Duncan clutched her arm, features contorted in the urge to shush her.
“Aye, all of it,” he said, looking round yet again. “For God’s sake, lass, keep your voice down!”
“When did it go? Or rather,” she amended, “when you did find it gone?”
“Last night.” He looked round yet again, and jerked his chin toward his office. “Come in, lass; I’ll tell ye about it.”
Duncan’s agitation subsided a little as he told her the story; by the time he had finished, he had regained a certain amount of outward calm.
The seven thousand pounds was what was left of the original ten thousand, which in turn was one-third of the thirty thousand sent—too late, but sent nonetheless—from Louis of France in support of Charles Stuart’s doomed attempt on the thrones of England and Scotland.
“Hector was careful, aye?” Duncan explained. “He lived as a rich man, but always within such means as a place like this”—he waved his one hand around, indicating the grounds and messuages of River Run—“might provide. He spent a thousand pound acquiring the land and building the house, then over the years, another thousand in slaves, cattle, and the like. And a thousand pound he put to the bankers—Jo said he couldna bear the thought of all that money sitting, earning nay interest”—he gave her a small, wry smile—“though he was too clever to attract attention by putting it all out. I suppose he meant, maybe, to invest the rest, a bit at a time—but he died before that was done.”
Leaving Jocasta as a very wealthy widow—but even more cautious than her husband had been about attracting undue attention. And so the gold had sat, safe in its hiding place, save for the one ingot being gradually whittled away and disposed of by Ulysses. Which had disappeared, she remembered with a qualm. Someone knew there was gold here.
Perhaps whoever had taken that ingot had guessed that there was more—and hunted, quietly, patiently, until they found it.
But now—
“Ye’ll have heard about General MacDonald?”
She’d heard the name frequently of late, in conversation—he was a Scottish general, more or less retired, she’d assumed—who had been staying here and there, the guest of various prominent families. She hadn’t heard of his purpose, though.
“He means to raise men—three thousand, four—among the Highlanders, to march to the coast. The Governor’s sent for aid; troopships are coming. So the General’s men will come down through the Cape Fear valley”—he made a graceful swooping gesture with his hand—“meet the Governor and his troops—and pincer the rebel militias that are a-building.”
“And you meant to give him the gold—or no,” she corrected herself. “You meant to give him arms and powder.”
He nodded and chewed his mustaches, looking unhappy.
“A man named Dunkling; Alexander knows him. Lord Dunsmore is gathering a great store of powder and arms in Virginia, and Dunkling is one of his lieutenants—and willing to give up some of that store, in return for gold.”
“Which is now gone.” She took a deep breath, feeling sweat trickle down between her br**sts, further dampening her shift.
“Which is now gone,” he agreed bleakly. “And I’m left to wonder what about this ghost of wee Jem’s, aye?”
Ghost, indeed. For someone to have entered a place like River Run, teeming with people, and to have moved several hundred pounds by weight of gold, completely unnoticed . . .
The sound of feet on the stairs caused Duncan to jerk his head sharply toward the door, but it was only Josh, one of the black grooms, his hat in his hand.
“Best we be going, Miss Bree,” he said, bowing respectfully. “If ye be wanting the light, like?”
For her drawings, he meant. It was a good hour’s trip into Cross Creek to lawyer Forbes’s house, and the sun was rising fast toward noon.
She glanced at her green-smeared fingers, and recalled the hair straggling untidily down from its makeshift bun; she’d have to tidy herself a bit first.
“Go, lass.” Duncan waved her toward the door, his lean face still creased with worry but lightened a little by having shared it.
She kissed him affectionately on the forehead and went down after Josh. She was worried, and not only about missing gold and prowling ghosts. General MacDonald, indeed. For if he meant to raise fighting men among the Highlanders, one of the natural places for him to go was to her father.
As Roger had noted to her sometime earlier, “Jamie can walk the tightrope between Whigs and Tories better than any man I know—but when push comes to shove . . . he’ll have to jump.”
The push had come at Mecklenberg. But shove, she thought, was named MacDonald.
100
A TRIP TO THE SEASIDE
NEIL FORBES, thinking it prudent to be absent from his usual haunts for a time, had removed to Edenton, with the excuse of taking his aged mother to visit her even more aged sister. He had enjoyed the long journey, in spite of his mother’s complaints about the clouds of dust raised by another carriage that preceded them.
He had been loath to sacrifice his sight of that carriage—a small, well-sprung affair, whose windows were sealed and heavily curtained. But he had always been a devoted son, and at the next post stop, he went to speak to the driver. The other coach obligingly dropped back, following them at a convenient distance.
“Whatever are ye lookin’ at, Neil?” his mother demanded, looking up from fastening her favorite garnet brooch. “That’s the third time ye’ve had a peek out thon window.”
“Not a thing, Mam,” he said, inhaling deeply. “Only taking pleasure in the day. Such beautiful weather, is it not?”
Mrs. Forbes sniffed, but obligingly settled her spectacles on her nose and leaned to peer out.
“Aye, weel, it’s fair enough,” she admitted dubiously. “Hot, though, and damp enough to wring buckets from your shirt.”
“Never mind, a leannan,” he said, patting her black-clad shoulder. “We’ll be in Edenton afore ye know. It’ll be cooler there. Nothing like a sea-breeze, so they say, to put the roses in your cheeks!”
101
NIGHTWATCH
Edenton
THE REVEREND MCMILLAN’S HOUSE was on the water. A blessing in the hot, muggy weather. The offshore breeze in the evening swept everything away—heat, hearth smoke, mosquitoes. The men sat on the big porch after supper, smoking their pipes and enjoying the respite.
Roger’s enjoyment was spiced by the guilty awareness that Mrs. Reverend McMillan and her three daughters were sweating to and fro, washing dishes, clearing away, sweeping floors, boiling up the leftover ham bones from supper with lentils for tomorrow’s soup, putting children to bed, and generally slaving away in the stuffy, sweltering confines of the house. At home, he would have felt obliged to help with such work, or face Brianna’s wrath; here, such an offer would have been received with drop-jawed incredulity, followed by deep suspicion. Instead, he sat peacefully in the cool evening breeze, watching fishing boats come in across the water of the sound and sipping something that passed for coffee, engaged in pleasant male conversation.
There was, he thought, occasionally something to be said for the eighteenth-century model of sexual roles.
They were talking over the news from the south: the flight of Governor Martin from New Bern, the burning of Fort Johnston. The political climate of Edenton was strongly Whiggish, and the company was largely clerical—the Reverend Doctor McCorkle, his secretary Warren Lee, the Reverend Jay McMillan, Reverend Patrick Dugan, and four “inquirers” awaiting ordination besides Roger—but there were still currents of political disagreement flowing beneath the outwardly cordial surface of the conversation.
Roger himself said little; he didn’t wish to offend McMillan’s hospitality by contributing to any argument—and something inside him wished for quiet, to contemplate tomorrow.
Then the conversation took a new turn, though, and he found himself paying rapt attention. The Continental Congress had met in Philadelphia two months before, and given General Washington command of the Continental army. Warren Lee had been in Philadelphia at the time, and was giving the company a vivid account of the battle at Breed’s Hill, at which he had been present.
“General Putnam, he brought up wagonloads of dirt and brush, to the neck of the Charlestown peninsula—you said you knew it, sir?” he asked, courteously turning toward Roger. “Well, Colonel Prescott, he’s there already, with two militia comp’nies from Massachusetts, and parts of another from Connecticut—was mebbe a thousand men in all, and dear Lord, was they a stench from the camps!”
His soft Southern accent—Lee was a Virginian—held a slight touch of amusement, but this faded as he went on.
“General Ward, he’d give orders to fortify this one hill, Bunker Hill, they call it, for an old redoubt atop. But Colonel Prescott, he goes up it and don’t care so much for the looks, him and Mr. Gridley, the engineer. So they leave a detachment there, and go on to Breed’s Hill, what they think is maybe better to the purpose, bein’ closer to the harbor.
“Now, this is all at night, mind. I was with one of the Massachusetts companies, and we marched right smart, then spent the whole night through, ’twixt midnight and dawn, diggin’ trenches and raising up six-foot walls about the perimeter.
“Come the dawn, and we skulked down behind our fortifications, and just in time, too, for there’s a British ship in the harbor—the Lively, they said—and she opens fire the minute the sun’s up. Looked right pretty, for the fog was still on the water and the cannon lit it up in red flashes. Did no harm, though; most all the balls fell short into the harbor—did see one whaleboat at the docks hit, though; stove it like kindling. The crew, they’d hopped out like fleas when the Lively took to firing. From where I was, I could just see ’em, hoppin’ up and down on the dock, a-shakin’ their fists—then the Lively let off another broadside, and they all fell flat or run like rabbits.”
The light was nearly gone, and Lee’s young face invisible in the shadows, but the amusement in his voice made a small rumble of laughter run among the other men.
“They was some firin’ from a little battery up on Copp’s Hill, and one or two of the other ships, they let off a pop or two, but they could see ’twan’t no earthly use and ceased. Then come in some fellows from New Hampshire to join up with us, and that was purely heartening. But General Putnam, he sends a good many men back to work on the fortifications at Bunker, and the New Hampshire folk, they’re crouched way down on the left, where they’s got no cover beyond rail fences stuffed with mown grass. Lookin’ at ’em down there, I was pleased as punch to have four feet of solid earthwork in front of me, I tell you, gentlemen.”
The British troops had set out across the Charles River, bold as brass under the midday sun, with the warships behind them and the batteries on shore all providing covering fire.
“We didn’t fire back, of course. Had no cannon,” Lee said with an audible shrug.