“Mary,” he whispered, and his eyes flew open, shocked.
The scent of green onions and cherries, not quite ripe. A cold boiled fowl. And the warm smell of a woman’s flesh, faintly acrid with the sweat in her clothes, overlaid by the mild, fatty smell of his sister’s lye soap.
He took a deep breath, as though he might capture more of it, but the cool air of the Highlands had fled, and he inhaled a thick gulp of hot mustard, and coughed.
“Aye, all right,” he muttered ungraciously to God. “Ye’ve made your point.”
He hadn’t sought out a woman, even in his most abject loneliness, living in the cave. But when Mary MacNab had come to him on the eve of his departure for an English prison, he’d found consolation for his grief in her arms. Not as replacement for Claire, never that—but only desperately needing, and gratefully accepting, the gift of touch, of not being alone for a little while. How could he possibly find it wrong that Claire had done the same?
He sighed, wriggling to find a more comfortable position. Little Chastity emitted a faint cry, and Silvia Hardman sat up at once in a rustle of clothes, bending down to the cradle with a sleepy murmur.
For the first time, the child’s name struck him. The baby was perhaps three or four months old. How long had Gabriel Hardman been gone? More than a year, he thought, from what the little girls had said. Chastity, indeed. Was the name merely the natural companion to Prudence and Patience—or Mrs. Hardman’s private, poignant bitterness, a reproach to her missing husband?
He closed his eyes and sought a sense of coolness in the dark. He thought he had burned long enough.
OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
HE WALKED TO THE road just before dawn, declining help from Prudence and Patience, though they insisted upon coming with him, in case he should fall flat on his face, be stricken with sudden paralysis, or step into a gopher’s hole and twist an ankle. They had no great opinion of his powers but were well mannered enough to keep a distance of a foot or so on either side, their hands hovering like small white butterflies near his elbows, pale in the half dark.
“There’s not so many wagons coming in, these last few days,” Patience observed, in a tone somewhere between anxiety and hope. “Thee may not find a suitable conveyance.”
“I should be satisfied wi’ a dung cart or a wagon filled with cabbages,” he assured her, already glancing down the road. “My business is somewhat urgent.”
“We know,” Prudence reminded him. “We were under the bed when Washington appointed you.” She spoke with a certain reserve, as a Quaker opposed to the practice of war, and he smiled at her small, serious face, long-lipped and kind-eyed like her mother’s.
“Washington is nay my greatest concern,” he said. “I must see my wife, before . . . before anything else.”
“Thee has not seen her in some time?” Prudence asked, surprised. “Why?”
“I was detained upon business in Scotland,” he said, deciding not to observe that he’d seen her but two days ago. “Is that a wagon coming, d’ye think?”
It was a drover with a herd of swine, in fact, and they were obliged to scuttle back from the roadside with some haste, in order to avoid being either bitten or trampled. By the time the sun was fully up, though, regular traffic had begun to flow along the road.
Most of this was coming from Philadelphia, as the girls had told him: Loyalist families who could not afford to leave by ship, fleeing the city with what they could carry, some with wagons or handcarts, many with no more than what they could convey on their backs or in their arms. There were also British soldiers in groups and columns, presumably assisting the exodus and protecting the Loyalists from being attacked or looted, should Rebel militia suddenly come out of the wood.
That thought reminded him of John Grey—who had been mercifully absent from his mind for several hours. Jamie ruthlessly pushed him out again, muttering, “Aye, stay gone,” under his breath. But a reluctant second thought occurred to him—what if Grey had been released by the militia at once and had already made his way back to Philadelphia? On the one hand, he would see to Claire’s safety; he could trust the man for that. But on the other . . .
Aye, well. If he walked into the house and found Grey there with her, he’d just take her away with him and say nothing. Unless . . .
“Does thee still suffer from the horseradish, Friend Jamie?” Patience asked politely. “Thee snorts quite fearful. Perhaps thee had best take my hankie.”
In the woods outside Philadelphia
GREY WOKE ABRUPTLY to full daylight and a musket barrel jabbed into his belly.
“Come out of there with your hands up,” said a cold voice. He got his good eye sufficiently open as to see that his interlocutor wore a tattered Continental officer’s coat over homespun breeches and an open-collared shirt, topped by a slouch hat turned up with a turkey feather through the brim. Rebel militia. Heart in his throat, he crawled stiffly out of his refuge and rose, hands in the air.
His captor blinked at Grey’s battered face, then at the fetters, strips of muslin bandage hanging from the rusted links. He withdrew the musket slightly but didn’t lower it. Now that Grey was on his feet, he could see several other men, as well, all peering at him with extreme interest.
“Ah . . . where did you escape from?” the officer with the musket asked carefully.
There were two possible answers, and he chose the riskier option. Saying “gaol” would have likely led to them leaving him alone or, at worst, taking him with them but leaving him in irons; either way, he’d still be wearing fetters.