“Ciamar a tha thu, a nighean?” he said, kissing her cheek in greeting.
“Tha mi gu math, mo athair,” she said, and she smiled, but he noted a small frown that troubled the smooth flesh of her forehead like the hatch of mayfly on a trout pond.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, taking his arm. “I wanted to talk to you before you go to the Indians tomorrow.” And there was that in her tone that drove all thought of fish from his mind upon the instant.
“Oh, aye?”
She nodded, but seemed to have some difficulty in finding words—an occurrence that alarmed him still further. But he could not help her, without some notion what it was about, and so kept pace with her, silent but encouraging. A mockingbird was busy nearby, practicing its repertoire of calls. It was the bird who lived in the red spruce behind the house; he knew because it paused now and then in the midst of its chatter and trilling to give a fine imitation of Adso the cat’s midnight yowl.
“When you talked to Roger about the Indians,” Brianna said finally, and turned her head to look at him, “did he mention something called the Trail of Tears?”
“No,” he said, curious. “What is that?”
She grimaced, hunching her shoulders in a way that seemed disconcertingly familiar.
“I thought maybe he hadn’t. He said he’d told you all he knew about the Indians and the Revolution—not that he knows all that much, it wasn’t his specialty—but this happened—will happen later, after the Revolution. So he maybe didn’t think it was important. Maybe it’s not.”
She hesitated, as though wanting him to tell her that it wasn’t. He only waited, though, and she sighed, looking at her feet as she paced along. She was wearing sandals without stockings, and her long, bare toes were grimed with the soft dust of the wagon road. The sight of her feet always filled him with an odd mixture of pride at their elegant shape and a faint sense of shame at their size—but as he was responsible for both, he supposed he had no grounds for complaint.
“About sixty years from now,” she said at last, eyes on the ground, “the American government will take the Cherokee from their land and move them. A long way—to a place called Oklahoma. It’s a thousand miles, at least, and hundreds and hundreds of them will starve and die on the way. That’s why they called it—will call it—the Trail of Tears.”
He was impressed to hear that there should be a government capable of doing such a thing, and said so. She shot him an angry glance.
“They’ll do it by cheating. They’ll talk some of the Cherokee leaders into agreeing by promising them things and not keeping their bargain.”
He shrugged.
“That’s how most governments behave,” he observed mildly. “Why are ye telling me this, lass? I will—thank God—be safely dead before any of it happens.”
He saw a flicker cross her face at mention of his death, and was sorry to have caused her distress by his levity. Before he could apologize, though, she squared her shoulders and went on.
“I’m telling you because I thought you should know,” she said. “Not all of the Cherokee went—some of them went farther up into the mountains and hid; the army didn’t find them.”
“Aye?”
She turned her head and gave him a look from those eyes that were his own, touching in their earnestness.
“Don’t you see? Mama told you what would happen—about Culloden. You couldn’t stop it, but you saved Lallybroch. And your men, your tenants. Because you knew.”
“Oh, Christ,” he said, realizing with a shock what she meant. Recollection washed through him in a flood, the terror and desperation and uncertainty of that time—the numb despair that had carried him through that last fatal day. “Ye want me to tell Bird.”
She rubbed a hand over her face, and shook her head.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if you should tell him—or if you do, whether he’ll listen. But Roger and I talked about it, after you asked him about the Indians. And I kept thinking about it . . . and, well, it just didn’t seem right, to know and not do anything. So I thought I’d better tell you.”
“Aye, I see,” he said a little bleakly.
He had noticed before the inclination of persons with tender consciences to ease their discomfort by handing the necessity of taking action on to someone else, but forbore to mention it. She could hardly be telling Bird herself, after all.
As though the situation he faced with the Cherokee were not sufficiently difficult already, he thought wryly—now he must deal with saving unknown future generations of savages? The mockingbird zoomed past his ear, unnervingly close, clucking like a hen, of all things.
It was so incongruous that he laughed. And then realized that there was nothing else to do. Not now.
Brianna was looking at him curiously.
“What are you going to do?”
He stretched himself, slowly, luxuriously, feeling the muscles of his back pull upon his bones, feeling each of them, alive and solid. The sun was coming down the sky, supper was beginning to cook, and for now, for this one last night, he need do nothing. Not yet.
“I’m going fishing,” he said, smiling at his lovely, unlikely, problematical daughter. “Fetch the wee lad, aye? I’ll get the poles.”
James Fraser, Esq. from Fraser’s Ridge
To my Lord John Grey, Mount Josiah Plantation,
this 2nd day of April, Anno Domini 1774
My lord,
I depart in the morning to visit the Cherokee, and so leave this with my wife, to be entrusted to Mr. Higgins when he shall next arrive, to be delivered with its accompanying parcel into your hands.
I presume upon your kindness and your solicitude for my family in asking your favor to help in selling the object I entrust to you. I suspect that your connexions might enable you to obtain a better price than I might do myself—and to do so discreetly.
I shall hope upon my return to confide in you the reasons for my action, as well as certain philosophical reflections which you may find of interest. In the meantime, believe me ever
Your most affectionate friend and humble servant,
J. Fraser
42
DRESS REHEARSAL
BOBBY HIGGINS looked uneasily at me over his mug of beer.
“Beg pardon, mum,” he said. “But you wouldn’t be a-thinking of practicing some type of physic upon me, would you? The worms are gone, I’m sure of it. And the—the other”—he blushed slightly and squirmed upon the bench—“that’s quite all right, too. I’ve et so many beans, I fart quite regular, and not a touch of the fiery knives about it!”
Jamie had frequently remarked upon the transparency of my features, but this was surprising perspicacity on Bobby’s part.
“I’m thrilled to hear it,” I said, evading his question momentarily. “You look quite in the pink of health, Bobby.”
He did; the hollow, wasted look had left him, and his flesh was firm and solid, his eyes bright. The blind one hadn’t gone milky, nor did it wander perceptibly; he must have some residual ability to detect light and shape, which strengthened my original diagnosis of a partially detached retina.
He nodded warily, and took a sip of beer, still keeping his eyes fixed on me.
“I’m very well indeed, mum,” he said.
“Splendid. You don’t happen to know how much you weigh, do you, Bobby?”
The look of wariness vanished, replaced by modest pride.
“Happen I do, mum. I took some fleeces to the river port for his Lordship last month, and was a mercer there what had a scale for weighing out—tobacco or rice, or blocks of indigo as it might be. Some of us fellows got to wagering for sport what this or that might weigh, and . . . well, ten stone four it is, mum.”
“Very nice,” I said with approval. “Lord John’s cook must be feeding you well.” I thought he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds when I first saw him; a hundred and forty-four was still on the light side for a man of nearly six feet, but it was a major improvement. And a real stroke of luck, that he should have known his weight exactly.
Of course, if I didn’t act fast, he might easily gain a stone or two; Mrs. Bug had set herself to outdo Lord John’s Indian cook (of whom we had heard much), and to this end was shoveling eggs, onions, venison, and a slice of leftover pork pie onto Bobby’s plate, to say nothing of the basket of fragrant muffins already in front of him.
Lizzie, seated beside me, took one of these and spread it with butter. I noted with approval that she, too, was looking healthier, delicately flushed—though I must remember to take a sample to check the malarial parasites in her blood. That would be an excellent thing to do while she was out. No way of getting an exact weight for her, unfortunately—but she couldn’t weigh more than seven stone, small and light-boned as she was.
Now, Bree and Roger at the other end of the scale . . . Roger had to weigh at least a hundred and eighty-five; Bree probably one-fifty. I took a muffin myself, thinking how best to bring up my plan. Roger would do it if I asked, of course, but Bree . . . I’d have to be careful there. She’d had her tonsils out under ether at the age of ten, and hadn’t liked the experience. If she found out what I was up to and began expressing her opinions freely, she might arouse alarm in the rest of my guinea pigs.
Enthused by my success at making ether, I had seriously underestimated the difficulty of inducing anyone to let me use it on them. Mr. Christie might well be an awkward bugger, as Jamie on occasion called him—but he was not alone in his resistance to the notion of being rendered suddenly unconscious.
I would have thought that the appeal of painlessness was universal—but not to people who had never experienced it. They had no context in which to place such a notion, and while they presumably didn’t all think ether was a Papist plot, they did view an offer to remove pain from them as being in some way contrary to the divine vision of the universe.
Bobby and Lizzie, though, were sufficiently under my sway that I was fairly sure I could coax—or bully—them into a brief trial. If they then reported the experience in a positive light . . . but improved public relations was only the half of it.
The real necessity was to try my ether out on a variety of subjects, taking careful note of the results. The scare of Henri-Christian’s birth had shown me how woefully unprepared I was. I needed to have some idea of how much to administer per unit of body weight, how long such-and-such a dose might last, and how deep the resulting stupor might be. The last thing I wanted was to be up to my elbows in someone’s abdomen, only to have them come suddenly round with a shriek.
“You’re doing it again, mum.” Bobby’s brow creased as he chewed slowly, eyes narrowed at me.
“What? What am I doing?” I feigned innocence, helping myself to a bit of the pork pie.
“Watching me. Same as a sparrer hawk watches a mouse, just afore she stoops. I’n’t she?” he appealed to Lizzie.
“Aye, she is,” Lizzie agreed, dimpling at me. “But it’s only her way, ken. Ye’d make a big mouse, Bobby.” Being Scottish, she pronounced it “moose,” which made Bobby laugh and choke over his muffin.