shot in the back. He bloody remembered it. The stables at Helwater, the warm smell of horses and mash, and the prickle of straw that worked its way through his stockings. Cold stone floors. He’d been crying . . . Why? All he recalled was a huge wash of desolation, total helplessness. The end of the world. Mac leaving.

He took a long, slow breath and pressed his lips together. Mac. The word didn’t bring back a face; he couldn’t remember what Mac had looked like. He’d been big, that was all. Bigger than Grandfather or any of the footmen or the other grooms. Safety. A sense of constant happiness like a soft, worn blanket.

“Shit,” he whispered, closing his eyes. And had that happiness been a lie, too? He’d been too little to know the difference between a groom’s deference to the young master and real kindness. But . . .

“‘You are a stinking Papist,’” he whispered, and caught his breath on something that might have been a sob. “ ‘And your baptismal name is James.’”

“It was the only name I had a right to give ye.”

He realized that his knuckles were pressed against his chest, against his gorget—but it wasn’t the gorget’s reassurance that he sought. It was that of the little bumps of the plain wooden rosary that he’d worn around his neck for years, hidden under his shirt where no one would see it. The rosary Mac had given him . . . along with his name.

With a suddenness that shocked him, he felt his eyes swim. You went away. You left me!

“Shit!” he said, and punched his fist so hard into the saddlebag that the horse snorted and shied, and a bolt of white-hot pain shot up his arm, obliterating everything.

57 DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

IAN WOKE JUST BEFORE dawn to find his uncle squatting beside him.

“I’m away to break bread wi’ the captains of my companies,” Jamie said without preamble. “Ye’ll report to Colonel Wilbur as a scout. And will ye see about horses, Ian? I’ll need a spare mount, gun-broke, and so will you.” He dropped a purse on Ian’s chest, smiled, and vanished into the morning mist.

Ian rolled slowly out of his blanket, stretching. He’d chosen his resting spot well away from the main camp, on a small rise of ground near the river. He didn’t bother wondering how Uncle Jamie had found him, or waste time in marveling at his uncle’s recuperative powers.

He took his time about his preparations, dressed carefully, and found some food, thinking over the things that must be done. He’d dreamed during the night, and the dream was still on him, though he couldn’t recall the details. He’d been in thick woods, and something was there with him, hiding among the leaves. He wasn’t sure what it was, or even if he’d seen it, but the sense of danger lingered uneasily between his shoulder blades. He’d heard a raven calling in his dream, and that was certainly a warning of some kind—but then the raven had flown past him, and it wasn’t a raven at all but a white bird of some kind. Its wing had touched his cheek in flight, and he could still feel the brush of its feathers.

White animals were messengers. Both the Mohawk and the Highlanders said so.

He was an Indian and a Highlander; dreams were not to be dismissed. Sometimes the meaning of a dream floated to the surface of your mind like a drowned leaf rising. He let it go, hoping the dream would return to explain itself, and went about his work, seeing Colonel Wilbur, finding and haggling for two reasonable horses, big enough to bear a large man through battle . . . but the white bird stayed by him all day long, hovering just above his right shoulder, a glimpse now and then in the corner of his eye.

IN THE LATE afternoon, his business done for the moment, he returned to the main camp and found Rachel standing in line with a number of other women at the well in the yard of the Goose and Grapes, two buckets resting at her feet.

“I could take those down to the river for ye,” he offered. She was flushed with the heat of the day but looked beautiful, her bare arms brown and the curving muscle of them so neat and delicate that it lifted his heart to look at them.

“I thank thee, Ian, but no.” She smiled up at him and reached to tweak one of the two eagle feathers he’d knotted into his hair. “Thy auntie says the boats throw their waste into the river, and half the army is pissing in it, as well, and she’s right. I should need to walk a mile upstream to find a clean place from which to draw water. Is thee about thy business, then?”

She spoke with interest but with no sense of concern or disapproval, and he appreciated that.

“I willna kill anyone unless I have to, Rachel,” he said softly, and touched her cheek. “I’m signed on as a scout. I shouldna have to.”

“But things happen,” she said, and looked away, to keep him seeing the sudden shadow in her eyes. “I know.”

With an unexpected spurt of impatience, he wanted to ask her: would she rather he kill or be killed for the sake of his soul’s grace? But he smothered the impulse, and the tinge of anger with it. She loved him, he didn’t doubt that. It was maybe a fair question to put to a Quaker, but not to his betrothed.

Her eyes were on his face, interested and thoughtful, and he felt a slight flush rise in his cheeks, wondering just how much of his thoughts showed.

“Thy life’s journey lies along its own path, Ian,” she said, “and I cannot share thy journey—but I can walk beside thee. And I will.”

The woman standing behind them in the line heaved a deep, contented sigh.

“Now, that’s a very pretty and right thing to say, sweetheart,” she said to Rachel, in approving tones. And, switching her gaze to Ian, looked him skeptically up and down. He was dressed in buckskins, clout, and calico shirt, and, bar the feathers in his hair and the tattoos, didn’t look too outlandish, he thought.

“You probably don’t deserve her,” the woman said, shaking her head doubtfully. “But try, there’s a good lad.”

HE CARRIED THE water for Rachel, making their way through the sprawl of the camp toward the place where Denzell had set up his medical practice. The tent was still standing, but Denzell’s wagon with its painted goldfinches on the tailboard was drawn up beside it, Dottie standing in it, and Denzell handing up parcels and boxes to her.

Rachel stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, then vanished into the tent to help with the packing.

“Wilt thee join us later, Ian?” Denny looked up from the pack he was strapping together.

“Anywhere, a bhràthair,” Ian said, smiling. “Where are ye bound, then?”

“Oh. Nowhere.” Denny took off his spectacles, polishing them absently on the tail of his shirt. “It’s not yet First Day, but we may well be engaged in battle then; we thought to hold meeting before supper tonight. We would be pleased if thee feels it good to sit with us, but if not . . .”

“No, I’ll come,” Ian said quickly. “To be sure. Ah . . . where . . . ?” He waved a hand vaguely, indicating the half-ordered chaos of the camp surrounding them. New companies of militia were still coming in from New Jersey and Pennsylvania to join the Continental soldiers, and while officers had been assigned to receive and organize these and help them find campgrounds, they were swiftly overwhelmed. Men were making camp anywhere they could find open ground, and there was great to-ing and fro-ing in search of water and food, arguments and raised voices, and the sound of industrious shoveling and muttered curses nearby indicated the creation of yet another set of sanitary trenches. A constant small procession of persons who couldn’t wait visited a nearby copse in hopes of a private moment. Ian made a mental note to step wary if he walked that way.

“Ye dinna mean to do it here, surely?” People came in and out all day, in need of the doctor’s attention, and wouldn’t be likely to stop, only because meeting was being held.

“Friend Jamie says he will provide us a refuge,” Denny assured him. “We’ll go as soon as—who has thee there, Dorothea?”

Dottie was stowing supplies but had paused to talk with a young girl who had climbed up to kneel on the wagon’s seat and was addressing Dorothea earnestly.

“It’s a woman in childbed, Denny,” she called. “Three campfires over!”

“Urgent?” Denny at once began unstrapping the pack he had just done up.

“This child says so.” Dottie straightened up and tucked her straggling fair hair back under her cap. “It’s her mother’s fourth; no trouble with the first three, but given the conditions . . .” She sidled past the baggage to the lowered tailboard, and Ian gave her a hand to hop down.

“She really wanted Mrs. Fraser,” Dottie said to Denny, sotto voce. “But she’ll settle for you.” She dimpled. “Is thee flattered?”

“I see my reputation spreads like pomade on a silken pillow,” he replied tranquilly. “And thy use of plain speech inflames me. Thee had best come with me. Will thee watch the wagon, Ian?”

The two of them made off through the maze of wagons, horses, and stray pigs—some enterprising farmer had driven a dozen lean hogs into camp, seeking to sell them to the quartermaster, but the pigs had taken fright at the inadvertent explosion of a musket nearby and run off among the crowd, causing mass confusion. Rollo had run one down and broken its neck; Ian had bled and eviscerated the carcass and—after giving Rollo the heart and lights—stashed it under damp canvas, hidden beneath Denzell’s wagon. Should he meet the distraught swineherd, he’d pay him for the beast, but he wasn’t letting it out of his sight. He stole a quick glance under the skirting board, but the canvas-covered lump was still there.

Rollo moved a little and made an odd sound, not quite a whine, that shifted Ian’s attention at once to the dog.

“How is it, a choin?” he asked. Rollo at once licked his hand and panted in a genial fashion, but Ian slid off the wagon tongue and knelt in the leaves, feeling his way over the big, shaggy body, just in case. Palpating, Auntie Claire called it, a word that always made Ian smile.

He found a little tenderness where the dog had been shot the autumn before, in the meat of the shoulder just above the foreleg, but that was always there. And a spot on his spine, a few inches forward of the beast’s tail, that made him splay his legs and groan when it was pressed. Maybe Rollo had strained himself taking down the hog.

“None sae young as ye used to be, are ye, a choin?” he asked, scratching Rollo’s whitened jaw.

“None of us are, a mac mo pheathar,” said his uncle Jamie, coming out of the gloaming and sitting down on the stump Dottie had been using to mount the wagon. He was wearing full uniform and looked hot. Ian passed over his canteen and Jamie took it with a nod of thanks, wiping his sleeve across his face.

“Aye, day after tomorrow,” he said, in answer to Ian’s raised brow. “First light, if not before. Wee Gilbert’s got command of a thousand men and permission to go after the rear guard.”

“You—I mean us”—Ian corrected himself—“with him?”

Jamie nodded and drank deep. Ian thought he looked a bit tense, but, after all, he was in command of three hundred men—if all of them were going with La Fayette . . .

“I think they’re sending me with him in hopes that my ancient wisdom will balance the Seigneur de La Fayette’s youthful enthusiasm,” Jamie said, lowering the canteen with a sigh. “And it’s maybe better than staying back wi’ Lee.” He grimaced. “Boiling Water thinks it beneath his dignity to marshal no but a thousand men and declined the command.”

Ian made a noise indicating amusement at this and faith in his uncle’s sagacity. It might be fun, harrying the British rear. He felt a tingle of anticipation at thought of putting on his war paint.

“Where’s Denzell gone?” Jamie asked, glancing at the wagon.

“Attending a childbirth over yon,” Ian said, lifting his chin in the direction Denzell and Dottie had taken. “He says ye’re hosting a Quaker meeting tonight.”

Jamie lifted a thick brow glistening with droplets of sweat.

“Well, I wasna planning to join in, but I said they might use my tent and welcome. Why, are ye going yourself?”

“Thought I might,” Ian said. “I was invited, after all.”

“Were ye?” Jamie looked interested. “D’ye think they mean to convert ye?”

“I dinna think that’s how Quakers work,” Ian said, a little ruefully. “And good luck to them if they do. I think the power o’ prayer must have limits.”

That made his uncle snort with amusement, but Jamie shook his head. “Never think it, laddie,” he advised. “If wee Rachel sets her mind to it, she’ll have your sword beaten into a plowshare before ye can say Peter Piper picked a peck o’ pickled peppers. Well, twice,” he added. “Or maybe three times.”

Ian made a dissentient noise through his nose. “Aye, and if I were to try bein’ a Friend, who would there be to protect the lot of ’em? Rachel and her brother and Dottie, I mean. Ye ken that, don’t ye? That they can only be what they are because you and I are what we are?”

Jamie leaned back a little, purse-lipped, then gave him the ghost of a wry smile.

“I ken that fine. And so does Denzell Hunter; it’s why he’s here, though it’s cost him his home and his meeting. But, mind, they’re worth protecting—beyond you bein’ in love wi’ Rachel, I mean.”

“Mmphm.” Ian wasn’t in the mood to discuss philosophy, and he doubted his uncle was, either. The light was in that long hour before darkfall, when the things of the forest pause and draw breath, slowing for the night. It was a good time to hunt, because the trees slowed first, so you saw the animals still moving among them.

Uncle Jamie kent that. He sat, relaxed, nothing moving save his eyes. Ian saw his gaze flick up and turned his own head to see. Sure enough, a squirrel clung to the trunk of a sycamore, ten feet away. He’d not have seen it, had he not caught the last flick of its tail as it stilled there. He met Jamie’s eyes, and they both smiled and sat silent for a while, listening to the racket of the camp, even this beginning to mute itself.

Denzell and Dottie hadn’t come back; perhaps the birth was more complicated than Denny had thought. Rachel would be going to Jamie’s tent soon, for the meeting.

He wondered about that. You needed a meeting, to counsel the two of you, then to approve and witness the marriage. Might Denny have it in his mind to establish a new Friends meeting, within which he could marry Dottie—and Rachel might wed Ian?

Jamie sighed and stirred, getting ready to rise.

“Ahh . . . Uncle,” Ian said, in a casual tone that made his uncle instantly focus attention on him.

“What?” said his uncle warily. “Ye havena got your lass wi’ child, have ye?”

“I have not,” Ian said, offended—and wondering vaguely how his uncle had known he was thinking of Rachel. “And why would ye think a thing like that, ye evil-minded auld mumper?”

“Because I ken well enough what ‘Ahh . . . Uncle’ usually means,” Jamie informed him cynically. “It means ye’ve got yourself into some confusion involving a lass and want advice. And I canna think what ye could be confused about wi’ regard to wee Rachel. A more straightforward lass I’ve never met—bar your auntie Claire, that is,” he added, with a brief grin.

“Mmphm,” Ian said, not best pleased by his uncle’s acuity, but obliged to admit the truth of it. “Well, then. It’s only . . .” Despite the completely benign intent—the innocence, even—of the question that had come into his mind, he felt his face go hot.

Jamie raised his brows.

“Well, if ye must know, then—I’ve never lain wi’ a virgin.” Once he’d got it out, he relaxed a little, though his uncle’s brows nearly met his hairline. “And, aye, I’m sure Rachel is one,” he added defensively.

“I’m sure, too,” his uncle assured him. “Most men wouldna consider it a problem.”

Ian gave him a look. “Ye ken what I mean. I want her to like it.”

“Verra commendable. Have ye had complaints from women before?”

“Ye’re in a rare mood, Uncle,” Ian said coldly. “Ye ken verra well what I mean.”

“Aye, ye mean if ye’re paying a woman to bed ye, ye’re no likely to hear anything ye dinna like regarding your own performance.” Jamie rocked back a little, eyeing him. “Did ye tell Rachel ye’re in the habit of consorting wi’ whores?”

Ian felt the blood rush to his ears and was obliged to breathe evenly for a moment before replying.

“I told her everything,” he said between clenched teeth. “And I wouldna call it a ‘habit.’” He did know better than to go on with, “It’s no more than other men do,” because he kent fine what sort of answer he’d get to that.

Fortunately, Jamie seemed to have reined in his jocularity for the moment and was considering the question.

“Your Mohawk wife,” he said delicately. “She, er . . .”

“No,” Ian said. “The Indians see bedding a bit differently.” And, seizing the opportunity to get a bit of his own back, added, “D’ye not recall the time we went to visit the Snowbird Cherokee and Bird sent a couple of maidens to warm your bed?”

Jamie gave him an old-fashioned sort of look that made him laugh.

“Tell me, Ian,” he said, after a pause, “would ye be having this conversation with your da?”

“God, no.”

“I’m flattered,” Jamie said dryly.

“Well, see . . .” Ian had answered by reflex and found himself fumbling for an explanation. “It—I mean . . . it’s no that I wouldna talk to Da about things, but if he’d told me anything about . . . it would ha’ been to do with him and Mam, wouldn’t it? And I couldna . . . well, I couldn’t, that’s all.”

“Mmphm.”

Ian narrowed his eyes at his uncle.

“Ye’re no going to try and tell me that my mother—”

“Who’s my sister, aye? No, I wouldna tell ye anything like that. I see your point. I’m only thinkin’ . . .” He trailed off and Ian gave him a pointed look. The light was fading, but there was still plenty. Jamie shrugged.

“Aye, well. It’s only—your auntie Claire was widowed when I wed her, aye?”

“Aye. So?”

“So it was me that was virgin on our wedding night.”

Ian hadn’t thought he’d moved, but Rollo jerked his head up and looked at him, startled. Ian cleared his throat.

“Oh. Aye?”

“Aye,” said his uncle, wry as a lemon. “And I was given any amount of advice beforehand, too, by my uncle Dougal and his men.”

Dougal MacKenzie had died before Ian was born, but he’d heard a good bit about the man, one way and another. His mouth twitched.

“Would ye care to pass on any of it?”

“God, no.” Jamie stood up and brushed bits of bark from the tails of his coat. “I think ye already ken ye should be gentle about it, aye?”

“Aye, I’d thought of that,” Ian assured him. “Nothing else?”

“Aye, well.” Jamie stood still, considering. “The only useful thing was what my wife told me on the night. ‘Go slowly and pay attention.’ I think ye canna go far wrong wi’ that.” He settled his coat on his shoulders. “Oidhche mhath, Ian. I’ll see ye at first light—if not somewhat before.”

“Oidhche mhath, Uncle Jamie.”

As Jamie reached the edge of the clearing, Ian called after him.

“Uncle Jamie!”

Jamie turned to look over his shoulder.

“Aye?”

“And was she gentle with ye?”

“God, no,” Jamie said, and grinned broadly.

58 CASTRAMETATION

THE SUN WAS LOW in the sky by the time William reached Clinton’s camp, and lower still before he’d turned Goth over to Sutherland’s grooms. Zeb was nowhere in sight. Perhaps he was with Colenso.

He delivered his cartouche of dispatches to Captain von Munchausen, saw the company clerk, and found the tent he shared with two other young captains, both of the 27th Foot. Randolph Merbling was sitting outside, reading by the last of the sun, but there was no sign of Thomas Evans—nor of Colenso Baragwanath. Nor of Zebedee Jeffers. Nor of William’s baggage.

He breathed for a moment, then shook himself like a dog shedding water. He was so tired of being angry that he just couldn’t be arsed anymore. He shrugged, borrowed a towel from Merbling, washed his face, and went to find a bite to eat.

He’d made up his mind not to think about anything whatever until he’d had some food and largely succeeded, letting roast chicken, bread, cheese, and beer fill at least some of his empty spaces. As he finished, though, a sudden sharp image punctured his pleasant digestive reverie. A flushed, pretty face, with wary eyes the exact color of the cider he was drinking.

Jane. Bloody hell! What with one thing and another, he’d quite forgotten the whore and her sister. He’d told them to meet him at the surgeon’s tent at sundown. . . . Well, the sun wasn’t down yet. He was on his feet and on his way, but then had a second thought and, going back to the cook, wangled a couple of loaves and some cheese, just in case.

Castrametation was the science of laying out a proper military camp. Drainage, sanitary trenches, where to put the powder depot to avoid flooding if it rained . . . He’d had a brief course in it once. He’d likely never need to do it himself, but it did help in locating things, if you knew where they were supposed to be. And when in camp, the hospital was meant to be on the opposite side from command headquarters, close to water but on a height, if one was available.

One was, and he found the large green-canvas tent without difficulty. Could have found it with his eyes closed. Surgeons carried the smell of their work around with them, and the whiff of dried blood and the uneasy tang of sickness and recent death were perceptible at a hundred yards. It was worse—much worse—after a battle, but there was always illness and accident, and the stink lingered even on peaceful days, aggravated now by the muggy heat that lay like a wet blanket over the camp.

There were men, and not a few women, clustered round the tent, waiting for attention. He gave them a quick glance, but didn’t see Jane. His heart had sped up a little at thought of seeing her, and he felt unaccountably disappointed. No reason why, he told himself. She and her sister would be nothing but trouble to him. They must have grown tired waiting, and—

“You’re very late, my lord,” said an accusatory voice at his elbow, and he whirled round to see her looking down her nose at him—as well as someone who was shorter than he could do, which wasn’t very well. He found himself smiling down at her, absurdly.

“I said sundown,” he replied mildly, nodding toward the west, where a thin slice of brilliance still glowed through the trees. “Not down yet, is it?”

“The sun takes a bloody long time to go down out here.” She switched her disapproval to the orb in question. “It’s much faster in the city.”

Before he could argue with this ridiculous assertion, she’d glanced back at him, frowning.

“Why aren’t you wearing your gorget?” she demanded, hands on her hips. “I went to a deal of trouble to get it back for you!”

“I’m exceedingly grateful to you, ma’am,” he said, striving for gravity. “I thought it might provoke inquiries, though, should I turn up suddenly in the midst of camp wearing it, and I thought you and your sister might just possibly wish to avoid . . . tedious explanations?”

She sniffed, but not without amusement.

“How thoughtful. Not quite so thoughtful of your servants, though, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come with me.” She linked her arm with his and towed him off toward the wood before he could protest. She led him to a small lean-to shelter in the undergrowth, which seemed to have been constructed of an unstuffed army bed sack and two petticoats. Bending down at her invitation, he discovered her sister, Fanny, within, sitting next to a bed sack that had been stuffed with fresh grass, upon which crouched both Colenso and Zeb, both looking bewildered. On sight of him, they crouched further.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded. “And where is my dunnage, Zeb?”

“Back there, sir,” Zeb quavered, jerking a thumb toward the growth behind the lean-to. “I couldn’t find your tent and I didn’t want to leave it, see.”

“But I told you—and what about you, Baragwanath? Are you still ill?” William demanded, kneeling down suddenly and thrusting his head into the shelter. Colenso looked bad, pale as a cup of soured milk, and plainly in pain, curled up into himself.

“Oh . . . ’tisn’t nothin’, sir,” he said, swallowing heavily. “Just must have . . . ate . . . something.”

“Did you see the surgeon?”

Colenso turned his face into the bed sack, shoulders hunched. Zeb was edging away, apparently thinking of making a run for it.

William grabbed him by the arm; the little groom yelped and he let go. “What’s wrong? Did you not have that arm seen to?”

“They’re afraid of the surgeons,” Jane said sharply.

William drew himself up to his full height and glared down at her.

“Oh? Who told them they should be afraid of the surgeons? And how do they come to be in your care, may I ask?”

Her lips pressed tight together, and she glanced involuntarily into the shelter. Fanny was looking out at them, doe eyes huge in the fading light. She swallowed and put a protective hand on Colenso’s shoulder. Jane sighed deeply and took William’s arm again.

“Come with me.”

She led him away a short distance, still within sight of the little shelter but out of earshot.

“Fanny and I were waiting for you when those boys came along together. The bigger one—what did you say his name is?”

“Colenso Baragwanath. He’s Cornish,” William added shortly, seeing a look of amusement flit across her face.

“Really. I hope it isn’t catching. Well, he was so ill he couldn’t stand, and sank down on the ground near us, making the most horrid noises. The little one—yes, I know he’s Zebedee, thank you—was beside himself, half-weeping with confusion. My sister is a most tenderhearted creature,” she said, rather apologetically. “She went to help, and I followed.” She shrugged.

“We got Colenso into the wood far enough to get his britches down in time, and I gave him a little water.” She touched a small wooden canteen that hung from her shoulder, and he wondered briefly where she’d got it. She hadn’t had it when he’d met the girls by the creek yesterday.

“I am much obliged to you, ma’am,” he said formally. “Now—why is it, exactly, that you did not then take the boys in to see the surgeons?”

For the first time, her composure showed signs of cracking. She turned a little away from him, and he noticed the last rays of the sun polishing the smooth crown of her head with a faint, familiar gleam of chestnut. The sight of it brought back memory of his first meeting with her with the force of a thunderclap—and, with it, the memory of his mingled shame and arousal. Especially the latter.

“Answer me,” he said, more roughly than he’d intended, and she turned on him, eyes narrowed at his tone.

“There was a finger lying on the ground by the surgeon’s tent,” she snapped. “It frightened my sister, and the boys took fright from her.”

William rubbed a knuckle down the bridge of his nose, eyeing her.

“A finger.” He had himself seen piles of amputated limbs outside the surgeons’ tents at Saratoga, and aside from a quick prayer of gratitude that none of the disconnected arms and legs was his, had experienced no particular qualms. “Whose was it?”

“How should I know? I was too much occupied in keeping your orderly from shitting himself to ask.”

“Ah. Yes. Thank you,” he said, rather formally. He glanced toward the shelter again and was surprised to see that Fanny had come out and was hovering a little way from her sister, a wary look on her lovely face. Did he look threatening? he wondered. Just in case, he relaxed his posture a bit and smiled at Fanny. She didn’t change expression, but continued to stare at him suspiciously.

He cleared his throat and took the sack off his shoulder, holding it out to Jane. “I thought you might have missed your supper. Have the boys—well, Zeb, at least—eaten anything?”

Jane nodded and took the bag with a celerity suggesting that it had been some time since the girls had had a meal. “He ate with the other grooms, he said.”

“All right, then. I’ll take him in to have his arm seen to and perhaps get a dose for Colenso, while you and your sister refresh yourselves. Then, madam, we can discuss your own situation.”

He’d been intensely aware of her physical presence for some moments, but when he said that, she turned the full effect of her eyes on him—cider, he thought vaguely, or sherry wine?—and seemed somehow to flow, shifting in some indefinable way. He hadn’t seen her move, but suddenly she was standing near enough to touch, and he smelled the odor of her hair and imagined he felt the warmth of her skin through her clothes. She took his hand briefly, and her thumb moved across the palm, slowly. The palm tingled and the hairs on his arm rippled.

“I’m sure we can come to a reasonable accommodation, my lord,” she said, very grave, and let him go.

He dragged Zeb into the surgeon’s tent like a recalcitrant colt and stood by, only half-attending, as a young Scottish surgeon with freckles swabbed the boy’s wound clean of dirt. Arabella–Jane didn’t smell of the whorish scent she’d worn at the brothel, but, by Christ, she smelled good.

“We should cauterize the wound, sir,” the young doctor’s voice was saying. “It will stop an abscess forming, aye?”

“No!” Zeb jerked away from the doctor and made a dash for the door, knocking into people and sending one woman flying with a shriek. Jolted out of his random thoughts, William made a reflexive dive and knocked the boy flat.

“Come on, Zeb,” he said, hauling Zeb to his feet and propelling him firmly back to Dr. MacFreckles. “It won’t be that bad. Just a moment or two, and then it’s all over.”

Zeb appearing patently unconvinced by this, William deposited him firmly on a stool and pulled up his own right cuff.

“Look,” he said, displaying the long, comet-shaped scar on his forearm. “That’s what happens when you get an abscess.”

Both Zeb and the doctor peered at the scar, impressed. It had been a splinter wound, he told them, caused by a lightning-struck tree.

“Wandered round the Great Dismal Swamp for three days in a fever,” he said. “Some . . . Indians found me and got me to a doctor. I nearly died, and”—he lowered his brows and gave Zeb a piercing look—“the doctor was just about to cut off my arm, when the abscess burst and he cauterized it. You might not be so lucky, hey?”

Zeb still looked unhappy, but reluctantly agreed. William gripped him by the shoulders and said encouraging things while the iron was heating, but his own heart was beating as fast as it might have had he been awaiting cautery himself.

Indians. One, in particular. He’d thought he’d exhausted his anger, but there it bloody was again, bursting into bright fresh flame like an ember smashed open with a poker.

Bloody fucking Ian Murray. Fucking Scot and sometime Mohawk. His bloody fucking cousin, which made it all that much worse.

And then there was Rachel. . . . Murray had taken him to Dr. Hunter and Rachel. He drew a deep, ragged breath, remembering her worn indigo gown, hanging on its peg in the Hunters’ house. Grabbing a handful of the cloth and pressing it to his face, breathing in her scent as though starved of air.

That was where Murray had met Rachel himself. And now she was betrothed to that—

“Ow!” Zeb writhed, and William realized belatedly that he was digging his fingers into the boy’s shoulder, just like—he let go as though Zeb were a hot potato, feeling the memory of James Fraser’s iron grip on his arm and the agonizing pain that had numbed him from shoulder to fingertip.

“Sorry,” he said, voice shaking a little with the effort to hide his fury. “Sorry, Zeb.” The surgeon was ready with the glowing iron; William took Zeb’s arm, as gently as he could, and held it still while the thing was done. Rachel had held his own.

He’d been right; it was quick. The surgeon pressed the hot iron to the wound and counted five, slowly, then took it away. Zeb went stiff as a tent pole and sucked in enough breath to supply three people, but didn’t scream.

“It’s done,” the doctor said, taking the iron away and smiling at Zeb. “Here, I’ll put a bit of sweet oil on and bandage it. Ye did well, laddie.”

Zeb’s eyes were watering, but he wasn’t crying. He sniffed deeply and wiped the back of his hand across his face, looking up at William.

“Well done, Zeb,” William said, squeezing his shoulder gently, and Zeb managed a tiny smile in return.

By the time they’d returned to the girls and Colenso, William had managed to tamp down the rage—again. Was he never going to be able to get rid of it? Not ’til you make up your mind what to do about things, he thought grimly. But there wasn’t anything that could be done right now, so he squashed all the sparks in his head firmly into one dense red ball and rolled it to the back of his mind.

“Here, let Fanny do it. He trusts her.” Jane took the vial containing the dose Dr. MacFreckles had made up for Colenso and gave it to her sister. Fanny promptly sat down beside Colenso, who was pretending as hard as he could to be asleep, and began stroking his head, murmuring something to him.

William nodded and, gesturing to Jane to accompany him, withdrew far enough to be out of earshot. Rather to his surprise, part of his brain had apparently been analyzing the problem and coming to conclusions while the rest was occupied, for he had a rough plan.

“What I suggest is this,” he said, without preamble. “I will make provision for you and your sister to receive regular army rations, as camp followers, and to travel under my protection. Once in New York, I will give you five pounds, and you’re on your own. In return . . .”

She didn’t quite smile, but a dimple showed in one cheek.

“In return,” he repeated more firmly, “you will mind my orderly and my groom, tend their ills, and make sure they’re reasonably cared for. You will also be my laundress.”

“Your laundress?!” The dimple had disappeared abruptly, replaced by an expression of sheer astonishment.

“Laundress,” he repeated doggedly. He knew what she’d been expecting him to propose and was rather surprised himself that he hadn’t, but there it was. He couldn’t, not with his thoughts of Rachel and of Anne Endicott so fresh in his mind. Not with the deep, smothered rage fueled by the thought that he deserved no woman but a whore.

“But I don’t know how to do laundry!”

“How hard can it be?” he asked, as patiently as he could. “You wash my clothes. Don’t put starch in my drawers. That’s about it, isn’t it?”

“But—but—” She looked aghast. “One needs a . . . a kettle! A fork, a paddle, something to stir with . . . Soap! I haven’t any soap!”

“Oh.” That hadn’t occurred to him. “Well . . .” He dug in his pocket, found it empty, and tried the other, which held a guinea, tuppence, and a florin. He handed her the guinea. “Buy what you need, then.”

She looked at the golden coin in her palm, her face utterly blank. She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“What’s the matter?” he asked impatiently. She didn’t answer, but a soft voice behind him did.

“The duffent know how.”

He whirled to find Fanny looking up at him from under her cap, her delicate cheeks flushed red by the sunset.

“What did you say?”

Fanny’s soft mouth pressed tight and her cheeks grew redder, but she repeated it, dogged. “The . . . duffent . . . know how.”

Jane reached Fanny in two steps, putting an arm around her sister’s shoulders and glaring at William.

“My sister’s tongue-tied,” she said, daring him to say anything. “That’s why she’s afraid of the surgeons. She thinks they will amputate her tongue if they find out.”

He drew a deep, slow breath.

“I see. And what she said to me . . . ‘She doesn’t know how’? She means you, I collect? What is it, pray, that you don’t know how?”

“Muddy,” whispered Fanny, now staring at the ground.

“Mud—money?” He stared at Jane. “You don’t know how to—”

“I’ve never had any money!” she snapped, and threw the guinea on the ground at his feet. “I know the names of the coins, but I don’t know what you can buy with them, except—except—what you can buy in a brothel! My cunt is worth six shillings, all right? My mouth is three. And my arse is a pound. But if someone gave me three shillings, I wouldn’t know if I could buy a loaf of bread or a horse with them! I’ve never bought anything!”

“You—you mean—” He was so flabbergasted, he couldn’t string words into a sentence. “But you have wages. You said—”

“I’ve been a brothel whore since I was ten years old!” Her fists clenched, knuckles sharp under the skin. “I never see my wages! Mrs. Abbott spends them—she says—for my—our—food and clothes. I’ve never had a penny to my name, let alone spent one. And now you hand me . . . that”—she stamped her foot on the guinea, driving it into the ground—“and tell me to buy a kettle?!? Where? How? From whom?!”

Her voice shook and her face was a deal redder than the setting sun could make it. She was furious, but also very near to tears. He wanted to take her in his arms and soothe her, but thought that might be a good way to lose a finger.

“How old is Fanny?” he asked instead. She jerked her head up, panting.

“Fanny?” she said blankly.

“I’m e-lev-en,” Fanny’s voice said behind him. “You weve her awone!”

He turned to see the girl glaring up at him, a stick clutched in her hand. He might have laughed, if not for the expression on her face—and if not for what he’d just realized. He took a step back, so as to see both girls at once, and like magnet and iron, they came together and clung, both staring distrustfully at him.

“How much is her maidenhead worth?” he asked Jane baldly, with a nod at Fanny.

“Ten pounth,” Fanny answered automatically, just as Jane shouted, “She’s not for sale! To you or any other bugger!” She pressed Fanny fiercely closer, daring him to make a move toward the girl.

“I don’t want her,” he said through his teeth. “I don’t fornicate with children, for God’s sake!”

Jane’s hard expression didn’t alter, and she didn’t loosen her grip on her sister.

“Then why did you ask?”

“To verify my suppositions regarding your presence here.”

Jane snorted. “Those being?”

“That you ran away. Presumably because your sister has now reached an age where . . . ?” He raised an eyebrow, nodding at Fanny. Jane’s lips compressed, but she gave him a tiny, grudging nod.

“Captain Harkness?” he asked. It was a shot in the dark, but well aimed. Harkness hadn’t been pleased at being deprived of his prey and, unable to come at William, might well have decided to take his revenge elsewhere.

The light bathed everything in tones of gold and lavender, but he could see Jane’s face go pale, nonetheless, and felt a tightening in his loins. If he found Harkness . . . He resolved to go looking tomorrow. The man might be in Philadelphia, as she’d said—but he might not. It would be a welcome focus for his rage.

“Right, then,” he said, as matter-of-factly as he could. He stooped and pried the guinea out of the soft earth, realizing as he did so that he’d been a fool to offer it to her. Not because of what she’d told him but because someone like her—or Colenso—would never have such a sum. They’d be suspected of stealing it and very likely would be relieved of it by the first person to see it.

“Just look after the boys, will you?” he said to Jane. “And the both of you keep clear of the soldiers until I can find you simple clothes. Dressed like that”—he gestured at their dust-smudged, sweat-stained finery—“you’ll be taken for whores, and soldiers don’t take no for an answer.”

“I am a whore,” Jane said, in a strange, dry voice.

“No,” he said, and felt his own voice as oddly separate from himself but very firm. “You’re not. You travel under my protection. I’m not a pimp—so you’re not a whore. Not until we reach New York.”

59 A DISCOVERY IN THE RANKS

THE 16TH PENNSYLVANIA militia company, Captain the Reverend Peleg Woodsworth in command, marched into camp in good order, having paused just outside to tidy themselves, clean their weapons, and wash their faces. Lord John knew no one would take notice but approved of the preparations on grounds of good military discipline, as he explained to Germain.

“Slovenly troops make bad fighters,” he said, critically examining a large rent in the sleeve of his filthy black coat. “And soldiers must be in the habit of obeying orders, no matter what those orders are.”

Germain nodded. “Aye, that’s what my mam says. Doesn’t matter whether ye see the point or not, ye do as ye’re told, or else.”

“Your mother would make an admirable sergeant,” Grey assured his orderly. He’d encountered Marsali Fraser once or twice, at her printshop. “Splendid grasp of the essence of command. Speaking of ‘or else,’ though—what, exactly, do you expect to happen when you go home?”

It was evident that Germain hadn’t given much thought to the prospect, but after a moment he uncreased his brow.

“Likely it’ll depend how long I’ve been gone,” he said, with a shrug. “If I went back tomorrow, I’d get my ears blistered and my arse, too. But I think if I was to be gone longer than a week, she’d be pleased I wasna deid.”

“Ah. Have you heard the story of the Prodigal Son, by chance?”

“No, me lo—er . . . Bert.” Germain coughed. “How does it go?”

“It’s—” he began automatically, but then stopped dead, feeling as though a stake had been driven through his chest. The company had already begun to fray and straggle; the few men behind him merely skirted him and went past. Germain twisted round to see what he was looking at.

“It’s that man who pretends to be a Frenchman. My father doesn’t like him.”

Grey stared at the gentleman in the suit of very fashionable blue and gray-striped silk, who was likewise staring at Grey, mouth slightly open, ignoring the small knot of Continental officers accompanying him.

“I know a lot of Frenchmen,” Grey said, recovering his breath. “But you’re right; that’s not one of them.” He turned his back on the man, mind awhirl, and gripped Germain by the arm.

“Your grandfather has to be in this moil somewhere,” he said, forcing resolution into his voice. “Do you see the building over there, with the flag?” He nodded at the limp banner, on the far side of the sprawling camp, but clearly visible. “Go there. That will be the commander in chief’s headquarters. Tell one of the officers who you’re looking for; they’ll find him for you among the militia.”

“Oh, they won’t have to,” Germain assured him. “Grand-père will be there.”

“Where?”

“With General Washington,” Germain said, with the exaggerated patience of those forced to consort with dunces. “He’s a general, too; did ye not know that?” Before Grey could respond to this piece of flabbergasting intelligence, Germain had scampered away in the direction of the distant banner.

Grey risked a glance over his shoulder, but Perseverance Wainwright had disappeared, as had the Continental officers, leaving only a couple of lieutenants in conversation.

He thought several blasphemous things in a row, alternating between Jamie Fraser and Percy Wainwright as the recipients of assorted violent assaults of a personal nature. What the fucking hell was either of them doing here? His fingers twitched, wanting to strangle someone, but he fought back this useless impulse in favor of deciding what the devil to do now.

He began to walk hastily, with no clear notion where he was going. Percy had seen him, he knew that much. Jamie hadn’t, but might at any moment. A general? What the—no time to worry about that just now. What might either one of them do about it?

He hadn’t seen Percy—ex-lover, ex-brother, French spy, and all-around shit—since their last conversation in Philadelphia, some months before. When Percy had first reappeared in Grey’s life, it had been with a last attempt at seduction—political rather than physical, though Grey had an idea that he wouldn’t have balked at the physical, either. . . . It was an offer for the British government: the return to France of the valuable Northwest Territory, in return for the promise of Percy’s “interests” to keep the French government from making an alliance with the American colonies.

He had—as a matter of duty—conveyed the offer discreetly to Lord North and then expunged it—and Percy—from his mind. He had no idea what, if anything, the First Minister had made of it.

Too late now in any case, he thought. France had signed a treaty with the rebellious colonies in April. It remained to be seen, though, whether that treaty would result in anything tangible in the way of support. The French were notoriously unreliable.

So now what? His instinct toward self-preservation urged him to fade quietly through the camp and disappear as quickly as possible. Germain wouldn’t tell Jamie he was here; they’d agreed that much in advance. Two considerations held him back, though: first, the minor matter that he didn’t yet know where the British army was or how far away. And second . . . a sense of curiosity about Percy that he himself recognized as dangerously reckless.

He’d kept moving, since to stand still was to be knocked over and trampled, and now found himself walking beside the Reverend Woodsworth. The tall minister’s face was suffused with an excitement that kept breaking through the man’s normal mien of calm dignity, and Grey couldn’t help smiling at it.

“God has brought us safe thus far, Bert,” Woodsworth said, looking about him with shining eyes. “And He will grant us victory, I know it!”

“Ah.” Grey groped for some reply, and finding—to his surprise—that he was incapable of agreeing with this statement, settled for, “I suppose we cannot presume to divine the Almighty’s intent, but I do trust He will preserve us, in His mercy.”

“Very well said, Bert, very well said.” And Woodsworth clapped him resoundingly on the back.

60 QUAKERS AND QUARTERMASTERS

JAMIE FOUND NATHANAEL Greene in his tent and still in shirtsleeves, the remains of breakfast on a table before him, frowning at a letter in his hand. He put this down at once upon seeing Jamie and rose to his feet.

“Come in, sir, do! Have you et anything yet today? I’ve a spare egg going to waste.” He smiled, but briefly; whatever had troubled him about the letter still lurked in the creases of his brow. Jamie glanced at it from the corner of his eye; from the blots and ragged edge, it looked a piece of domestic correspondence, rather than an official note.

“I have, I thank ye, sir,” Jamie said, with a slight bow of acknowledgment toward the egg, which sat neglected in a little wooden cup with a flowered heart painted on it. “I only wondered, if ye meant to ride out today, might I come with ye?”

“Of course!” Greene looked surprised but pleased. “I should welcome your advice, General.”

“Perhaps we might trade wisdom, then,” Jamie suggested. “For I should value your own advice, though perhaps on a different matter.”

Greene paused, coat half-pulled on.

“Really? Advice on what sort of matter?”

“Marriage.”

Greene’s face struggled between astonishment, a courteous attempt to suppress the astonishment, and something else. He glanced behind him at the letter lying on the table and settled his coat on his shoulders.

“I could use sound advice on that matter myself, General Fraser,” he said, with a wry twist of the lips. “Let’s be off, then.”

They rode out of camp north by northwest—Greene was equipped with a battered compass, and Jamie wished for a moment that he still possessed the gold-plated astrolabe that William had sent from London at the behest of Lord John. That had perished when the Big House burned, though the spurt of dark feeling that went through him now had more to do with the thought of John Grey than with the fire and its aftermath.

Conversation at first dealt only with the business at hand: the location of supply dumps along the probable line of march—and, if necessary, retreat, though no one spoke of that possibility. There was no particular doubt as to where the British army was headed; a body that large, with an enormous baggage train and outlying flocks of camp followers, was limited in its choice of roads.

“Aye, that would do,” Jamie said, nodding in agreement at Greene’s suggestion of an abandoned farmstead. “D’ye think the well’s good?”

“I’m minded to find out,” Greene said, turning his horse’s head toward the farm. “It’s hot as Hades already. Scorch our ears off by noon, I reckon.”

It was hot; they’d left off their stocks and waistcoats and were riding in shirtsleeves, coats across their saddlebows, but Jamie felt the linen of his shirt sticking to his back and sweat trickling over his ribs and down his face. Fortunately, the well was still good; water glimmered visibly below, and a stone dropped in gave back a satisfactory plunk!

“I confess I’m surprised to find you in want of advice regarding marriage, General,” Greene said, having first drunk his fill and then upended a bucketful of water luxuriously over his head. He blinked water off his lashes, shook himself like a dog, and handed the bucket to Jamie, who nodded thanks. “I should have thought your own union most harmonious.”

“Aye, well, it’s not my own marriage I’m worrit for,” Jamie said, grunting a little as he pulled up a fresh full bucket—hand over hand, for the windlass had rotted away and he’d been obliged to fetch a rope from his saddlebag. “Will ye ken a young scout named Ian Murray? He’s my nephew.”

“Murray. Murray . . .” Greene looked blank for a moment, but then comprehension dawned. “Oh, him! Yes, drat him. Your nephew, you say? Thought he was an Indian. Cost me a guinea on that race. My wife won’t be happy about that at all. Not that she’s happy at the moment, regardless,” he added with a sigh. Evidently the letter had been domestic.

“Well, I might persuade him to give it ye back,” Jamie said, suppressing a smile, “if ye might be able to help him to wed.”

He raised the bucket overhead and gave himself over to a moment of joy as the drench of water quenched the heat. He drew one deep, grateful breath of coolness, tasting of the dank stones at the bottom of the well, and likewise shook himself.

“He means to marry a Quaker lass,” he said, opening his eyes. “I kent that ye were a Friend yourself, havin’ heard ye speak to Mrs. Hardman when we met. So I wondered, maybe, if ye could tell me just what’s needed in the way of requirement for such a marriage?”

If Greene had been surprised to find that Ian was Jamie’s nephew, this news seemed to knock him speechless. He stood for a moment, pushing his lips in and out, as though they might suck up a word he could spit back out, and at last found one.

“Well,” he said. He paused for a bit, considering, and Jamie waited patiently. Greene was a man of fairly strong opinions, but he didn’t give them hastily. Jamie did wonder what there was to consider in his question, though—were Quakers even stranger in their customs than he thought?

“Well,” Greene said again, and exhaled, settling his shoulders. “I must tell you, General, that I no longer consider myself a Friend, though I was indeed raised in that sect.” He shot Jamie a sharp look. “And I must also tell you that the cause of my departure was a mislike of their narrow-minded, superstitious ways. If your nephew means to turn Quaker, sir, I’d recommend you do your best to dissuade him.”

“Och. Well, that’s part of the difficulty, I gather,” Jamie replied equably. “He doesna mean to turn Quaker himself. And I think that a wise decision; he isna suited for it at all.”

Greene relaxed a little at that and went so far as to smile, if wryly.

“I’m glad to hear it. But he has no objection to his wife remaining a Friend?”

“I think he’s better sense than to suggest otherwise.”

That made Greene laugh. “Perhaps he’ll manage marriage well enough, then.”

“Oh, he’ll make a bonny husband for the lass, I’ve nay doubt. It’s the getting them wed that seems a difficulty.”

“Ah. Yes.” Greene glanced round the homestead, wiping his wet face with a wadded handkerchief. “That might in fact be very difficult, if the young woman . . . well. Let me think for a moment. In the meantime . . . the well’s good, but we can’t store powder here; there’s not much roof left, and I’m told this weather often presages thunderstorms.”

“There’s likely a root cellar at the back,” Jamie suggested.

There was. The door had gone and a tangle of spindly, pallid vines had sprouted from a rotted sack of potatoes abandoned in the corner, tendrils crawling in slow desperation toward the light.

“It’ll do,” Greene decided, and made a penciled note in the small book he carried everywhere. “Let’s move on, then.”

They let the horses drink, poured more water over themselves, and rode on, gently steaming. Greene was not a chatterer, and there had been no conversation for a mile or two, when he finally reached a conclusion of his mental processes.

“The principal thing to bear in mind regarding Friends,” he said, without preliminary, “is that they depend very much upon one another’s company and opinion—often to the exclusion of the world outside their meetings.” He shot Jamie a glance. “The young woman—is your nephew known to her meeting?”

“Mmphm,” Jamie said. “As I understand from her brother, they were both put out of their meeting—in a small place in Virginia when he decided to become a surgeon in the Continental army. Or perhaps he was put out, and she merely went with him; I dinna ken whether it makes a difference.”

“Oh, I see.” Greene plucked the wet shirt away from his body in hopes of admitting a little air to his skin, but it was a vain hope. The air lay thick as a woolen blanket on the simmering countryside. “A ‘fighting Quaker,’ as they call it?”

“No, he willna take up arms,” Jamie assured Greene, “but apparently his merely being connected with the army offended his meeting.” Greene snorted in what appeared to be a personal way, and Jamie cleared his throat. “In fact, Denzell Hunter—Dr. Hunter—also is engaged to be married. Though his path may be somewhat smoother, in that his bride has become a Friend herself.”

“Has she a home meeting?” Greene asked sharply. Jamie shook his head.

“No, it appeared to be a . . . private event. The conversion, I mean. I am told that Quakers dinna have either clergy or ritual . . . ?” He left that hanging delicately, and Greene snorted again.

“Nor do they. But I assure you, General, there is nothing truly private in a Friend’s life—certainly no spiritual matter. My own father opposed reading, as being a practice likely to separate one from God, and when as a young man I not only read but began to collect works on military strategy, in which I had an interest, I was brought before an examination committee from our meeting and subjected to such questions as to—well, as I say, I am no longer a member of that sect.”

He blew out his lips and made small rumbling noises for a bit, frowning at the road ahead—though Jamie saw that, even in his preoccupation, Greene was taking note of their surroundings, with an eye to logistics.

He himself had become aware of a certain vibration in the air and wondered if Greene sensed it. Not quite noise, it was a disturbance that he knew well: a large body of men and horses, too far away to see their dust—but there. They’d found the British army. He slowed a little, looking carefully at the trees ahead in case of British scouts—for the British must surely know by now that they were pursued.

Greene’s hearing was less acute, though, or perhaps he was only preoccupied, for he glanced at Jamie in surprise, though he slowed, as well. Jamie raised a hand to stop him speaking and lifted his chin—there was a rider coming toward them, following the road. The sound of hooves was audible, and Jamie’s own mount flung up his head and whickered with interest, nostrils flaring.

Both men had come armed; Greene set a hand on the musket balanced across his saddle. Jamie left his rifle in its sling but checked the priming of the pistols in his saddle holsters. Awkward to fire a long gun from horseback.

The rider was coming slowly, though; Jamie’s hand on the pistol’s grip relaxed, and he shook his head at Greene. They reined up, waiting, and a moment later the rider came in view.

“Ian!”

“Uncle Jamie!” Ian’s face blossomed with relief at sight of him, and no wonder. He was dressed like a Mohawk, in buckskin leggings and calico shirt, with feathers in his hair, and a long, hairy gray carcass lay across his saddlebow, blood dripping slowly from it down the horse’s leg.

The beast wasn’t dead, though; Rollo twitched and raised his head, giving the newcomers a yellow wolf glare, but recognized Jamie’s scent and barked once, then let his tongue loll out, panting.

“What’s happened to the hound, then?” Jamie rode up alongside and leaned forward to look.

“The numpty fell into a deadfall trap,” Ian said, frowning rebuke at the dog. Then he gently scratched the big dog’s ruff. “Mind, I’d ha’ fallen in it myself, if he hadna gone before me.”

“Bad hurt?” Jamie asked. He didn’t think so; Rollo was giving General Greene his usual look of appraisal—a look that made most people take a few steps back. Ian shook his head, his hand curled into Rollo’s fur to keep him steady.

“Nay, but he’s torn his leg and he’s lame. I was looking for a safe place to leave him; I’ve got to report in to Captain Mercer. Though seein’ as you’re here—oh, good day to ye, sir,” he said to Greene, whose horse had backed up in response to Rollo and was presently indicating a strong desire to keep going, in spite of his rider’s inclination. Ian sketched a salute and turned back to Jamie. “Seein’ as you’re here, Uncle Jamie, could ye maybe fetch Rollo back to the lines with ye and get Auntie Claire to tend his leg?”

“Oh, aye,” Jamie said, resigned, and swung down from the saddle, groping for his soggy handkerchief. “Let me bind his leg first. I dinna want blood all over my breeks, and the horse willna like it, either.”

Greene cleared his throat.

“As you mention reporting, Mr. . . . Murray?” he asked, with a sideways glance at Jamie, who nodded. “Perhaps you’d be so good as to give me, as well as Captain Mercer, the benefit of your report?”

“Aye, sir,” Ian said agreeably. “The army’s divided into three bodies now, wi’ a great long line o’ baggage wagons in between. Sae far as I could tell—I exchanged words wi’ another scout who’d gone all the way up the column—they’re headed toward a place called Freehold. The ground’s no verra good for attack—folded up like a used napkin, all cut up wi’ ravines and bitty creeks—though the other scout told me there’s meadows beyond that might do for a fight, and ye could lure them or drive them out there.”

Greene asked sharp questions, some of which Ian could answer and some he couldn’t, while Jamie tended to the ginger business of binding up the dog’s leg—there was a nasty stake wound, though not too deep; he hoped the stake hadn’t been poisoned. Indians would do that sometimes, in case a wounded deer or wolverine might spring out of the trap.

Jamie’s horse was not enthused at the prospect of carrying a wolf on his back but eventually was persuaded, and with no more than a nervous eye roll backward now and then, they were mounted.

“Fuirich, a choin,” Ian said, leaning over and scratching Rollo behind the ears. “I’ll be back, aye? Taing, Uncle!” And with a brief nod to Greene, he was away, his own horse clearly wanting to put as much distance between himself and Rollo as possible.

“Dear Lord,” Greene said, wrinkling his nose at the dog’s reek.

“Aye, well,” Jamie said, resigned. “My wife says ye get used to any sort of smell after a bit of smelling it. And I suppose she’d know.”

“Why, is she a cook?”

“Och, no. A physician. Gangrene, ken, festering bowels and the like.”

Greene blinked.

“I see. You have a most interesting family, Mr. Fraser.” He coughed and looked after Ian, rapidly vanishing in the distance. “You might be wrong about him never becoming a Quaker. At least he doesn’t bow his head to a title.”

61 A VISCOUS THREE-WAY

JAMIE CAME BACK from his ride with General Greene looking damp, wrinkled, and completely disheveled but otherwise refreshed—and with Rollo, bloody and disgruntled but not badly hurt.

“He’ll be fine,” I said, scratching Rollo gently behind the ears. The gash had bled a lot, but wasn’t deep. “I don’t think I’ll stitch it.”

“Dinna blame ye a bit, Sassenach,” Jamie said, glancing at the dog, who had suffered my cleaning, salving, and bandaging his leg but didn’t look at all inclined to stand for more fiddling. “Where are my good stockings?”

“In the portmanteau with your other linen,” I replied patiently. “Where they are every morning. Surely you know that?”

“I do,” he admitted. “I just like ye to tend to me.”

“All right,” I said, obligingly pulling them out. “D’you want me to put them on for you?”

“Nay, I can manage that,” he said, taking them. “Could ye find my shirt, though?”

“I think I can do that, yes,” I replied, taking the shirt out of the same portmanteau and shaking it out. “How was General Greene this morning?”

“Good. I asked him about the Quaker way of marriage,” he said, pulling a fresh white shirt—his only fresh white shirt, as I pointed out—over his head.

“Evidently the difficulty is with Denzell and Rachel not havin’ a home meeting, as it’s called. It’s no that they canna marry, but to do it in the proper way, it would involve the whole meeting. There’s a thing called a Clearness Committee, which meets wi’ the bride and groom to counsel them and make sure they’re suited and that they’ve some notion what they’re in for.” He shrugged into the sleeves and grinned at me. “I couldna help thinking, while he was tellin’ me, what a committee like that would have had to say about us when we wed.”

“Well, they wouldn’t have had any more notion what we were in for than we did,” I said, amused. “Do you think they would have thought us well suited?”

“If they’d seen the way I looked at ye, Sassenach, when ye didna see me lookin’—then, aye, they would.” He kissed me briefly and looked round for the hairbrush. “Can ye club up my hair for me? I canna be reviewing my troops like this.” His hair was tied back carelessly with a leather thong, damp stray wisps sticking to his face.

“Of course. How many of them are you reviewing? And when?” I sat him down on the stool and set to work with the brush. “Have you been burrowing through the countryside headfirst? You have foxtails and leaves in your hair, and those winged seeds that elder trees make. Ooh! To say nothing of this.” I carefully removed a tiny green caterpillar that had become entangled in his tresses and showed it to him, perched inquisitively on my forefinger.

“Thalla le Dia,” he said to the caterpillar. Go with God. And taking it carefully onto his own finger, brought it to the tent flap and loosed it into the grass.

“All of them, Sassenach,” he said, returning and sitting down again. “My last two companies came in this morning; they’ll have been fed now and rested a bit. I meant to ask,” he added, twisting round to look up at me, “would ye come with me, Sassenach, and have a look at them? To see if any should be left back from the fighting or to tend any that might need the odd bit o’ repair.”

“Yes, of course. When?”

“Come to the parade ground in an hour, if ye would.” He passed a hand over the neatly gleaming auburn queue, doubled on itself and ribboned in a club at his nape. “Aye, that’s grand. Am I decent otherwise?”

He stood up and brushed bits of discarded leaf from his sleeve. The crown of his head brushed the tent, and he was glowing—with sun, energy, and the suppressed excitement of impending action.

“You look like bloody Mars, god of war,” I said dryly, handing him his waistcoat. “Try not to scare your men.”

His mouth quirked as he shrugged into the waistcoat, but he spoke seriously, eyes on mine.

“Och, I want them frightened of me, Sassenach. It’s the only way I’ll have a chance of bringing them out of it alive.”

WITH AN HOUR to spare, I took my kit of everyday medical supplies and went out to the big tree where the sick among the camp followers tended to gather. The army surgeons would tend camp followers as well as soldiers, if they had time—but they wouldn’t be having time today.

There was the usual assortment of minor ailments and injuries: a deeply embedded splinter (infected, requiring the application of drawing salve, followed by excavation, disinfection, and bandage); a dislocated toe (caused by the patient having kicked a fellow in play, but the work of a moment to reduce); a split lip (requiring one stitch and a little gentian ointment); a badly gashed foot (the result of inattention whilst chopping wood, requiring twenty-eight stitches and a large dressing); one child with an ear infection (an onion poultice and willow-bark tea prescribed); another with the bellyache (peppermint tea and a strong admonition against eating eggs of unknown age out of birds’ nests of unknown provenance) . . .

The few patients requiring medicines I put aside until I’d dealt with the injuries. Then—with a wary eye on the sun—I led them off to my tent to dispense packets of willow bark, peppermint, and hemp leaves.

The tent flap was open; surely I had left it closed? I ducked my head into the gloom of the tent and stopped abruptly. A tall figure stood before me, apparently in the act of rifling my medicine chest.

“What the devil are you doing with that?” I asked sharply, and the figure jerked, startled.

My eyes had now become accustomed to the diffuse light, and I saw that the thief—if that’s what he was—was a Continental officer, a captain.

“I beg your pardon, madam,” he said, giving me a perfunctory bow. “I had heard that there was a supply of medicaments here. I—”

“There is, and they’re mine.” This seemed a trifle ungracious—though I certainly thought his own attitude rather brusque—and I softened the remark a little. “What is it that you need? I imagine I can spare a little—”

“Yours?” He glanced from the chest—very clearly an expensive professional bit of furniture—to me, and his brows rose. “What are you doing with a thing like that?”

Several possible replies flitted through my head, but I’d recovered from the surprise of seeing him sufficiently as not to make any of them. I settled for a neutral “May I ask who you are, sir?”

“Oh.” Mildly flustered, he bowed to me. “I beg pardon. Captain Jared Leckie, your servant, ma’am. I am a surgeon with the Second New Jersey.”

He eyed me consideringly, clearly wondering who the devil I was. I was wearing a canvas apron with capacious pockets over my gown, these pockets presently stuffed with all manner of small instruments, dressings, bottles and jars of ointments and liquids. I’d also taken off my broad-brimmed hat when I came into the tent and, as usual, was not wearing a cap. I had bound up my hair, but it had come loose and was coiling damply round my ears. He obviously suspected me of being a laundress, come to collect soiled linen—or possibly something worse.

“I am Mrs. Fraser,” I said, drawing myself up with what I hoped was a gracious nod. “Er . . . Mrs. General Fraser, that is,” I added, seeing that he appeared unimpressed.

His eyebrows shot up, and he looked me openly up and down, his eyes lingering on the top pockets of my apron, these featuring an unwieldy rolled dressing in the act of coming unrolled and trailing down my front and a jar of asafoetida, whose cork was loose, thus allowing the reek of it to waft gently above the other notable smells of the camp. It was known commonly as “devil’s dung,” and for good reason. I pulled the jar out and pushed the cork in more securely. This gesture seemed somehow to reassure him.

“Oh! The general is a physician, I perceive,” he said.

“No,” I said, beginning to see that I should have uphill work with Captain Leckie, who appeared young and not overbright. “My husband is a soldier. I am a physician.”

He stared at me as though I’d told him I was a prostitute. Then he made the mistake of assuming that I was joking and laughed heartily.

At this point, one of my patients, a young mother whose one-year-old son had an ear infection, poked her neatly capped head hesitantly into the tent. Her little boy was in her arms, howling and red-faced.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, Mrs. Wilkins. Do bring him in; I’ll get the bark for him directly.”

Captain Leckie frowned at Mrs. Wilkins and beckoned her closer. She looked nervously at me, but allowed him to lean down and look at little Peter.

“He has a difficult tooth,” Leckie said, rather accusingly, after running a large, unwashed thumb through Peter’s drooling mouth. “He ought to have the gum slit, to let the tooth come through.” He began to fumble in his pocket, where he doubtless had a highly insanitary scalpel or lancet.

“He is teething,” I agreed, shaking out a quantity of crumbled willow bark into my mortar. “But he also has an ear infection, and the tooth will come through of its own accord within the next twenty-four hours.”

He rounded on me, indignant and astonished.

“Are you contradicting me?”

“Well, yes,” I said, rather mildly. “You’re wrong. You want to have a good look in his left ear. It’s—”

“I, madam, am a diplomate of the Medical College of Philadelphia!”

“I congratulate you,” I said, beginning to be provoked. “You’re still wrong.” Having thus rendered him momentarily speechless, I finished grinding the bark into powder and poured it into a square of gauze, which I folded into a neat packet and handed to Mrs. Wilkins, with instructions as to the brewing of the infusion and how to administer it, as well as how to apply an onion poultice.

She took the packet as though it might explode and, with a hasty glance at Captain Leckie, fled, little Peter’s howls receding like a siren in the distance.

I drew a deep breath.

“Now,” I said, as pleasantly as possible. “If you’re in need of simples, Dr. Leckie, I have a good supply. I can—”

He had drawn himself up like a crane eyeing a frog, beady-eyed and hostile.

“Your servant, ma’am,” he said curtly, and stalked past me.

I rolled my eyes up toward the canvas overhead. There was a small gecko-like creature clinging to the cloth, who viewed me with no particular emotion.

“How to win friends and influence people,” I remarked to it. “Take note.” Then I pushed the tent flap back and beckoned for the next patient to come in.

I HAD TO hurry in order to make my rendezvous with Jamie, who was just about to begin his review when I dashed up, twisting my hair into a mass and pinning it hastily under my broad-brimmed hat. It was a terribly hot day; being in the open sun for only a few minutes had made my nose and cheeks tingle warningly.

Jamie bowed gravely to me and began his advance along the line of men drawn up for review, greeting men, saluting officers, asking questions, giving his aide-de-camp notes of things to be done.

He had Lieutenant Schnell with him as aide-de-camp—a nice German boy from Philadelphia, perhaps nineteen—and a stout gentleman I didn’t know but assumed from his uniform to be the captain in charge of whatever companies we were inspecting. I followed them, smiling at the men as I passed, while looking them over sharpish for any overt signs of illness, injury, or disability—I was sure that Jamie could spot excessive drunkenness without my expert opinion.

There were three hundred men, he’d told me, and most of them were quite all right. I kept walking and nodding, but wasn’t above beginning to fantasize some dangerous circumstance in which I found Captain Leckie writhing in pain, which I would graciously allay, causing him to grovel and apologize for his objectionable attitude. I was trying to choose between the prospect of a musket ball embedded in his buttock, testicular torsion, and something temporarily but mortifyingly disfiguring, like Bell’s palsy, when my eye caught a glimpse of something odd in the lineup.

The man in front of me was standing bolt upright, musket at port arms, eyes fixed straight ahead. This was perfectly correct—but no other man in the line was doing it. Militiamen were more than capable, but they generally saw no point in military punctilio. I glanced at the rigid soldier, passed by—then glanced back.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I exclaimed, and only sheer chance kept Jamie from hearing me, he being distracted by the sudden arrival of a messenger.

I took two hasty steps back, bent, and peered under the brim of the dusty slouch hat. The face beneath was set in fierce lines, with a darkly ominous glower—and was completely familiar to me.

“Bloody effing hell,” I whispered, seizing him by the sleeve. “What are you doing here?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he whispered back, not moving a muscle of face or body. “Do walk on, my dear.”

Such was my astonishment, I might actually have done it, had my attention not been drawn by a small figure skulking about behind the line, trying to avoid notice by crouching behind a wagon wheel.

“Germain!” I said, and Jamie whirled about, eyes wide.

Germain stiffened for an instant and then turned to flee, but too late; Lieutenant Schnell, living up to his name, sprang through the line and grabbed Germain by the arm.

“Is he yours, sir?” he asked, glancing curiously from Jamie to Germain and back.

“He is,” Jamie said, with a tone that had turned many a man’s blood to water. “What the devil—”

“I’m an orderly!” Germain said proudly, trying to detach himself from Lieutenant Schnell’s grip. “I’m supposed to be here!”

“No, you’re not,” his grandfather assured him. “And what do ye mean, an orderly? Whose orderly?”

Germain at once glanced in John’s direction, then, realizing his mistake, jerked his eyes back, but it was too late. Jamie reached John in a single stride and ripped the hat off his head.

The face was identifiable as that of Lord John Grey, but only by someone who knew him well. He wore a black felt patch over one eye, and the other was all but obscured by dirt and bruises. He’d cut his luxuriant blond hair to roughly an inch in length and appeared to have rubbed dirt into it.

With considerable aplomb, he scratched his head and handed Jamie his musket.

“I surrender to you, sir,” he said, in a clear voice. “To you, personally. So does my orderly,” he added, putting a hand on Germain’s shoulder. Lieutenant Schnell, quite flabbergasted, let go of Germain as though he were red-hot.

“I surrender, sir,” Germain said solemnly, and saluted.

I’d never seen Jamie at a complete loss for words, and didn’t now, but it was a near thing. He inhaled strongly through his nose, then turned to Lieutenant Schnell.

“Escort the prisoners to Captain McCorkle, Lieutenant.”

“Er . . .” I said apologetically. A hard blue eye swiveled in my direction, brow raised.

“He’s injured,” I said, as mildly as I could, with a brief gesture in John’s direction. Jamie’s lips compressed for an instant, but he nodded.

“Take the prisoners—and Mrs. Fraser”—I daresay it was merely sensitivity on my part that perceived a certain emphasis on “Mrs. Fraser”—“to my tent, Lieutenant.”

With scarcely a breath, he turned on John.

“I accept your surrender, Colonel,” he said, with icy politeness. “And your parole. I will attend you later.”

And, with that, he turned his back on the three of us, in what could only be described as a marked manner.

“WHAT ON EARTH happened to your eye?” I demanded, peering at it. I had John on the cot in my small medical tent, the flap open to admit as much light as possible. The eye was swollen half shut and surrounded by a sticky black ring where the felt patch had been peeled away, the underlying flesh a lurid palette of green, purple, and ghastly yellow. The eye itself was red as a flannel petticoat and, from the irritated state of the eyelids, had been watering more or less constantly for some time.

“Your husband punched me when I told him I’d bedded you,” he replied, with complete composure. “I do hope he didn’t take any similarly violent actions upon being reunited with you?”

Had I been capable of a convincing Scottish noise, I might have resorted to one. As it was, I merely glared at him.

“I decline absolutely to discuss my husband with you,” I said. “Lie down, blast you.”

He eased himself back on the cot, wincing.

“He said he hit you twice,” I remarked, watching this. “Where was the second one?”

“In the liver.” He gingerly touched his lower abdomen. I pulled up his shirt and inspected the damage, which amounted to further spectacular bruising around the lower ribs, with blue streaks draining down toward the ilial crest, but little more.

“That’s not where your liver is,” I informed him. “It’s on the other side.”

“Oh.” He looked blank. “Really? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am,” I assured him. “I’m a doctor. Let me look at your eye.”

I didn’t wait for permission, but he didn’t resist, lying back and staring up at the canvas roof while I spread the eyelids as far as possible. The sclera and conjunctiva were badly inflamed, and even the dim light made the eye water profusely. I held up two fingers.

“Two,” he said, before I could ask. “And before you start ordering me to look to and fro and up and down . . . I can’t. I can see out of it—though it’s a bit blurry, and I see everything doubled, which is very disagreeable—but I can’t move it at all. Dr. Hunter opined that some muscle or other was trapped by some sort of bone. He didn’t feel competent to deal with it.”

“I’m flattered that you think I might be.”

“I have the fullest confidence in your abilities, Dr. Fraser,” he said politely. “Besides, have I any choice?”

“No. Keep quite still, there . . . Germain!” I had caught sight of a telltale flutter of pink calico from the corner of my eye, and the runaway came sidling in, looking vaguely guilty.

“Don’t tell me what you have in your shirt,” I said, noting a suspicious bulge or two. “I don’t want to be an accessory to crime. No, wait—is it alive?”

Germain prodded the bulge, as though not quite sure, but it didn’t move, and he shook his head. “No, Grand-mère.”

“Good. Come here and hold this, will you?”

I handed him my pocket looking glass and, adjusting the tent flap so that a ray of light shone in, then adjusted Germain’s hand so that the reflected light shone directly from the mirror into the affected eye. John yelped slightly when the light struck his eye, but obediently clutched the sides of the cot and didn’t move, though his eye watered terribly. All the better; it would wash out bacteria and perhaps make it easier to move the eyeball.

Denny was most likely right, I thought, selecting my smallest cautery iron and slipping it gently under the lower lid. It was the best thing I could find for the job, being flat, smooth, and spade-shaped. I couldn’t move the globe of the eyeball upward at all; even slight pressure made him go white. I could move it slightly from side to side, and given the sensitivity of John’s face just below the eye, I began to form a mental picture of the damage. It was almost certainly what was called a “blowout” fracture, which had cracked the delicate bone of the orbital floor and forced a displaced bit of it—along with part of the inferior rectus muscle—down into the maxillary sinus. The edge of the muscle was caught in the crack, thus immobilizing the eyeball.

“Bloody, bloody-minded, effing Scot,” I said, straightening up.

“Not his fault,” said John. “I provoked him.” He sounded excessively cheerful, and I turned a cold look on him.

“I’m not any more pleased with you,” I informed him. “You aren’t going to like this, and it will serve you right. How in heaven’s name did you—no, don’t tell me now. I’m busy.”

He folded his hands across his stomach, looking meek. Germain sniggered, but desisted when I gave him a glare of his own.

Tight-lipped, I filled a syringe—Dr. Fentiman’s penis syringe, as it happened; how appropriate—with saline solution for irrigation and found my small pair of needle-nosed forceps. I had another peek at the site with my makeshift spatula and prepared a tiny, curved needle with a wet catgut suture, cut very fine. I might manage without needing to stitch the inferior rectus—it depended whether the edge of the muscle had frayed very badly, by reason of its long entrapment, and how it survived being dislodged—but best to have the suture handy, in case of need. I hoped the need wouldn’t occur; there was so much swelling . . . but I couldn’t wait several days for it to subside.

What was troubling me was not so much the immediate reduction of the fracture and freeing of the muscle but the longer-term possibility of adhesion. The eye should be kept fairly immobile, to aid healing, but doing that might cause the muscle to adhere to the orbit, literally freezing the eye permanently. I needed something slippery with which to dress the site, something biologically inert and non-irritating—in my own time, sterile glycerin drops would have been instantly available, but here . . .

Egg white, perhaps? Probably not, I thought; body heat might coddle it, and then what?

“John!”

A shocked voice behind me made me turn, needle in hand. A very dapper-looking gentleman in a stylish wig and a gray-blue velvet suit was standing just inside the tent flap, staring aghast at my patient.

“What’s happened to him?” Percy Beauchamp demanded, spotting me in the background.

“Nothing serious,” I said. “Are you—”

“Leave,” said John, in a voice I’d never heard him use before. He sat up, fixing the newcomer with as steely a look as could be managed with one badly watering crimson eye. “Now.”

“What in God’s name are you doing here?” Beauchamp demanded. His accent was English, but English faintly tinged with French. He took a step nearer and lowered his voice. “Surely you have not become a Rebel?”

“No, I bloody haven’t! Leave, I said.”

“Dear God, you mean you—what the devil happened to you?” He’d come close enough now to behold the complete picture: filthy cropped hair, filthy disheveled clothes, filthy stockinged feet with holes in toe and heel, and a distorted visage now directing a glare of bloodshot venom at him.

“Now, look here—” I began, turning on Percy with determined firmness, but Germain stopped me.

“He’s the man who was looking for Papa in New Bern last year,” Germain said. He’d put down the looking glass and was watching the evolving scene with interest. “Grand-père thinks he’s a villain.”

Percy cast Germain a startled look, but recovered his composure with remarkable speed.

“Ah. The proprietor of distinguished frogs,” he said, with a smile. “I recall. Peter and Simon were their names? One yellow and one green.”

Germain bowed respectfully.

“Monsieur has an excellent memory,” he said, with exquisite politeness. “What do you want with my papa?”

“An excellent question,” said John, putting one hand over his injured eye, the better to glare at Monsieur Beauchamp.

“Yes, that is a good question,” I said mildly. “Do sit down, Mr. Beauchamp—and bloody explain yourself. And, you,” I added, taking John firmly by both shoulders, “lie down.”

“That can wait,” John said shortly, resisting my attempt to flatten him. He swung his legs over the side of the cot. “What are you doing here, Percy?”

“Oh, you know him, do you?” I said, beginning to be provoked.

“Certainly. He’s my brother—or was.”

“What?” Germain and I exclaimed as one. He looked at me and giggled.

“I thought Hal was your only brother,” I said, recovering. I glanced back and forth between John and Percy. There was no resemblance at all between them, whereas John’s resemblance to Hal was as marked as if they’d been stamped from the same mold.

“Stepbrother,” John said, still more shortly. He got his feet under him, preparing to rise. “Come with me, Percy.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said, raising my voice slightly.

“How do you propose to stop me?” John was on his feet, staggering a little as he tried to focus his eyes. Before I could answer, Mr. Beauchamp had lunged forward and grabbed his arm, to keep him from falling. John jerked violently away from him, nearly falling again as he stumbled backward into the cot. He caught his balance and stood glowering at Beauchamp, his fists half clenched.

Beauchamp’s gaze was locked with his, and the air between them was . . . electric. Oh, I thought, glancing from one to the other, suddenly enlightened. Oh.

I must have made some small movement, because Beauchamp’s gaze flicked suddenly toward my face. He looked startled at whatever he saw there, then, recovering himself, smiled wryly and bowed.

“Madame,” he said. Then, in perfect, accentless English, “He is really my stepbrother, though we haven’t spoken in . . . some time. I am here as the guest of the Marquis de La Fayette—amongst other things. Do allow me to take his lordship to meet the marquis. I promise to bring him back in one piece.” He smiled at me, warm-eyed and sure of his charm, which was considerable.

“His lordship is a prisoner of war,” said a very dry Scottish voice from behind Beauchamp. “And my responsibility. I regret that he must remain here, sir.”

Percy Beauchamp whirled round, gaping at Jamie, who was filling the tent flap in a most implacable fashion.

“I still want to know what he wants with Papa,” Germain said, small blond brows drawn down in a suspicious glower.

“I should like to know that, too, monsieur,” Jamie said. He came into the tent, ducking, and nodded toward the stool I had been using. “Pray be seated, sir.”

Percy Beauchamp glanced from Jamie to Lord John and back again. His face had gone smooth and blank, though the lively dark eyes were full of calculation.

“Alas,” he said, the slight French accent back. “I am engaged to le marquis—and General Washington—just now. You will excuse me, I am sure. Bonjour, Mon Général.” He marched to the tent flap, head held high, turning at the last moment to smile at John. “Au revoir, mon frère.”

“Not if I bloody see you first.”

NOBODY MOVED FOR the space of nine heartbeats—I counted them—following Percy Beauchamp’s dignified exit. Finally, John sat down abruptly on the cot, exhaling audibly. Jamie caught my eye and, with a slight nod, sat down on the stool. Nobody spoke.

“You mustn’t hit him again, Grand-père,” Germain said earnestly, breaking the silence. “He’s a very good man, and I’m sure he won’t take Grannie to bed anymore, now that you’re home to do it.”

Jamie gave Germain a quelling look, but his mouth twitched. From my position behind the cot, I could see the back of John’s neck flush a deep pink.

“I’m much obliged to his lordship for his care of your grannie,” Jamie told Germain. “But if ye think makin’ impertinent remarks regarding your elders is going to save your arse—think again.”

Germain shifted uneasily, but rolled his eyes at Lord John in a “worth a try” sort of way.

“I’m obliged to you for your good opinion, sir,” John told him. “And I reciprocate the compliment—but I trust you are aware that good intent alone does not absolve one from the consequences of rash conduct.”

Jamie was beginning to flush as deeply as John.

“Germain,” I said. “Do go away. Oh—see if you can find me some honey, would you?”

All three of them looked at me, startled at this apparent non sequitur.

“It’s viscous,” I said, with a slight shrug. “And antibacterial.”

“Of course it is,” John said under his breath in a hopeless sort of way.

“What does ‘viscous’ mean?” Germain asked, interested.

“Germain,” said his grandfather, in a menacing tone, and he hastily disappeared without waiting for enlightenment.

Everyone took a deep breath.

“Lie down now,” I said to John, before anything regrettable might be said. “Have you got a moment, Jamie? I need someone to hold the mirror while I fix his eye.”

With no more than an instant’s hesitation, they both obeyed, not looking at each other. I was nearly ready; when I’d got Jamie positioned and the ray of light focused on the eye, I once more irrigated the eye and socket gently with saline solution, then rinsed my fingers thoroughly with the same stuff.

“I need you both to hold completely still,” I said. “I’m sorry, John, but there’s no other way to do this, and if we’re lucky, it will be quick.”

“Aye, I’ve heard that one before,” Jamie muttered, but desisted when I shot a sideways look at him.

I was afraid to use the forceps, for fear of puncturing his eyeball. So I spread the lids of John’s affected eye with the fingers of my left hand, wedged the fingertips of my right as deeply into the eye socket as I could, and squeezed.

He made a shocked, strangled sort of noise, and Jamie gasped but didn’t drop the mirror.

There are not many things in the world slipperier than a wet eyeball. I tried to squeeze as lightly as I could, but there was no help for it; a light pressure merely allowed the eyeball to pop out of my fingers like an oiled grape. I clenched my teeth and tried again, gripping harder.

On the fourth try, I managed to get a sufficient grip as to allow me to try to rotate the eyeball in its socket. I didn’t quite manage it, but at least got a better idea of how it might go.

Five minutes later, John was trembling like a blancmange, hands clenched tight on the rails of the cot, Jamie was praying under his breath in Gaelic, and all three of us were drenched with sweat.

“Once more,” I said, drawing breath and wiping sweat from my chin with the back of my hand. I rinsed my fingers again. “If I can’t get it this time, we’ll have a rest and try again later.”

“Oh, God,” said John. He closed both eyes briefly, swallowed hard, and opened them as wide as he could. Both eyes were watering badly, and tears washed down his temples.

I felt Jamie move slightly next to me. He refocused the mirror—but I saw that he had also moved nearer to the cot, so that his leg pressed against the rail, just next to John’s gripping fingers. I wiggled my wet fingers in preparation, said a brief prayer to St. Claire, patron of sore eyes, and thrust my fingers as deeply into the socket as I could manage.

By this time, I had a very clear mental image of the fracture, a dark line beneath the torn conjunctiva, and the line of the inferior rectus muscle wedged into it. I twisted, a short, sharp jerk, before my fingers slipped—and felt the muscle pop free. John shuddered the full length of his body and gave a little moan.

“Glory be,” I said, and laughed from sheer relief. There was a little blood—not much—on my fingers, and I wiped them on my apron. Jamie flinched and looked away.

“Now what?” he asked, carefully not looking at John.

“Now what—Oh.” I considered that one for a moment, then shook my head.

“He has to lie down for several hours with the eye covered—a day or two, ideally. If Germain finds me some honey, I’ll lubricate the eye socket with a bit of it, to prevent adhesion.”

“I mean,” Jamie said patiently, “does he require to be kept under a doctor’s care?”

“Not all the time,” I said, surveying John critically. “Someone—me, I mean—needs to check the eye every so often, but there’s really nothing else to be done for it; the swelling and bruises will take care of themselves. Why? What were you planning to do with him?”

Jamie made a small gesture of frustration.

“I would hand him over to Washington’s staff for interrogation,” he said. “But—”

“But I surrendered to you personally,” John said helpfully. He glanced at me out of his working eye. “That means I’m his responsibility.”

“Aye, thank ye for that,” Jamie muttered, giving him an irritable look.

“Well, you aren’t going to tell him anything useful, either, are you?” I asked, putting a hand on John’s forehead. Slightly warm, but no gross fever. “Such as the nature of the relations between yourself and the recent Mr. Beauchamp?”

Jamie gave a brief snort.

“I ken fine what his relations are wi’ that wee sodomite,” he said bluntly. He gave John a piercing stare. “Ye dinna mean to tell me what he’s doing here, do ye?”

“No,” John said cheerfully. “Though it almost certainly wouldn’t help you if I did.”

Jamie nodded, having evidently expected nothing better, and rose with an air of decision.

“Well, then. I’ve work to do, and so have you, Sassenach. Wait here for Germain, if ye will, and when ye’ve finished with the honey, tell Germain he’s to be in charge of his lordship. He’s no to leave his lordship under any circumstances, save you or I tell him he may—and should Monsieur Beauchamp pay another call, Germain is to be present at any conversation. He speaks French verra fluently,” he advised John. “And should ye think of attempting to subvert my grandson’s loyalty—”

“Sir!” John said, looking shocked at the mere idea.

“Mmphm,” Jamie said darkly, and left.

62 THE MULE DISLIKES YOU

I DIDN’T KNOW QUITE what to say to John, in the wake of recent events. He seemed similarly at a loss, but coped with the social awkwardness by closing his eyes and pretending to be asleep. I couldn’t leave him until Germain got back with the honey—assuming he found any, but I had a fair amount of faith in his abilities.

Well, no point in sitting about with my hands folded. I took out my mortar and pestle and set to work grinding gentian root and garlic for antibiotic ointment. This occupied my hands, but unfortunately not my mind, which was scampering in circles like a hamster on a wheel.

I had two main anxieties at the moment, one of which I could do nothing about: that being the escalating sense of oncoming battle. I knew it very well; I couldn’t be mistaken. Jamie hadn’t told me explicitly, perhaps because he hadn’t had written orders yet—but I knew as clearly as if it had been shouted by a town crier. The army would move soon.

I stole a glance at John, who lay like a tomb effigy, hands neatly crossed at his waist. All it wanted was a small dog curled up at his feet. Rollo, snoring under the cot, would have to do, I supposed.

John, of course, was the other anxiety. I had no idea how he’d come to be where he was, but enough people had seen him surrender that his presence would be common knowledge by nightfall. And once it was . . .

“I don’t suppose you’d consider escaping, if I left for a moment?” I asked abruptly.

“No,” he said, not opening his eyes. “I gave my parole. Besides, I wouldn’t make it outside the camp,” he added.

The silence resumed, broken by the brumm of a large bumblebee, which had blundered into the tent, and the more distant shouts and drumbeats of soldiers drilling and the low thrashing noises of daily camp life.

The only good thing—if one chose to regard it that way, and I might as well—was that the rising sense of battle urgency was likely to preclude official curiosity about John. What the devil would Jamie do with him when the army decamped in the morning? I wondered.

“Grand-mère, Grand-mère!” Germain burst into the tent, and Rollo—who had slept through Percy Beauchamp’s visit without stirring a whisker—shot out from under the cot with an explosive WOOF! that nearly overturned the cot and John with it.

“Hush, dog,” I said, seeing him glaring wildly round, and took a restraining grip on his scruff. “And what the he—I mean the dev—I mean what’s the matter, Germain?”

“I saw him, Grannie! I saw him! The man who took Clarence! Come quick!” And without waiting for response, he turned and raced out of the tent.

John began to sit up, and Rollo tensed under my hand.

“Sit!” I said to both of them. “And bloody stay!”

THE HAIRS ON my forearms were prickling, even as sweat streamed down my neck. I’d left my hat behind and the sun blazed on my cheeks; I was panting by the time I caught up with Germain, as much from emotion as from heat.

“Where—”

“Just there, Grannie! The big bugger wi’ the kerchief round his arm. Clarence must ha’ bitten him!” Germain added, with glee.

The bugger in question was big: roughly twice my size, with a head like a pumpkin. He was sitting on the ground under the shade of what I thought of as the hospital tree, nursing his kerchief-wrapped arm and glowering at nothing in particular. A small group of people seeking medical treatment—you could tell as much from their hunched and drooping attitudes—was keeping a distance from him, looking warily at him from time to time.

“You’d best keep out of sight,” I murmured to Germain, but, hearing no answer, glanced round to discover that he’d already faded artfully from view, canny child that he was.

I walked up, smiling, to the little group of waiting people—mostly women with children. I didn’t know any of them by name, but they clearly knew who and what I was; they bobbed their heads and murmured greetings, but cut their eyes sideways at the man under the tree. “Take him first before he does something messy” was the clear message. Just as clear as the sense of badly contained violence that the man was radiating in all directions.

I cleared my throat and walked over to the man, wondering what on earth I was to say to him. “What have you done with Clarence the mule?” or “How dare you rob my grandson and leave him in the wilderness alone, you bloody bastard?”

I settled for “Good morning. I’m Mrs. Fraser. What happened to your arm, sir?”

“Bleedin’ mule bit me to the bone, gaddamn his stinkin’ hide,” the man replied promptly, and glowered at me under eyebrows ridged with scar tissue. So were his knuckles.

“Let me see it, will you?” Not waiting for permission, I took hold of his wrist—it was hairy and very warm—and unwrapped the kerchief. This was stiff with dried blood, and no wonder.

Clarence—if it was Clarence—actually had bitten him to the bone. Horse and mule bites could be serious but usually resulted only in deep bruising; equines had powerful jaws, but their front teeth were designed for tearing grass, and as most bites were through clothing, they didn’t often break skin. It could be done, though, and Clarence had done it.

A flap of skin—and a good chunk of flesh—about three inches wide had been partially detached, and I could see past the thin fatty layer to the gleam of tendon and the red membranous covering of the radius. The wound was recent but had stopped bleeding, save for a little oozing at the edges.

“Hmm,” I said noncommittally, and turned his hand over. “Can you close your fingers into a fist?” He could, though the ring finger and little finger wouldn’t fold in completely. They did move, though; the tendon wasn’t severed. “Hmm,” I said again, and reached into my bag for the bottle of saline solution and a probe. Saline was a little less painful for disinfection than dilute alcohol or vinegar—and it was somewhat easier to get hold of salt, at least when living in a city—but I kept a tight grip on the enormous wrist as I poured the liquid into the wound.

He made a noise like a wounded bear, and the waiting onlookers took several steps back, as a body.

“Rather a vicious mule,” I observed mildly, as the patient subsided, panting. His face darkened.

“Gonna beat the gaddamn bastarding fucker to death, soon as I get back,” he said, and bared his yellow teeth at me. “Skin him, I will, and sell his meat.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t advise that,” I said, keeping a grip on my temper. “You don’t want to be using that arm violently; it could bring on gangrene.”

“It could?” He didn’t go pale—it wasn’t possible, given the temperature—but I’d definitely got his attention.

“Yes,” I said pleasantly. “You’ve seen gangrene, I daresay? The flesh goes green and putrid—beastly smell—limb rots, dead in days . . . that sort of thing?”

“I seen it,” he muttered, eyes now fixed on his arm.

“Well, well,” I said soothingly, “we’ll do our best here, won’t we?” I would normally have offered a patient in such a case a fortifying draft of whatever liquor was available—and, thanks to the marquis, I had quite a good supply of French brandy—but in the present instance, I wasn’t feeling charitable.

In fact, my general feeling was that Hippocrates could turn a blind eye for the next few minutes. Do no harm, forsooth. Still, there wasn’t a great deal I could do to him, armed with a two-inch suture needle and a pair of embroidery scissors.

I stitched the wound as slowly as I could, taking care to slosh more saline over it periodically and glancing covertly round for assistance. Jamie was with Washington and the high command as they strategized the imminent engagement; I couldn’t summon him out to deal with a mule thief.

Ian had vanished on his pony, scouting the British rear guard. Rollo was with Lord John. Rachel had gone off with Denny and Dottie in the Quakers’ wagon, to look for supplies in the nearest village. And good luck to them, I thought; General Greene’s foragers had spread out like locusts over the face of the earth the moment the army halted, stripping farmsteads and storage barns in their path.

The patient was cursing in a rather monotonous and uninspired fashion, but showed no signs of keeling over in a convenient faint. What I was doing to his arm was unlikely to improve his temper; what if he actually did intend to go straight off and beat Clarence to death?

If Clarence was loose, I’d put good odds on the mule to win any such encounter, but he was very likely tied or hobbled. But then . . . a horrid thought struck me. I knew where Germain was, and what he was doing—or trying to do.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I muttered, bending my head over the teamster’s arm to hide an undoubtedly appalled expression. Germain was an extremely talented pickpocket, but stealing a mule out of the middle of a gang of teamsters . . .

What had Jamie said? “He’d be taken up for theft and hanged or flogged within an inch of his life, and I couldna do a thing to stop it.” Teamsters being what they were, they’d likely just break his neck and be done with it, rather than waiting for any sort of military justice.

I swallowed hard and glanced quickly over my shoulder, to see if I could spot the teamsters’ encampment. If I could see Germain . . .

I didn’t see Germain. What I saw was Percy Beauchamp, regarding me thoughtfully from the shadow of a nearby tent. Our eyes met, and he instantly came toward me, straightening his coat. Well, I was in no position to look a gift horse—or mule—in the mouth, was I?

“Madame Fraser,” he said, and bowed. “Are you in need of some assistance?”

Yes, I bloody did need assistance; I couldn’t drag my surgical repairs out much longer. I darted a look at my massive patient, wondering whether he had any French.

Apparently my face was just as transparent as Jamie had always told me it was; Percy smiled at me and said conversationally in French, “I don’t think this clot of decaying menstrual blood is capable of understanding more English than it takes to hire the sort of poxed and imbecile whore who would let him touch her, let alone understand the tongue of angels.”

The teamster went on muttering, “Shit-fire, shit-fire, fucking shit-ass fucking-ass mule, that gaddamn hurts . . .”

I relaxed a little and replied in French. “Yes, I need help—with the utmost urgency. My grandson is trying to steal the mule this oaf stole from him. Can you retrieve him from the teamsters’ camp before someone notices?”

“À votre service, madame,” he replied promptly, and, clicking his heels smartly together, bowed and went off.

I TOOK AS long as I could over the final dressing of the wound, worried that should my foul-mouthed patient find Germain among the teamsters, Percy’s French manners might be unequal to the occasion. And I couldn’t really expect Hippocrates to continue turning a blind eye, were I compelled to do something drastic if the man tried to break Germain’s neck.

I heard a familiar loud braying behind me, though, and turned sharply to see Percy, flushed and a trifle disheveled, leading Clarence toward me. Germain sat atop the mule, his face set in lines of vindictive triumph as he glared at my patient.

I stood up hastily, groping for my knife. The teamster, who had been gingerly prodding the fresh bandage round his arm, looked up, startled, then surged to his feet with a roar.

“Shit-FIRE!” he said, and started purposefully toward them, fists clenched. Percy, to his credit, stood his ground, though he paled a little. He handed the reins up to Germain, though, and stepped firmly forward.

“Monsieur . . .” he began. I would have liked to know just what he had in mind to say but didn’t find out, as the teamster didn’t bother with colloquy, instead driving a hamlike fist into Percy’s belly. Percy sat down hard and folded up like a fan.

“Bloody hell—Germain!” For Germain, nothing daunted by the sudden loss of support, had gathered up Clarence’s reins and tried to lash the teamster across the face with them.

This might possibly have been effective, had he not telegraphed his intention quite so clearly. As it was, the teamster ducked and reached out, clearly intending to grab either the reins or Germain. The crowd around me had realized what was happening by now, and women started screaming. At this point, Clarence decided to become involved and, laying back his ears, curled his lips and snapped at the teamster’s face, coming within a toucher of taking off the man’s nose.

“SHIT-ASS FUCKING MULE!!” Deeply inflamed, the teamster leapt at Clarence and fixed his teeth in the mule’s upper lip, clinging like grim death to his neck. Clarence screamed. The women screamed. Germain screamed.

I didn’t scream, because I couldn’t breathe. I was elbowing my way through the crowd, fumbling for the slit in my skirt so I could reach my knife. Just as I laid my hand on the hilt, though, a hand came down on my shoulder, halting me in my tracks.

“Pardon me, milady,” said Fergus, and, stepping purposefully past me, walked up beside the lunging mass of mule, teamster, and shrieking child, and fired the pistol in his hand.

Everything stopped, for a split second, and then the shouting and screaming started again, everyone surging toward Clarence and his companions to see what had happened. For a long moment, it wasn’t apparent what had happened. The teamster had let go his grip in astonishment and turned toward Fergus, eyes bulging and blood-tinged saliva running down his chin. Germain, with more presence of mind than I would have had in such a situation, got hold of the reins and was hauling on them with all his strength, trying to turn Clarence’s head. Clarence, whose blood was plainly up, was having none of it.

Fergus calmly put the fired pistol back into his belt—I realized at this point that he must have fired into the dirt near the teamster’s feet—and spoke to the man.

“If I were you, sir, I would remove myself promptly from this animal’s presence. It is apparent that he dislikes you.”

The shouting and screaming had stopped, and this made several people laugh.

“Got you there, Belden!” a man near me called. “The mule dislikes you. What you think of that?”

The teamster looked mildly dazed but still homicidal. He stood with his fists clenched, legs braced wide apart and shoulders hunched, glowering at the crowd.

“What I think . . . ?” he began. “I think—”

But Percy had managed to get to his feet and, while still somewhat hunched, was mobile. Without hesitation, he walked up and kicked the teamster smartly in the balls.

This went over well. Even the man who appeared to be a friend of Belden’s whooped with laughter. The teamster didn’t go down but curled up like a dried leaf, clutching himself. Percy wisely didn’t wait for him to recover, but turned and bowed to Fergus.

“À votre service, monsieur. I suggest that you and your son—and the mule, of course—might withdraw?”

“Merci beaucoup, and I suggest you do the same, tout de suite,” Fergus replied.

“Hey!” shouted the teamster’s friend, not laughing now. “You can’t steal that mule!”

Fergus rounded on him, imperious as the French aristocrat Percy had implied he might be.

“I cannot, sir,” he said, inclining his head a quarter of an inch in acknowledgment. “Because a man cannot steal that which already belongs to him, is this not so?”

“Is that not . . . is what not so?” demanded the man, confused.

Fergus scorned to answer this. Lifting one dark brow, he strode off several paces, turned, and shouted, “Clarence! Écoutez-moi!”

With the teamster’s collapse, Germain had succeeded in getting Clarence somewhat under control, though the mule’s ears were still laid out flat in displeasure. At the sound of Fergus’s voice, though, the ears rose slowly upright and swiveled in his direction.

Fergus smiled, and I heard a woman behind me sigh involuntarily. Fergus’s smile was remarkably charming. He reached into his pocket and withdrew an apple, which he skewered neatly on his hook.

“Come,” he said to the mule, extending his right hand and twiddling the fingers in a head-scratching motion. Clarence came, disregarding Mr. Belden, who had now sat down and was clutching his knees, the better to contemplate his state of inner being. The mule ducked his head to take the apple, nudging Fergus’s elbow, and allowed his forehead to be scratched. There was a murmur of interest and approbation from the crowd, and I noticed a few censorious glances being shot at the groaning Mr. Belden.

The sense of being about to faint had left me, and now my insides began to unclench. With some effort, I slid the knife back into its sheath without stabbing myself in the thigh and wiped my hand on my skirt.

“As for you, sans crevelle,” Fergus was saying to Germain, with a low-voiced menace that he’d plainly learned from Jamie, “we have a few things to discuss presently.”

Germain turned a rather sickly shade of yellow. “Yes, Papa,” he murmured, hanging his head in order to avoid his father’s minatory eye.

“Get down,” Fergus said to him, and, turning to me, raised his voice. “Madame General, permit me to present this animal personally to General Fraser, in the service of liberty!”

This was delivered in such a tone of ringing sincerity that a few souls applauded. I accepted, as graciously as possible, on behalf of General Fraser. By the conclusion of these proceedings, Mr. Belden had got awkwardly to his feet and stumbled off toward the teamsters’ camp, tacitly ceding Clarence to the cause.

I took Clarence’s reins, relieved and glad to see him again. Apparently it was mutual, for he nosed me familiarly in the shoulder and made chummy huffing noises.

Fergus, meanwhile, stood for a moment looking down at Germain, then squared his shoulders and turned to Percy, who still looked a little pale but had straightened his wig and regained his self-possession. Percy bowed very formally to Fergus, who sighed deeply, then bowed back.

“And I suppose that we, too, have matters to discuss, monsieur,” he said, resigned. “Perhaps a little later?”

Percy’s handsome face lighted.

“À votre service . . . seigneur,” he said, and bowed again.

63 AN ALTERNATE USE FOR A PENIS SYRINGE

GERMAIN HAD, IN FACT, found some honey, and now that the excitement of recovering Clarence was over, he produced a large chunk of sticky honeycomb, wrapped in a dirty black kerchief, from the recesses of his shirt.

“What are you going to do wi’ that, Grannie?” he asked, curious. I’d set the oozing chunk of comb in a clean pottery dish and was again employing the useful penis syringe—carefully sterilized with alcohol—to suck up honey, being careful to avoid bits of wax and noticeable pollen grains. Having been designed for irrigation rather than puncture, the syringe had a blunt, smoothly tapered tip: just the thing for dribbling honey into someone’s eye.

“I’m going to lubricate his lordship’s bad eye,” I said. “Fergus, will you come and steady his lordship’s head, please? Put your hand on his forehead. And, Germain, you’ll hold his eyelids open.”

“I can keep still,” John said irritably.

“Be quiet,” I said briefly, and sat down on the stool beside him. “No one can keep still while having things poked into their eye.”

“You were poking your bloody fingers into my eye not an hour since! And I didn’t move!”

“You squirmed,” I said. “It’s not your fault, you couldn’t help it. Now, be quiet; I don’t want to accidentally stab you in the eyeball with this.”

Breathing audibly through his nose, he clamped his mouth shut and suffered Fergus and Germain to immobilize him. I’d debated whether to dilute the honey with boiled water, but the heat of the day had made it sufficiently thin that I thought it better to use it at full strength.

“It’s antibacterial,” I explained to the three of them, using my cautery iron again to lift the eyeball and squirting a slow dribble of honey under it. “That means it kills germs.”

Fergus and Germain, to whom I had explained germs more than once, nodded intelligently and tried to look as though they believed in the existence of such things, which they didn’t. John opened his mouth as though to speak, but then shut it again and exhaled strongly through his nose.

“But the chief virtue of honey in the present instance,” I went on, anointing the eyeball generously, “is that it’s viscous. Let go now, Germain. Blink, John. Oh, very good!” The handling had of course made the eye water, but even dilute honey retains its viscosity; I could see the altered gleam of the light across the sclera, indicating the presence of a thin, soothing—I hoped—layer of honey. Some had overflowed, of course, and amber beads were sliding down his temple toward his ear; I stanched the flow with a handkerchief.

“How does it feel?”

John opened and closed his eye a couple of times, very slowly.

“Everything looks blurry.”

“Doesn’t matter; you aren’t going to be looking out of that eye for a day or two anyway. Does it feel any better?”

“Yes,” he said, in a distinctly grudging manner, and the other three of us made approving noises that made him look embarrassed.

“Right, then. Sit up—carefully! Yes, that’s it. Close your eye and hold this to catch the drips.” And, handing him a clean handkerchief, I unrolled a length of gauze bandage, thumbed a pad of lint carefully into the eye socket, and rolled the bandage round his head a few times, tucking in the ends. He strongly resembled a figure in an old painting titled The Spirit of ’76, but I didn’t mention it.

“All right,” I said, exhaling and feeling rather pleased with myself. “Fergus, why don’t you and Germain go and find some food? Something for his lordship, and something for the road tomorrow. I rather think it will be a long day.”

“This one’s been quite long enough already,” John said. He was swaying a little, and I pushed him gently back down with little resistance. He stretched his neck to ease it, then settled on the pillow with a sigh. “Thank you.”

“It was my pleasure,” I assured him. I hesitated, but, with Fergus’s departure, I didn’t think I’d have a better chance to ask what was in my mind. “I don’t suppose you know what Percival Beauchamp wants with Fergus, do you?”

The good eye opened and looked at me.

“You mean you don’t think he believes Fergus to be the lost heir to a great fortune? No, I don’t, either. But if Mr. Fraser will take a bit of unsolicited advice, I’d strongly suggest having as little as possible to do with Monsieur Beauchamp.” The eye closed again.

Percy Beauchamp had taken his leave—very gracefully—after Clarence’s rescue, explaining that he must attend le marquis but adding that he would seek out Fergus on the morrow.

“When things are quieter,” he’d added, with a genteel bow.

I regarded John thoughtfully.

“What did he do to you?” I asked. He didn’t open his eye, but his lips tightened.

“To me? Nothing. Nothing at all,” he repeated, and turned over on his side with his back to me.

64 THREE HUNDRED AND ONE

THREE HUNDRED MEN. Jamie stepped into the darkness beyond the 16th New Jersey’s campfire and paused for a moment to let his eyes adjust. Three hundred bloody men. He’d never led a band of more than fifty. And never had much in the way of subalterns, no more than one or two men under him.

Now he had ten militia companies, each with its own captain and a few informally appointed lieutenants, and Lee had given him a staff of his own: two aides-de-camp, a secretary—now, that he could get used to, he thought, flexing the fingers of his maimed right hand—three captains, one of whom was striding along at his shoulder, trying not to look worrit, ten of his own lieutenants, who would serve as liaison between him and the companies under his command, a cook, an assistant cook—and, of course, he had a surgeon already.

Despite the preoccupations of the moment, the memory of Lee’s face when Jamie’d told him exactly why he didn’t need an army surgeon assigned to him made him smile.

“Indeed,” Lee had said, his long-nosed face going blank. Then he’d gathered his wits and gone red in the face, thinking himself practiced upon. But Jamie had pushed back his cuff and shown Lee his right hand, the old white scars on his fingers like tiny starbursts where the bones had come through, and the broad one, still red but neat, straight, and beautifully knit, running down between the middle finger and the little one, showing where the missing finger had been amputated with such skill that one had to look twice to see why the hand seemed strange.

“Well, General, your wife seems a most accomplished needlewoman,” Lee said, now amused.

“Aye, sir, she is,” he’d said politely. “And a verra bonny hand with a blade, too.”

Lee gave him a sardonic look and spread out the fingers of his own right hand; the outer two were missing.

“So was the gentleman who took these off me. A duel,” he added offhandedly, seeing Jamie’s raised brows, and curled up his hand again. “In Italy.”

He didn’t know about Lee. The man had a reputation, but he was a boaster, and the two didn’t often go together. On the other hand, he was proud as one of Louis’s camels, and arrogance sometimes did mark a man who kent his worth.

The plan to attack the British rear guard, at first intended as a quick strike by La Fayette and a thousand men—Lee scorning such a minor command—had grown more elaborate, as such things always did if you gave commanders time to think about them. Once Washington had decided that the expeditionary force should be five thousand men, Lee had graciously condescended to this more appropriate command—leaving La Fayette in charge of his own smaller force, for the sake of the marquis’s amour-propre, but with Lee in command overall. Jamie had his doubts, but it wasn’t his place to voice them.

He glanced to his left, where Ian and his dog were ambling along, the former whistling to himself and the latter a huge, shaggy shape in the dark, panting from the heat.

“Iain,” he said casually in Gàidhlig, “did your friends with the feathers have aught to say about Ounewaterika?”

“They had, Uncle,” Ian replied in the same language. “Not much, though, for they know him only by repute. He’s a most ferocious fighter, or so it’s said.”

“Mmphm.” The Mohawk were certainly ferocious and did set great store by personal courage—but he thought they had a negligible grasp of strategy, tactics, and judgment. He was about to ask about Joseph Brant, who was likely the closest thing to a general—in the formal sense—among the Mohawk, but was interrupted by a tall, gangling form stepping out in front of him.

“I beg your pardon, sir. Might I have a word?” the man said, and, looking right and left at Jamie’s companions, added, “A private word.”

“Certainly, Captain . . . Woodsworth,” he replied, hoping his hesitation in finding the man’s name was small enough to pass unnoticed. He’d memorized all the militia captains as he met them—and as many men as he could—but their names wouldn’t come easy to him for a bit yet.

After a moment’s further hesitation, he nodded to Ian to go on with Captain Whewell to the next fire.

“Tell them what’s afoot, Captain,” he said, for the next fire was one of Whewell’s assigned companies, “but wait for me there, aye?”

“What’s afoot?” Woodsworth repeated, sounding alarmed. “What’s happening? Are we to go now?”

“Not yet, Captain. Come aside, aye? Else we’ll be trampled.” For they were standing in the path that led from the fires to a set of hastily dug latrine trenches; he could smell the acrid tang of ordure and quicklime from here.

Leading Woodsworth aside, he acquainted him with the change of commander for the morning, but assured him that this would make no real difference to the militia companies under Jamie’s command; they would receive their orders in the normal way.

He thought privately that it wouldn’t make a difference in how the companies operated—it might well make a difference as to whether they met battle on the morrow or not, and whether they survived if they did—but there was no telling whether the better odds lay with La Fayette or Lee. Chances were that sheer accident, Fate, or, just possibly, God, would decide.

“Now, sir,” he said. “Ye wished to speak wi’ me?”

“Oh.” Woodsworth inhaled through his nose and straightened himself, hastily retrieving the words of whatever speech he’d composed. “Yes, sir. I wished to inquire after the—er—the disposition made of Bertram Armstrong.”

“Bertram . . . what?”

“The man you took from my—er, from the lines earlier today, with the little boy.”

Jamie didn’t know whether to laugh or be annoyed. Bertram?

“The man is well enough disposed for the present, sir. My wife’s seen to his eye, and he’s been fed.”

“Oh.” Woodsworth shuffled his feet, but stood his ground. “I’m glad of that, sir. But what I meant—I am concerned for him. There is talk about him.”

“I’m sure there is,” Jamie said, not bothering to hide the edge in his voice. “And what is your concern, sir?”

“They are saying—the men from Dunning’s company—that Armstrong is a government spy, that he is a British officer who concealed himself among us. That they found a commission upon him, and correspondence. I—” He paused and gulped breath, the next words coming out in a rush. “I cannot believe it of him, sir, nor can any of us. We feel that some mistake must have been made, and we—we wish to say that we hope nothing . . . hasty will be done.”

“No one has suggested anything of the sort, Captain,” Jamie assured him, alarm running down his spine like quicksilver. Only because they haven’t had time. He’d been able to ignore the thorny problem Grey presented as a prisoner, in the fierce rush of preparation and the fiercer rush of his own feelings, but he couldn’t ignore it much longer. He should have notified La Fayette, Lee, and Washington of Grey’s presence immediately, but had gambled on the confusion of imminent battle to disguise his delay.

His eyes had grown used to the scattered light of stars and fire; he could see Woodsworth’s long face, apologetic but determined.

“Yes. I hesitate to speak so frankly, sir, but the sorry fact is that when men’s passions run high, regrettable actions—irretrievable actions—may be taken.” Woodsworth swallowed audibly. “I should not like to see that.”

“Ye think someone might see fit to take such action? Now?” He glanced round at the encircling fires. He could see bodies moving, restless as the flames, dark shadows in the woods—but he caught no sense of riot, no pulse of anger. A murmur of talk, to be sure, voices raised in excitement, bursts of laughter and even singing, but it was the nervous spirit of anticipation, expectation, not the sullen rumble of a mob.

“I am a clergyman, sir.” Woodsworth’s voice was stronger now, urgent. “I know how men may turn to evil conversation and how quickly such conversation may turn to action. One drink too many, a careless word . . .”

“Aye, ye’re right about that,” Jamie said. He cursed himself for not having thought of this possibility; he’d let his own feelings cloud his mind. Of course, he’d had no idea when he left Grey that he’d been carrying a commission—but that was no excuse. “I’ve sent word to General Lee about . . . Mr. Armstrong. Should ye hear any more talk about the man, ye might let it be known that the matter is in official hands. That might prevent anything . . . regrettably informal happening.”

Woodsworth’s sigh of relief was palpable.

“Yes, sir,” he said, with gratitude. “I shall certainly let that be known.” He stepped aside, bobbing his head, but then stopped, struck by a thought. “Oh.”

“Aye?” Jamie spoke impatiently; he felt assailed from all sides by swarms of tiny, stinging troubles, and was inclined to swat this one.

“I trust you will forgive my persistence, General. But I just thought—the boy who was with Armstrong. Bobby Higgins, he’s called.”

All Jamie’s senses were instantly alert.

“What about him?”

“He—I mean Armstrong—the boy said he was in search of his grandfather, and Armstrong said he knew the man—and that his name was James Fraser. . . .”

Jamie shut his eyes. If no one lynched John Grey before dawn, he might throttle the man himself.

“The boy is indeed my grandson, Captain,” he said, as evenly as he could, opening his eyes. Which means, aye, I ken bloody Bert Armstrong. And if that small bit of information became generally known, there were going to be a lot of very awkward questions asked, by people in a position to demand answers. “My wife is caring for him.”

“Oh. Good. I just wished to—”

“To make known your concern. Aye, Captain. I thank ye. Good night.”

Woodsworth bowed and stepped back, murmuring, “Good night,” in his turn, and disappeared into a night that was far from good and getting worse by the moment.

Jamie jerked his coat straight and strode on. Three hundred men to inform and command, to rouse, lead, and control. Three hundred lives in his hands.

Three hundred and bloody one.

65 MOSQUITOES

JAMIE WALKED INTO the light of the fire quite late, smiled at me, and sat down suddenly.

“Is there food?” he asked.

“There is, sir,” said the woman who was stirring it. “And you’ll have some, too, ma’am,” she added firmly, giving me a look that strongly suggested that I was not looking my very best. I wasn’t disposed to care, but accepted with thanks a wooden bowl of something hot and a chunk of bread to eat it with.

I barely noticed what I ate, though I was ravenous. The day had been so filled with activity that I hadn’t had time to eat—would not have eaten at all, in fact, had I not brought food for John, at which point he insisted that I sit down for ten minutes and eat with him. Percy Beauchamp had not come back; that was something on the plus side of the ledger, I supposed.

There had been a couple of dozen men from Jamie’s companies that I rejected by reason of disfirmity—crippled, asthmatic, collapsed with age—and perhaps three dozen more who were essentially sound but sporting some injury requiring attention, these mostly the result of fistfights or falling down while under the influence of drink. Several of them were still under the influence of drink and had been sent off under guard to sleep it off.

I did wonder for a moment how many men normally went into battle drunk. In all honesty, I’d be strongly tempted to do it myself, were I required to do what these men were about to do.

There was still a tremendous bustle, but the earlier sense of exhilaration had transmuted into something more concentrated, more focused and sober. Preparations were being made in earnest.

I’d finished my own, or hoped I had. A small tent for shelter from the blazing sun, packs of medical supplies, surgical kits, each equipped with a jar of wet sutures, a wad of lint for mopping up blood, and a bottle of dilute alcohol—I’d run out of salt and couldn’t summon the will to badger or beg more from the commissary officer; I’d try to do it in the morning. And the emergency kit that I carried over my shoulder, no matter what.

I sat close to the fire, but despite that and in spite of the warmth of the night itself, I began to feel chilled and heavy, as though I were slowly ossifying, and only then realized how tired I was. The camp hadn’t gone to sleep entirely—there was still talk around the fires, and the occasional rasp of a scythe or a sword being sharpened, but the volume had dropped. The atmosphere had settled with the sinking of the moon, even those souls most excited at the prospect of imminent battle succumbing to sleep.

“Come and lie down,” I said softly to Jamie, and rose from my seat with a muffled groan. “It won’t be for long, but you need some rest—and so do I.”

“Aye, all right, but I canna be under canvas,” he said, low-voiced, following me. “I feel half smothered; couldna breathe in a tent.”

“Well, plenty of room outside,” I said, nobly suppressing a twinge at the thought of sleeping on the ground. Fetching a couple of blankets, I followed him, yawning, a little way along the riverbank, until we found a private spot behind the scrim of willows that dragged their leaves in the water.

In fact, it was surprisingly comfortable; there was a thick growth of springy grass on which to spread the blankets, and, so close to the water, the air was at least moving, cool on my skin. I shucked out of my petticoats and took my stays completely off, with a blissful shiver of relief as the coolness stirred gently through my damp shift.

Jamie had stripped to his shirt and was rubbing his face and legs with mosquito ointment, the presence of hordes of these insects accounting for the lack of company near the water. I sat down beside him and helped myself to a small scoop of the mint-smelling grease. Mosquitoes seldom bit me, but that didn’t stop them whining past my ears and poking inquisitively into my mouth and nostrils, which I found disconcerting in the extreme.

I lay back, watching as he finished his more thorough anointing. I could feel the distant approach of morning, but longed all the more for whatever brief oblivion I could get before the sun rose and all hell broke loose.

Jamie closed the tin and stretched out beside me with a low groan, black leaf shadows trembling over the paleness of his shirt. I rolled toward him just as he rolled toward me, and we met with a blind and groping kiss, smiling against each other’s mouth, wriggling and squirming to find a good way of lying together. Warm as it was, I wanted to be touching him.

He wanted to be touching me, too.

“Really?” I said, astonished. “How can you possibly—you’ve been up for hours!”

“No, only the last minute or two,” he assured me. “I’m sorry, Sassenach. I ken ye’re tired and I wouldna ask—but I’m desperate.” He let go of my bottom long enough to pull up his shirt, and I rather resignedly started disentangling my shift from my legs.

“I dinna mind if ye fall asleep while I’m about my business,” he said in my ear, feeling his way one-handed. “I willna take long about it. I just—”

“The mosquitoes will bite your arse,” I said, wiggling my own arse into a better position and opening my legs. “Hadn’t I best put some—oh!”

“Oh?” he said, sounding pleased. “Well, it’s all right if ye want to stay awake, of course . . .”

I pinched his buttock, hard, and he gave a small yelp, laughed, and licked my ear. The fit was a bit dry, and he fumbled for the tin of mosquito ointment.

“Are you sure—” I began dubiously. “Oh!” He was already applying the half-liquid ointment, with more enthusiasm than dexterity, but the fact of his enthusiasm was more arousing than skill might have been. Having a small amount of oil of peppermint vigorously applied to one’s private parts was a rather novel sensation, too.

“Make that noise again,” he said, breathing heavily in my ear. “I like it.”

He was right; it didn’t take long. He lay half on and half off me, panting, his heart beating slow and hard against my breast. I had my legs wrapped round him—I could feel the flutter of tiny insects on my ankles and bare feet as they swarmed, avid for his unprotected bare flesh—and didn’t mean to let him go. I squeezed him close, rocking gently, slippery and tingling and . . . I didn’t take long, either. My quivering legs relaxed, releasing him.

“Shall I tell you something?” I said, after a bit of mint-scented heavy breathing. “The mosquitoes won’t bite your cock.”

“I dinna mind if they carry me off to their lair to feed to their bairns,” he murmured. “Come here, Sassenach.”

I pushed damp hair out of my face and settled contentedly in the hollow of his shoulder, his arm around me. By now, I had reached that sense of accommodation with the humid atmosphere in which I stopped trying to keep track of my own body’s boundaries and simply melted into sleep.

I slept without dreaming and without moving, until a touch of cramp in my left foot roused me enough to shift a little. Jamie raised his arm a bit, then replaced it as I settled again, and I became aware that he wasn’t asleep.

“You . . . all right?” I murmured, thick-tongued with drowsiness.

“Aye, fine,” he whispered, and his hand smoothed the hair from my cheek. “Go back to sleep, Sassenach. I’ll wake ye when it’s time.”

My mouth was sticky, and it took a moment to locate any words.

“You need to sleep, too.”

“No,” he said, soft but definite. “No, I dinna mean to sleep. So close to the battle . . . I have dreams. I’ve had them the last three nights, and they get worse.”

My own arm was lying across his midsection; at this, I reached up involuntarily, putting my hand over his heart. I knew he’d dreamed—and I had a very good idea what he’d dreamed about, from the things he’d said in his sleep. And the way he’d wakened, trembling. “They get worse.”

“Shh,” he said, and bent his head to kiss my hair. “Dinna fash, a nighean. I want only to lie here wi’ you in my arms, to keep ye safe and watch ye sleep. I can rise then with a clear mind . . . and go to do what must be done.”

66 WAR PAINT

“NESSUN DORMA.” None shall sleep. It was a song—an aria, Brianna had called it—from an opera she knew; she’d played a part in it at her university, dressed up in Chinese robes. Ian smiled at thought of his cousin, taller than most men, striding up and down on a stage, swishing her silk robes about her; he wished he’d seen that.

He’d thought of her from the moment he’d opened the little deerskin bag that held his paints. She was a painter, Bree, and a good one. She ground her own pigments, and she’d made his red ochre for him, and the black and white from charcoal and dried clay—and made for him, too, a deep green from ground malachite, and a brilliant yellow from the gall of the buffalo she and her mother had killed; no other man had such deep colors to his paint, and he wished for a moment that Eats Turtles and some of his other Mohawk clan brothers could be with him to admire them.

The noise of the distant camp was like the singing of cicadas in the trees near a river: a buzz too loud to think through, but one that went away as you got used to it. None shall sleep . . . The women and children, they might sleep—but the whores surely didn’t. Not tonight.

He felt a twitch at the thought, but dismissed it. Thought of Rachel, and dismissed her, too, but reluctantly.

He opened the willow-bark box of deer fat and anointed his face and chest and shoulders with it, slowly, focusing his mind. Normally he’d speak to the spirits of the earth as he did this, and then to his own particular saints, Michael and Bride. But he wasn’t seeing Michael or Bride; Brianna was still faintly with him, but what he was feeling was a strong sense of his da, which was disconcerting.

It didn’t seem respectful to be dismissing his own father. He stopped what he was doing and closed his eyes instead, waiting to see if maybe Da had a thing to tell him.

“I hope ye’re no bringing me word of my death, aye?” he said aloud. “Because I dinna mean to die until I’ve lain wi’ Rachel, at least.”

“Well, there’s a noble goal, to be sure.” The dry voice was Uncle Jamie’s, and Ian’s eyes popped open. His uncle was standing among the trailing fronds of a river willow, dressed in nothing but his shirt.

“Out of uniform, are ye not, Uncle?” he said, though his heart had leapt in his chest like a startled deer mouse. “General Washington willna be pleased.” Washington was a great stickler for proper uniform. Officers must be dressed suitably at all times; he said the Continentals couldn’t be taken seriously as an army, did they come to the field looking and acting like a rabble in arms.

“I’m sorry to interrupt ye, Ian,” Uncle Jamie said, stepping out from the willow. The moon was nearly down; he was nay more than a ghost, bare-legged in his floating sark. “Who were ye speaking to, though?”

“Oh. My da. He was just . . . there in my mind, ken? I mean, I think of him often, but it’s not sae often I feel him with me. So I wondered had he come to tell me I’d die this day.”

Jamie nodded, not seeming bothered at the thought.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Ye’re putting on your paint, aye? Getting ready, I mean.”

“Aye, I was about to. Ye want some, too?” It was only half said in jest, and Jamie took it that way.

“I would, Ian. But I think General Washington might have me strung up by the thumbs and flogged, should I come before him wi’ my troops all marshaled and me wi’ war paint on.”

Ian made a small sound of amusement and scooped two fingers into the dish of red ochre, which he began to rub on his chest.

“And what are ye doin’ out here in your sark, then?”

“Washing,” Jamie said, but in a tone indicating that that wasn’t all of it. “And . . . talkin’ to my ain dead.”

“Mmphm. Anyone in particular?”

“My uncle Dougal, and Murtagh, him who was my godfather. They’re the two I’d most want with me, in battle.” Jamie made a small restless movement. “If I can, I make a wee moment to be alone before a fight. To wash, ken, and pray a bit, and then . . . to just ask if they’ll bide with me as I go.”

Ian thought this interesting; he hadn’t known either man himself—they’d both died at Culloden—but he’d heard stories.

“Bonnie fighters,” he said. “Did ye ask my da, too? To go with ye, I mean. Perhaps that’s why he’s about.”

Jamie turned his head sharply toward Ian, surprised. Then relaxed, shaking his head.

“I never had to ask Ian Mòr,” he said softly. “He was always . . . just with me.” He gestured briefly to the darkness on his right.

Ian’s eyes stung and his throat closed. But it was dark; it didn’t matter.

He cleared his throat and held out one of the tiny dishes. “Will ye help me, Uncle Jamie?”

“Oh? Aye, surely. How d’ye want it?”

“Red across my forehead—I can do that bit. But black from the wee dots to the chin.” He drew a finger across the line of tattooed dots that curved under his cheekbones. “Black’s for strength, aye? It declares ye’re a warrior. And yellow means ye’re no afraid to die.”

“Och, aye. Are ye wantin’ the yellow today?”

“No.” He let the smile show in his voice, and Jamie laughed.

“Mmphm.” Jamie dabbed with the rabbit-foot brush, then spread the color evenly with his thumb. Ian closed his eyes, feeling strength come into him with the touch.

“Do ye usually do this alone, Ian? Seems hard, save ye’ve a looking glass.”

“Mostly. Or sometimes we’d do it together, and a clan brother would paint ye. If it’s an important thing—a big raid, say, or going to make war on someone—then the medicine man would paint us, and sing.”

“Tell me ye dinna want me to sing, Ian,” his uncle murmured. “I mean, I’d try, but . . .”

“I’ll do without, thanks.”

Black for the lower face, red on the forehead, and a band of the malachite green following the line of his tattoos, from ear to ear, across the bridge of his nose.

Ian peered at the small dishes of pigment; it was easy to spot the white, and he pointed to it.

“Can ye maybe draw a wee arrow, Uncle? Across my forehead.” He drew a finger from left to right, showing where.

“I can, aye.” Jamie’s head was bent over the paint dishes, hand hovering. “Did ye not tell me once the white is for peace, though?”

“Aye, should ye be going to parley or trade, ye use a good deal of white. But it’s for the mourning, too—so if ye go to avenge someone, ye’d maybe wear white.”

Jamie’s head came up at that, staring at him.

“This one’s no for vengeance,” Ian said. “It’s for Flying Arrow. The dead man whose place I took, when I was adopted.” He spoke as casually as he could, but he felt his uncle tighten and look down. Neither one of them was ever going to forget that day of parting, when he’d gone to the Kahnyen’kehaka, and both of them had thought it was forever. He leaned over and put a hand on Jamie’s arm.

“That day, ye said to me, ‘Cuimhnich,’ Uncle Jamie. And I did.” Remember.

“So did I, Ian,” Jamie said softly, and drew the arrow on his forehead, his touch like a priest’s on Ash Wednesday, marking Ian with the sign of the cross. “So did we all. Is that it?”

Ian touched the green stripe gingerly, to be sure it was dry enough.

“Aye, I think so. Ken Brianna made me the paints? I was thinking of her, but then I thought I maybe shouldna take her with me that way.”

He felt Jamie’s breath on his skin as his uncle gave a small snort and then sat back.

“Ye always carry your women wi’ ye into battle, Ian Òg. They’re the root of your strength, man.”

“Oh, aye?” That made sense—and was a relief to him. Still . . . “I was thinkin’ it maybe wasna right to think of Rachel in such a place, though. Her being Quaker and all.”

Jamie dipped his middle finger into the deer fat, then delicately into the white clay powder, and drew a wide, swooping “V” near the crest of Ian’s right shoulder. Even in the dark, it showed vividly.

“White dove,” he said with a nod. He sounded pleased. “There’s Rachel for ye.”

He wiped his fingers on the rock, then rose and stretched. Ian saw him turn to look toward the east. It was still night, but the air had changed, just in the few minutes they’d sat. His uncle’s tall figure was distinct against the sky, where a little before he’d seemed part of the night.

“An hour, nay more,” Jamie said. “Eat first, aye?” And, with that, turned and walked away to the stream and his own interrupted prayers.

67 REACHING FOR THINGS THAT AREN’T THERE

WILLIAM WISHED he could stop reaching for things that weren’t there. A dozen times today—oftener!—he’d reached for the dagger that should have been on his belt. Once or twice, for one of his pistols. Slapped an impotent hand against his hip, missing his sword, missing the small, solid weight of his shot pouch, the swing of his cartridge box.

And now he lay sweating naked on his cot, hand slapped flat on his chest where he’d reached without thinking for the wooden rosary. The rosary that, if he’d had it, would no longer be the comfort it had been for so many years. The rosary that, if he’d had it, no longer said “Mac” to him. If he did still have it, he’d have snatched it off and thrown it into the nearest fire. That’s likely what James Fraser had done with it after William had thrown the rosary in the bastard’s face. But, then, Fraser wasn’t the bastard here, was he?

He muttered “Scheisse!” and flung himself irritably over. Three feet away, Evans stirred and farted in his sleep, a sudden, muffled sound like distant cannon. On his other side, Merbling went on snoring.

Tomorrow. He’d gone to bed late after an exhausting day and would be up in an hour, maybe, but he lay wide awake, eyes so adapted to the dark that he could see the pale blur of the tent canvas overhead. No chance of sleep, he knew. Even if he’d see no action himself—and he wouldn’t—the proximity of battle had him so keyed up that he could have leapt from bed and gone straight for the enemy right now, sword in hand.

There’d be a battle. Maybe not a big one, but the Rebels were yapping at their heels, and tomorrow—today—there would be a meeting. It might put paid to Washington’s ambitions, though Sir Henry was firm that this was not his goal. He meant to get his army and the people under its protection to New York; that was all that mattered—though if his officers should choose to demonstrate their military superiority while doing so, he had no great objection.

William had stood at attention behind Sir Henry’s chair at dinner, his back against the tent wall, listening attentively while the plans were drawn up. Had in fact had the honor of carrying the formal written orders to von Knyphausen, whose troops were to march to Middletown, while Clinton’s brigade would form up at the rear, to engage the Rebels while my lord Cornwallis’s escorted the baggage train on to safety. That’s why he’d been so late getting to bed.

He yawned suddenly, surprising himself, and settled back, blinking. Maybe he could sleep a bit, after all. Thinking of dinner and orders and such mundanities as the color of von Knyphausen’s nightshirt—it was pink silk, with purple pansies embroidered round the neck—rather than the oncoming battle had calmed his mind amazingly. Distraction. That’s what he needed.

Worth a try, he supposed. . . . He squirmed into the most comfortable attitude he could manage, closed his eyes, and began mentally extracting the square roots of numbers greater than one hundred.

He’d got to the square root of 117 and was muzzily groping for the product of 12 and 6 when he felt the sudden stir of air on his damp skin. He sighed and opened his eyes, thinking that Merbling had got up for a piss, but it wasn’t Merbling. A dark figure stood just inside the tent flap. The flap wasn’t closed, and the figure was clearly visible against the faint glow from the banked campfires outside. A girl.

He sat up fast, groping one-handed for the shirt he’d tossed to the foot of his cot.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he whispered, as softly as he could.

She’d been hovering, uncertain. But hearing him speak, she came straight for him, and next thing he knew, her hands were on his shoulders, her hair brushing his face. He put up his own hands in reflex and found that she was in her shift, her breasts free and warm under it, a few inches from his face.

She pulled back, and in what seemed like the same motion, skimmed the shift off over her head, shook out her hair, and straddled him, her moist round thighs pressing his.

“Get off!” He grabbed her by the arms, pushing her away. Merbling stopped snoring. Evans’s bedclothes rustled.

William stood up, snatched up her shift and his shirt, and, taking her by the arm, marched her out of the tent, as quietly as he could.

“What the devil do you think you’re doing? Here, put that on!” He thrust the shift unceremoniously into her arms and hastily pulled his shirt on. They were not in full view of anyone, but might be at any moment.

Her head emerged from the shift like a flower popping out of a snowbank. A rather angry flower.

“Well, what do you think I was doing?” she said. She pulled her hair free of the shift and fluffed it violently. “I was trying to do you a kindness!”

“A—what?”

“You’re going to fight tomorrow, aren’t you?” There was enough light to see the shine of her eyes as she glared at him. “Soldiers always want to fuck before a fight! They need it.”

He rubbed a hand hard over his face, palm rasping on his sprouting whiskers, then took a deep breath.

“I see. Yes. Very kind of you.” He suddenly wanted to laugh. He also—very suddenly—wanted to take advantage of her offer. But not enough to do it with Merbling on one side and Evans on the other, ears flapping.

“I’m not going to fight tomorrow,” he said, and the pang it caused him to say that out loud startled him.

“You’re not? Why not?” She sounded startled, too, and more than a little disapproving.

“It’s a long story,” he said, struggling for patience. “And it’s not your business. Now, look. I appreciate the thought, but I told you: you’re not a whore, at least not for the time being. And you’re not my whore.” Though his imagination was busy with images of what might have happened had she stolen into his cot and taken hold of him before he was fully awake . . . He put the thought firmly aside and, taking her by the shoulders, turned her round.

“Go back to your own bed now,” he said, but couldn’t stop himself from patting her very nice arse in farewell. She turned her head and glared at him over her shoulder.

“Coward!” she said. “A man that won’t fuck won’t fight.”

“What?” For an instant, he didn’t think she’d really said it, but she had.

“You heard me. Good—fucking—night!”

He reached her in two strides, seized her shoulder, and whirled her round to face him.

“And who gave you that bit of wisdom, may I ask? Your good friend Captain Harkness?” He wasn’t truly angry, but the shock of her unexpected arrival was still reverberating in his blood and he was annoyed. “Did I save you from buggery so you could throw my circumstances in my face?”

Her chin drew back, and she breathed hard, but not in apparent distress.

“What circumstances?” she demanded.

“I told you—bloody hell. Do you know what the Convention army is?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s the long story, and I’m not telling you it standing in my shirt in the middle of camp. Now, bugger off and take care of your sister and the lads. That’s your job; I’ll take care of myself.”

She exhaled sharply, with a puh! sound.

“Doubtless you will,” she said, with the maximum of sarcasm and a pointed glance at his cock, which was poking absurdly at his shirt, making its own urgent preferences known.

“Scheisse,” he said again, briefly, then grabbed her in a bear hug that pressed her body against his all the way down and kissed her. She struggled, but after the first moment he realized that the struggle was not meant to procure her release but to provoke him further. He tightened his grip until she stopped, but didn’t quit kissing her for some time thereafter.

He finally let go, panting and bedewed with perspiration; the air was like breathing hot tar. She was panting, too. He could take her. Wanted to. Push her down on her knees in the grass beside the tent, pull up her shift, and have her from behind—it wouldn’t take more than seconds.

“No,” he said, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “No,” he said again, more positively. Every nerve in his body wanted her, and had he been sixteen, it would have been long over by this time. But he wasn’t, and he had just enough self-control to turn her round again. He gripped her by scruff and buttock to keep her from turning back and held her immobile.

“When we get to New York,” he whispered, bending to speak in her ear, “I’ll think again.”

She stiffened, her buttock rounding hard in his hand, but didn’t pull away or try to bite him, which he’d half-expected.

“Why?” she said, in a calm voice.

“That’s a long story, too,” he said. “Good night, Jane.” And, releasing her, stalked away into the dark. Nearby, the drums of reveille began.