I suppose,” he added bitterly.
“It is rather striking,” I agreed, with caution. “Yes, I knew. My husband told me”—I groped for some delicate way of putting it— “the, um, circumstances of your birth some years ago.”
And just how was I going to describe those circumstances?
It hadn’t exactly escaped me that there were a few awkward explanations to be made—but caught up in the alarms of Jamie’s sudden reappearance and escape and the giddiness of my own subsequent euphoria, it somehow hadn’t occurred to me that I would be the person making them.
I’d seen the little shrine he kept in his room, the double portrait of his two mothers—both so heartbreakingly young. If age was good for anything, surely it should have given me the wisdom to deal with this?
How could I tell him that he was the result of an impulsive, self-willed young girl’s blackmail? Let alone tell him that he had been the cause of both his legal parents’ deaths? And if anyone was going to tell him what his birth had meant to Jamie, it was going to have to be Jamie.
“Your mother…” I began, and hesitated. Jamie would have taken the blame solely upon himself rather than blacken Geneva’s memory to her son, I knew. I wasn’t having that.
“She was reckless,” William said, watching me closely. “Everybody says she was reckless. Was it—I suppose I only want to know, was it rape?”
“God, no!” I said, horrified, and saw his fists uncurl a little.
“That’s good,” he said, and let out the breath he’d been holding. “You’re sure he didn’t lie to you?”
“I’m sure.” He and his father might be able to hide their feelings; I certainly couldn’t, and while I would never be able to make a living playing cards, having a glass face was occasionally a good thing. I stood still and let him see that I told the truth.
“Do you think—did he say—” He stopped and swallowed, hard. “Did they love each other, do you think?”
“As much as they could, I think,” I said softly. “They hadn’t much time, only the one night.” I ached for him and would have liked so much to take him in my arms and comfort him. But he was a man, and a young one, fierce about his pain. He’d deal with it as he could, and I thought it would be some years—if ever—before he learned to share it.
“Yes,” he said, and pressed his lips together, as though he’d been going to say something else and thought better of it. “Yes, I—I see.” It was quite clear from his tone that he didn’t but, reeling under the impact of realization, had no idea what to ask next, let alone what to do with the information he had.
“I was born almost exactly nine months after my parents’ marriage,” he said, giving me a hard look. “Did they deceive my father? Or did my mother play the whore with her groom before she wed?”
“That might be a bit harsh,” I began.
“No, it isn’t,” he snapped. “Which was it?”
“Your fa—Jamie. He’d never deceive another man in his marriage.” Except Frank, I thought, a little wildly. But, of course, he hadn’t known at first that he was doing it…
“My father,” he said abruptly. “Pa—Lord John, I mean. He knew—knows?”
“Yes.” Thin ice again. I didn’t think he had any idea that Lord John had married Isobel principally for his sake—and Jamie’s—but didn’t want him going anywhere near the question of Lord John’s motives.
“All of them,” I said firmly, “all four of them; they wanted what was best for you.”
“Best for me,” he repeated bleakly. “Right.” His knuckles had gone white again, and he gave me a look through narrowed eyes that I recognized all too well: a Fraser about to go off with a bang. I also knew perfectly well that there was no way of stopping one from detonating but had a try anyway, putting out a hand to him.
“William,” I began. “Believe me—”
“I do,” he said. “Don’t bloody tell me any more. God damn it!” And, whirling on his heel, he drove his fist through the paneling with a thud that shook the room, wrenched his hand out of the hole he’d made, and stormed out. I heard crunching and rending as he paused to kick out several of the balusters on the landing and rip a length of the stair railing off, and I made it to the door in time to see him draw back a four-foot chunk of wood over his shoulder, swing, and strike the crystal chandelier that hung over the stairwell in an explosion of shattering glass. For a moment, he teetered on the open edge of the landing and I thought he would fall, or hurl himself off, but he staggered back from the edge and threw the chunk of wood like a javelin at the remnant of the chandelier with a burst of breath that might have been a grunt or a sob.
Then he rushed headlong down the stairs, thumping his wounded fist at intervals against the wall, where it left bloody smudges. He hit the front door with his shoulder, rebounded, jerked it open, and went out like a locomotive.
I stood frozen on the landing in the midst of chaos and destruction, gripping the edge of the broken balustrade. Tiny rainbows danced on walls and ceiling like multicolored dragonflies sprung out of the shattered crystal that littered the floor.
Something moved; a shadow fell across the floor of the hall below. A small, dark figure walked slowly in through the open doorway. Putting back the hood of her cloak, Jenny Fraser Murray looked round at the devastation, then up at me, her face a pale oval glimmering with humor.
“Like father, like son, I see,” she remarked. “God help us all.”
THE HOUR OF THE WOLF
THE BRITISH ARMY was leaving Philadelphia. The Delaware was choked with ships, and the ferries ran nonstop from the end of State Street across to Cooper’s Point. Three thousand Tories were leaving the city, too, afraid to stay without the army’s protection; General Clinton had promised them passage, though their baggage made a dreadful mess—stacked on the docks, crammed into the ferries—and occupied a good deal of space on board the ships. Ian and Rachel sat on the riverbank below Philadelphia, under the shade of a drooping sycamore, and watched an artillery emplacement being disassembled, a hundred yards away.
The artillerymen worked in shirtsleeves, their blue coats folded on the grass nearby, removing the guns that had defended the city, preparing them for shipping. They were in no hurry and took no particular notice of spectators; it didn’t matter now.
“Does thee know where they are going?” Rachel asked.
“Aye, I do. Fergus says they’re going north, to reinforce New York.”
“Thee has seen him?” She turned her head, interested, and the leaf shadows flickered over her face.
“Aye, he came home last night; he’ll be safe now, wi’ the Tories and the army gone.”
“Safe,” she said, with a skeptical intonation. “As safe as anyone may be, in times like these, thee means.” She’d taken off her cap because of the heat and brushed the damp, dark hair back from her cheeks.
He smiled, but said nothing. She knew as well as he did what the illusions of safety were.
“Fergus says the British mean to cut the colonies in half,” he remarked. “Separate north from south and deal with them separately.”
“Does he? And how does he know this?” she asked, surprised.
“A British officer named Randall-Isaacs; he talks to Fergus.”
“He is a spy, thee means? For which side?” Her lips compressed a little. He wasn’t sure where spying fell, in terms of Quaker philosophy, but didn’t care to ask just now. It was a tender subject, Quaker philosophy.
“I shouldna like to have to guess,” he said. “He passes himself off as an American agent, but that may be all moonshine. Ye canna trust anyone in wartime, aye?”
She turned round to look at him at that, hands behind her back as she leaned against the sycamore.
“Can thee not?”
“I trust you,” he said. “And your brother.”
“And thy dog,” she said, with a glance at Rollo, writhing on the ground to scratch his back. “Thy aunt and uncle, too, and Fergus and his wife? That seems a fair number of friends.” She leaned toward him, squinting in concern. “Does thy arm pain thee?”
“Och, it’s well enough.” He shrugged with his good shoulder, smiling. His arm did hurt, but the sling helped. The ax blow had nearly severed his left arm, cutting through the flesh and breaking the bone. His aunt said he had been lucky, in that it had not damaged the tendons. The body is plastic, she said. Muscle would heal, and so would bone.
Rollo’s had; there was no trace of stiffness from the gunshot wound, and while his muzzle was growing white, he slid through the bushes like an eel, sniffing industriously.
Rachel sighed and gave him a direct look under dark, level brows.
“Ian, thee is thinking something painful, and I would much prefer thee tells me what it is. Has something happened?”
A great many things had happened, were happening all around them, would continue to happen. How could he tell her … ? And yet he couldn’t not.
“The world is turning upside down,” he blurted. “And you are the only constant thing. The only thing I—that binds me to the earth.”
Her eyes softened.
“Am I?”
“Ye ken verra well that you are,” he said gruffly. He looked away, his heart pounding. Too late, he thought, with a mixture of dismay and elation. He’d begun to speak; he couldn’t stop now, no matter what might come of it.
“I know what I am,” he said, awkward but determined. “I would turn Quaker for your sake, Rachel, but I ken I’m not one in my heart; I think I never could be. And I think ye wouldna want me to say words I dinna mean or pretend to be something I canna be.”
“No,” she said softly. “I would not want that.”
He opened his mouth but couldn’t find more words to say. He swallowed, dry-mouthed, waiting. She swallowed, too; he saw the slight movement of her throat, soft and brown; the sun had begun to touch her again, the nut-brown maiden ripening from winter’s pale bloom.
The artillerymen loaded the last of the cannon into a wagon, hitched their limbers to teams of oxen, and with laughter and raucous talk moved up the road toward the ferry point. When they were gone at last, a silence fell. There were still noises—the sound of the river, the rustle of the sycamore, and far beyond, the bellowings and crashings of an army on the move, the sound of violence impending. But between them, there was silence.
I’ve lost, he thought, but her head was still bent in thought. Is she maybe praying? Or only trying to think how to send me away?
Whichever it was, she lifted her head and stood up, away from the tree. She pointed at Rollo, who was lying couchant now, motionless but alert, yellow eyes following every movement of a fat robin foraging in the grass.
“That dog is a wolf, is he not?”
“Aye, well, mostly.”
A small flash of hazel told him not to quibble.
“And yet he is thy boon companion, a creature of rare courage and affection, and altogether a worthy being?”
“Oh, aye,” he said with more confidence. “He is.”
She gave him an even look.
“Thee is a wolf, too, and I know it. But thee is my wolf, and best thee know that.”
He’d started to burn when she spoke, an ignition swift and fierce as the lighting of one of his cousin’s matches. He put out his hand, palm forward, to her, still cautious lest she, too, burst into flame.
“What I said to ye, before … that I kent ye loved me—”
She stepped forward and pressed her palm to his, her small, cool fingers linking tight.
“What I say to thee now is that I do love thee. And if thee hunts at night, thee will come home.”
Under the sycamore, the dog yawned and laid his muzzle on his paws.
“And sleep at thy feet,” Ian whispered, and gathered her in with his one good arm, both of them blazing bright as day.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Brigadier General Simon Fraser
There are, as anyone who’s read my books will already realize, a lot of Simon Frasers running around the eighteenth century. The Brigadier who fought gallantly and was killed at Saratoga is not one of the Frasers of Lovat, but a Fraser of Balnain. That is, not a direct descendant of the Old Fox but certainly a relation of the family. He had an illustrious military career, including the famous taking of Quebec with James Wolfe in 1759 (which battle forms a part of a novella entitled “The Custom of the Army,” a Lord John Grey story which will be published in March of 2010 as part of an anthology titled Warriors—in case you want more details).
My reason for mentioning the Brigadier particularly, though, is the interesting matter of his grave. Most accounts of Saratoga that mention Simon Fraser of Balnain report that he was buried in the evening of the day he died, within the boundaries of the Great Redoubt (not Breymann’s Redoubt, which Jamie stormed with Benedict Arnold, but the larger one on the field), at his own request. Some accounts add details, such as the attendance of Balcarres’s rangers, or of the Americans firing a minute gun in Fraser’s honor when they realized what was taking place, while other accounts consider these romantic but probably apocryphal details and say that he was attended only by the close members of his staff.
Now, it isn’t always possible to go in person to a place you’re writing about, nor is it always necessary. It is usually desirable, though, and luckily, Saratoga is pretty accessible, and the battlefield there is well preserved and curated. I’ve walked the field there three times over the course of several years since I first decided that I wanted to use this particular battle as a centerpiece of a book, if not the book I happened to be writing at the time. On one of these occasions, I was there alone, there were no other tourists, and I got into conversation with one of the park employees (dressed in period costume and posted at the rebuilt site of the Bemis farm). After he patiently answered a lot of intrusive questions (“Are you wearing underwear?” being one of them, and “No,” being the answer. “Long shirttails,” being the further explanation for how one avoids chafing while wearing homespun breeches), allowed me to handle his Brown Bess musket and explained the loading and firing of it, we got into a discussion of the battle and its personalities—since I did, at this point, know quite a lot about it.
General Fraser’s grave was at that point noted on the Park Service map—but it wasn’t in the Great Redoubt; it was located near the river. I’d been down there but found no marker for it, and so inquired where it was—and why wasn’t it in the Great Redoubt? I was informed that the Park Service had at one point—I don’t know when, but fairly recently—done an archaeological excavation of the Great Redoubt, including the supposed gravesite. To everyone’s surprise, General Fraser was not buried there, nor was anyone else. There were signs that a grave had once been dug, and a uniform button was found there, but no signs whatever of a body. (And while the body itself would be long since decomposed, you would expect still to see some signs.) There was (the employee told me) an account that said that General Fraser’s grave had been moved to a site near the river, and that that was why the map was so marked—but no one knew where the specific place was, or, in fact, whether the General was in that one, either, which was why there was no marker there.
Well, novelists are a conscienceless lot. Those of us who deal with history tend to be fairly respectful of such facts as are recorded (always bearing in mind the proviso that just because it’s in print, it isn’t necessarily true). But give us a hole to slide through, an omission in the historic record, one of those mysterious lacunae that occur in even the best-documented life … so all in all, I rather thought that perhaps General Fraser had been sent home to Scotland. (Yes, they did send bodies to and fro in the eighteenth century, on occasion. Someone exhumed poor old Tom Paine from his grave in France, intending to ship him back to America so he could be interred there with honor as a prophet of the Revolution. His body was lost in transit, and no one’s ever found it. Speaking of interesting lacunae …)
Anyway, as it happened, I went to Scotland last year, and while wandering round the countryside in search of a logical place near Balnain in which to plant General Fraser, stumbled over (literally) the large chambered cairn at Corrimony. Such sites are always evocative, and when I read on the sign posted there that there had once been a body in the central chamber, but it had evidently decayed into the soil (there were traces of bones left in the earth, even after a thousand years or more), and that the tomb had been broken into sometime in the nineteenth century (thus explaining why you won’t find anything in the cairn if you happen to go there now) … well, hey. (People always ask novelists where they get their ideas. Everywhere!)
Quaker Plain Speech
The Religious Society of Friends was founded around 1647 by George Fox. As part of the Society’s belief in the equality of all men before God, they did not use honorific titles (such as “Mr./Mrs.,” “General/Colonel,” etc.), and used “plain speech” in addressing everyone.
Now, as any of you who know a second language with Latin roots (Spanish, French, etc.) realize, these languages have both a familiar and a formal version of “you.” So did English, once upon a time. The “thee” and “thou” forms that most of us recognize as Elizabethan or biblical are in fact the English familiar forms of “you”—with “you” used as both the plural familiar form (“all y’all”), and the formal pronoun (both singular and plural). As English evolved, the familiar forms were dropped, leaving us with the utilitarian “you” to cover all contingencies.
Quakers retained the familiar forms, though, as part of their “plain speech,” until the twentieth century. Over the years, though, plain speech also evolved, and while “thee/thy” remained, “thou/thine” largely disappeared, and the verb forms associated with “thee/thy” changed. From about the mid-eighteenth century onward, plain speech used “thee” as the singular form of “you” (the plural form remained “you,” even in plain speech), with the same verb forms normally used for third-person singular. For example, “He knows that/Thee knows that.” The older verb endings—“knowest,” “doth,” etc.—were no longer used.
Scots/Scotch/Scottish
As noted elsewhere (Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, see Author’s Notes), in the eighteenth century (and indeed, well into the mid-twentieth century), the word “Scotch” and its variants (e.g., “Scotchman”) were commonly used (by both English people and Scots) to describe an inhabitant of Scotland. The terms “Scottish” and “Scots” were also occasionally used, though less common.
Typos and Terminology
There may be an impulse to regard the term “mess-kid” (as used in Part Three of this book) as a typographical error. It’s not. A mess-kid was a shallow, circular bucket in which sailors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were served their food. A mess-kit, on the other hand, referred to the utensils carried and used by a soldier.
By the same token, while “crotch” is the usual American English term, the older form, “crutch,” would have been used in eighteenth-century English-English usage. Which is not to say there aren’t any typographical errors in this book (despite the heroic efforts of Ms. Kathy Lord, the copy editor; the alerts of various friends and translators who read the manuscript in chunks; and a fair amount of diligence by myself, these things happen) but these particular terms aren’t.
Saratoga
A tremendous amount of historical research goes into a book like this (I am often bemused by letters from people telling me they’d visited a museum, seen some eighteenth-century artifacts, and been struck all a-heap by discovering that I hadn’t just made it all up!), and while there isn’t room to acknowledge or list even a fraction of the sources I’ve used, I did want to mention one specific book.
The two battles of Saratoga were historically important, remarkably dramatic, and very complex, both in the logistics of the battles and in the troop movements and politics that led up to them. I was fortunate to find, early on in my researches, Richard M. Ketchum’s Saratoga, which is an amazingly well-done portrait of the battles, the background, and the plethora of colorful individuals who took part. I just wanted to recommend this book to those of you with a deeper interest in the historical aspects, as these could only be touched on lightly in the context of a novel.
Loch Errochty and Tunnel Tigers
During the 1950s and ’60s, a great hydroelectric scheme was implemented in the Scottish Highlands. The work of a great many “tunnel tigers” (also known as “the Hydro boys”)—laborers, many of them from Ireland and Poland—went into digging tunnels through the mountains and building dams for the creation of man-made lochs. Loch Errochty is in fact one of these man-made lochs. The tunnel I’ve drawn as being associated with it (complete with miniature train) is like those common to the hydroelectric scheme as a whole, but I don’t know that there actually is one at Loch Errochty. On the other hand, the dam, turbine service