Mr. Crombie, very stiff to begin with, began to unbend under the influence of food, spruce beer, and the flattering attention paid him. A certain amount of the attention, Jamie thought, was due to the fact that Ian, a wide grin on his face, stayed by his pupil for a time, prompting and correcting, ’til Hiram should feel more at ease in the tongue, and able to manage on his own. Ian was extremely popular, particularly with the young women of the village.
For himself, he enjoyed the feasting very much; relieved of responsibility, there was nothing to do save to talk and listen and eat—and in the morning he would go.
It was an odd feeling, and one he was not sure he had ever had before. He had had many leavetakings, most regretful—a few taken with a sense of relief—some that wrenched the heart from his chest and left him aching. Not tonight. Everything seemed strangely ceremonious, something consciously done for the last time, and yet there was no sadness in it.
Completion, he supposed, was the sense of it. He had done what he could do, and now must leave Bird and the others to make their own way. He might come again, but never again by duty, in his role as the agent of the King.
That was a peculiar thought in itself. He had never lived without the consciousness of allegiance—whether willing or not, witting or not—to a king, whether that be German Geordie’s house or the Stuarts. And now he did.
For the first time, he had some glimmer of what his daughter and his wife had tried to tell him.
Hiram was trying to recite one of the psalms, he realized. He was doing a good job of it, because he had asked Ian to translate it, and had then carefully committed it to memory. However . . .
“Oil runs down over the head and the beard . . .”
Penstemon cast a wary glance at the small pot of melted bear grease that they were using as a condiment, and narrowed her eyes at Hiram, plainly intending to snatch the dish from him if he tried to pour it over his head.
“It’s a story of his ancestors,” Jamie said to her, with a brief shrug. “Not his own custom.”
“Oh. Hm.” She relaxed a little, though continuing to keep a close eye on Hiram. He was a guest, but not all guests could be trusted to behave well.
Hiram did nothing untoward, though, and with many protests of sufficiency, and awkward compliments toward his hosts, was persuaded to eat until his eyes bulged, which pleased them.
Ian would stay for a few days, to be sure that Hiram and Bird’s people were in some sort of mutual accord. Jamie was not quite sure that Ian’s sense of responsibility would overcome his sense of humor, though—in some ways, Ian’s sense of humor tended toward the Indians’. A word from Jamie might therefore not come amiss, just by way of precaution.
“He has a wife,” Jamie said to Bird, with a nod toward Hiram, now engaged in close discourse with two of the older men. “I think he would not welcome a young woman in his bed. He might be rude to her, not understanding the compliment.”
“Don’t worry,” said Penstemon, overhearing this. She glanced at Hiram, and her lip curled with scorn. “Nobody would want a child from him. Now, a child from you, Bear-Killer . . .” She gave him a long look beneath her lashes, and he laughed, saluting her with a gesture of respect.
It was a perfect night, cold and crisp, and the door was left open that the air might come in. The smoke from the fire rose straight and white, streaming toward the hole above, its moving wraiths like spirits ascending in joy.
Everyone had eaten and drunk to the point of a pleasant stupor, and there was momentary silence and a pervading sense of peace and happiness.
“It is good for men to eat as brothers,” Hiram observed to Standing Bear, in his halting Tsalagi. Or rather, tried to. And after all, Jamie reflected, feeling his ribs creak under the strain, it was really a very minor difference between “as brothers” and “their brothers.”
Standing Bear gave Hiram a thoughtful look, and edged slightly farther away from him.
Bird observed this, and after a moment’s silence, turned to Jamie.
“You’re a very funny man, Bear-Killer,” he repeated, shaking his head. “You win.”
To Mr. John Stuart,
Superintendent of the Southern
Department of Indian Affairs
From Fraser’s Ridge,
on the First Day of November,
Anno Domini 1774,
James Fraser, Esq.
My dear sir,
This is to notify you of my Resignation as Indian Agent, as I find that my personal Convictions will no longer allow me to perform my Office on behalf of the Crown in good Conscience.
In thanks for your kind Attention and many Favors, and wishing you well in future, I remain
Your most humble Servant,
J. Fraser
PART NINE
The Bones of Time
68
SAVAGES
ONLY TWO LEFT. The pool of liquid wax glowed with the light of the flaming wick above it, and the jewels slowly came into view, one green, one black, glowing with their own inner fire. Jamie dipped the feather end of a quill gently into the melted wax and scooped the emerald up, raising it into the light.
He dropped the hot stone into the handkerchief I held waiting, and I rubbed it quickly, to get off the wax before it should harden.
“Our reserves are getting rather low,” I said, in uneasy jest. “Let’s hope there aren’t any more expensive emergencies.”
“I shallna touch the black diamond, regardless,” he said definitely, and blew out the wick. “That one is for you.”
I stared at him.
“What do you mean by that?”
He shrugged a little, and reached to take the emerald in its handkerchief from me.
“If I should be killed,” he said very matter-of-factly. “Ye’ll take it and go. Back through the stones.”
“Oh? I don’t know that I would,” I said. I didn’t like talking about any contingency that involved Jamie’s death, but there was no point in ignoring the possibilities. Battle, disease, imprisonment, accident, assassination . . .
“You and Bree were going about forbidding me to die,” I said. “I’d do the same thing, if I had the faintest hope of your paying the least attention.”
He smiled at that.
“I always mind your words, Sassenach,” he assured me gravely. “But ye do tell me that man proposes and God disposes, and should He see fit to dispose of me—ye’ll go back.”
“Why would I?” I said, nettled—and unsettled. The memories of his sending me back through the stones on the eve of Culloden were not ones I ever wished to recall, and here he was, prying open the door to that tightly sealed chamber of my mind. “I’d stay with Bree and Roger, wouldn’t I? Jem, Marsali and Fergus, Germain and Henri-Christian and the girls—everyone’s here. What is there to go back to, after all?”
He took the stone from its cloth, turning it over between his fingers, and looked thoughtfully at me, as though making up his mind whether to tell me something. Small hairs began to prickle on the back of my neck.
“I dinna ken,” he said at last, shaking his head. “But I’ve seen ye there.”
The prickling ran straight down the back of my neck and down both arms.
“Seen me where?”
“There.” He waved a hand in a vague gesture. “I dreamt of ye there. I dinna ken where it was; I only know it was there—in your proper time.”
“How do you know that?” I demanded, my flesh creeping briskly. “What was I doing?”
His brow furrowed in the effort of recollection.
“I dinna recall, exactly,” he said slowly. “But I knew it was then, by the light.” His brow cleared suddenly. “That’s it. Ye were sitting at a desk, with something in your hand, maybe writing. And there was light all round ye, shining on your face, on your hair. But it wasna candlelight, nor yet firelight or sunlight. And I recall thinking to myself as I saw ye, Oh, so that’s what electric light is like.”
I stared at him, open-mouthed.
“How can you recognize something in a dream that you’ve never seen in real life?”
He seemed to find that funny.
“I dream of things I’ve not seen all the time, Sassenach—don’t you?”
“Well,” I said uncertainly. “Yes. Sometimes. Monsters, odd plants, I suppose. Peculiar landscapes. And certainly people that I don’t know. But surely that’s different? To see something you know about, but haven’t seen?”
“Well, what I saw may not be what electric light does look like,” he admitted, “but that’s what I said to myself when I saw it. And I was quite sure that ye were in your own time.
“And after all,” he added logically, “I dream of the past; why would I not dream of the future?”
There was no good answer to a thoroughly Celtic remark of that nature.
“Well, you would, I suppose,” I said. I rubbed dubiously at my lower lip. “How old was I, in this dream of yours?”
He looked surprised, then uncertain, and peered closely at my face, as though trying to compare it with some mental vision.
“Well . . . I dinna ken,” he said, sounding for the first time unsure. “I didna think anything about it—I didna notice that ye had white hair, or anything of the sort—it was just . . . you.” He shrugged, baffled, then looked down at the stone in my hand.
“Does it feel warm to your touch, Sassenach?” he asked curiously.
“Of course it does,” I said, rather crossly. “It’s just come out of hot wax, for heaven’s sake.” And yet the emerald did seem to pulse gently in my hand, warm as my own blood and beating like a miniature heart. And when I handed it to him, I felt a small, peculiar reluctance—as though it did not want to leave me.
“Give it to MacDonald,” I said, rubbing my palm against the side of my skirt. “I hear him outside, talking to Arch; he’ll be wanting to be off.”
MACDONALD HAD COME pelting up to the Ridge in the midst of a rainstorm the day before, weathered face nearly purple with cold, exertion, and excitement, to inform us that he had found a printing establishment for sale in New Bern.
“The owner has already left—somewhat involuntarily,” he told us, dripping and steaming by the fire. “His friends seek to sell the premises and equipment promptly, before they might be seized or destroyed, and thus provide him with funds to reestablish himself in England.”
By “somewhat involuntarily,” it turned out, he meant that the print shop’s owner was a Loyalist, who had been kidnapped off the street by the local Committee of Safety and shoved willy-nilly onto a ship departing for England. This form of impromptu deportation was becoming popular, and while it was more humane than tar and feathers, it did mean that the printer would arrive penniless in England, and owing money for his passage, to boot.
“I happened to meet wi’ some of his friends in a tavern, tearin’ their hair over his sad fate and drinking to his welfare—whereupon I told them that I might be able to put them in the way of an advantage,” the Major said, swelling with satisfaction. “They were all ears, when I said that ye might—just might, mind—have ready cash.”