But there was no time to think of such things; there were calls now of “Retreat! Retreat!” and the men behind him stirred and rippled like wheat in a rising wind.
“Stay by me!” he said, in a loud, firm voice, and the ones nearest him took a grip of their weapons and stood.
William. Thought of his son sparked a flare of alarm in his bones. The arrow that had struck Ian had jolted the vision of William, sprawled and bloody in the mud, out of his head, but now . . . Christ, he couldn’t send men after the lad, not with half the army pouring back in this direction, and the British maybe on their heels. . . . A sudden ray of hope: if the British were headed this way, they’d maybe come across the lad and care for him.
He wanted badly to go himself. If William was dying . . . but he could in no circumstances leave his men, and particularly not in these circumstances. A terrible urgency seized him.
Christ, if I never speak to him—never tell him—
Now he saw Lee and his aides coming down the road. They were moving slowly, no air of haste about it, but deliberate—and looking back now and then, almost surreptitiously, glancing quickly again to the front, sitting straight in their saddles.
“Retreat!” The cry was springing up now all around them, growing stronger, and men were streaming out of the woods. “Retreat!”
“Stay by me,” Jamie said, softly enough that only Bixby and Guthrie heard him—but it was enough. They stiffened, stood by him. Their resolve would help to hold the rest. If Lee came even with him, ordered him . . . then they would have to go. But not ’til then.
“Shit!” said one of the men behind him, surprised. Jamie glanced back, saw a staring face, then whipped round to look where the man was looking. Some of Craddock’s men were coming out of the wood, looking pleased with themselves. They had Claire’s mare with them, and over her saddle was the limp body of an Indian, his long, greased scalp locks nearly dragging the ground.
“Got him, sir!” One of the men—Mortlake—saluted, grinning white-toothed from the shade of a hat that he didn’t think to remove. His face gleamed like oiled leather, and he nodded to Ian in a friendly fashion, jerking his thumb at the mare. “Horse—you?”
“It is,” Ian said, and his Scots accent made Mortlake blink. “I thank ye, sir. I think my uncle had best take the horse, though. Ye’ll need her, aye?” he added to Jamie, lifting an eyebrow toward the ranks of men behind them.
Jamie wanted to refuse; Ian looked as if he could barely walk. But the lad was right. Jamie would have to lead these men, whether forward or back—and he’d need them to be able to see him. He nodded reluctantly, and the body of the Abenaki was dragged from the saddle and tossed carelessly into the brush. He saw Ian’s eyes follow it, dark with dislike, and thought for a split second of the smoked ear his nephew carried in his sporran, and hoped that Ian wouldn’t—but, no, a Mohawk took no trophies from another’s kill.
“There were two of them, ye said, Ian?”
Ian turned from contemplation of the dead Abenaki and nodded.
“Saw t’other one,” Mortlake answered the implied question. “Ran when we shot this villain.” He coughed, glancing at the increasing streams of men coming down the road. “Beg pardon, sir, but oughtn’t we be moving, too?”
The men were fidgeting, craning their necks to see, murmuring when they spotted Lee, whose aides were spreading out, trying to marshal the swarming men into some kind of orderly retreat but being roundly ignored. Then something, some change of atmosphere, made Jamie turn, and half the men with him.
And here came Washington up the road on Jamie’s erstwhile white stallion, galloping, and a look on his big, rough face that would have melted brass.
The incipient panic in the men dissolved at once as they pressed forward, urgent to learn what was afoot. There was chaos in the road. Some companies scattered, stopping abruptly to look round for their fellows, some noticing Washington’s sudden appearance, others still coming down the road, colliding with those standing still—and, in the midst of it, Washington pulled his horse up beside Charles Lee’s and leaned toward him, flushed like an apple with heat and anger.
“What do you mean by this, sir?!” was all that Jamie heard clearly, the words carried to him by some freak of the heavy air, before noise and dust and smothering heat settled so thickly on the scene that it was impossible to hear anything over the clishmaclaver, save the disquieting echo of musket volleys and the occasional faint popping of grenadoes in the distance.
He didn’t try to shout above the noise; it wasn’t necessary. His men were going nowhere, as riveted to the spectacle before them as he was.
Lee’s long-nosed face was pinched with fury, and Jamie saw him for a brief instant as Punch, the furious puppet in a Punch-and-Judy show. An unhinged urge to laugh bubbled up, as the necessary corollary irresistibly presented itself: George Washington as Judy, the mobcapped shrew who belabored her husband with a stick. For an instant, Jamie feared he had succumbed to the heat and lost his mind.
Once envisioned, though, he couldn’t escape the thought, and for an instant he was standing in Hyde Park, watching Punch feed his baby to the sausage machine.
For that was what Washington was very clearly doing. It lasted no more than three or four minutes, and then Washington made a furious gesture of disgust and dismissal and, wheeling his horse, set off at a trot, circling back to pass the troops who had clotted along the roadside, watching in fascination.
Emerging from his own fascination with a jolt, Jamie put a foot in the mare’s stirrup and swung up.