Drums of Autumn

  my annoyance at John Grey came back with a rush. How dare he risk both Jamie and William—and for what? Why was the bloody man here, in a wilderness as blatantly unsuited to someone of his sort as a—

  The door opened, and Jamie poked his head in.

  “Will ye be all right?” he asked. His eyes rested on the boy, an expression of polite concern on his face, but I saw his hand, curled tight as it rested on the door frame, and the line of tension that ran through leg and shoulder. He was strung like a harp; if I had touched him, he would have given off a low twanging noise.

  “Quite all right,” I said pleasantly. “Would Lord John care for some refreshment, do you think?”

  I put the kettle on to boil for tea, and—with an inner sigh—took out the last loaf of bread, which I had meant to use for my next round of penicillin experiments. Feeling that the emergency justified it, I brought out the last bottle of brandy as well. Then I put the jampot on the table, explaining that the butter was unfortunately in the custody of the pig at the moment.

  “Pig?” said William, looking confused.

  “In the pantry,” I said, with a nod at the closed door.

  “Why do you keep—” he started, then sat up sharply and closed his mouth, having obviously been kicked under the table by his stepfather, who was smiling pleasantly over his cup.

  “It is very kind of you to receive us, Mrs. Fraser,” Lord John interjected, giving his stepson a warning eye. “I do apologize for our unexpected arrival; I hope we do not discommode you too greatly.”

  “Not at all,” I said, wondering just where we were going to put them to sleep. William could go to the shed with Ian, I supposed; it was no worse than sleeping rough, as he had been doing. But the thought of sharing a bed with Jamie, with Lord John on the trundle an arm’s-length away…

  Ian, with his usual instinct for mealtimes, appeared at this delicate point in the proceedings, and was introduced all round, with such a confusion of explanations and reciprocal bowing in cramped quarters that the teapot was knocked over.

  Using this minor disaster as an excuse, I sent Ian off to show William the attractions of wood and stream, with a packet of jam sandwiches and a bottle of cider to share between them. Then, free of their inhibiting presences, I filled the cups with brandy, sat down again, and fixed John Grey with a narrow eye.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, without preamble.

  He opened his light blue eyes very wide, then lowered his very long lashes and batted them deliberately at me.

  “I did not come with the intention of seducing your husband, I assure you,” he said.

  “John!” Jamie’s fist struck the table with a force that rattled the teacups. His cheekbones were flushed dark red, and he was scowling with embarrassed fury.

  “Sorry.” Grey, by contrast, had gone white, though he remained otherwise visibly unruffled. It occurred to me for the first time that he might possibly be as unnerved as Jamie by this meeting.

  “My apologies, ma’am,” he said, with a curt nod in my direction. “That was unforgivable. I would point out, however, that you have been looking at me since we met as though you had encountered me lying in the gutter outside some notorious mollyhouse.” A light flush burned over his face now, too.

  “Sorry,” I breathed. “Give me a bit more notice next time, and I’ll take care to adjust my features.”

  He stood up suddenly and went to the window, where he stood with his back to the room, hands braced on the sill. There was an exceedingly awkward silence. I didn’t want to look at Jamie; instead I affected great interest in a bottle of fennel seeds that stood on the table.

  “My wife has died,” he said abruptly. “On the ship between England and Jamaica. She was coming to join me there.”

  “I am sorry to hear of it,” Jamie said quietly. “The lad will have been with her?”

  “Yes.” Lord John turned back, leaning against the sill, so that the spring sunlight silhouetted his neat head and gave him a gleaming halo. “Willie was—very close to Isobel. She was the only mother he’d known since his birth.”

  Willie’s true mother, Geneva Dunsany, had died in giving birth to him; his presumed father, the Earl of Ellesmere, had died the same day, in an accident. So much, Jamie had already told me. Likewise, that Geneva’s sister, Isobel, had taken care of the orphaned boy, and that John Grey had married Isobel when Willie was six or so—at the time Jamie had left the Dunsanys’ employ.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, sincerely, and didn’t mean only the death of his wife.

  Grey glanced at me, and gave me the shadow of a nod in acknowledgment.

  “My appointment as governor was nearly at an end; I had intended perhaps to take up residence on the island, should the climate suit my family. As it was…” He shrugged.

  “Willie was grief-stricken by the loss of his mother; it seemed advisable to seek to distract his mind by whatever means I could. An opportunity presented itself almost at once; my wife’s estate includes a large property in Virginia, which she had bequeathed to William. Upon her death, I received inquiries from the factor of the plantation, asking for instruction.”

  He moved away from the window, coming slowly back toward the table where we sat.

  “I could not well decide what to do with the property without seeing it, and evaluating the conditions that obtain here. So I determined that we should sail to Charleston, and from there, travel overland to Virginia. I trusted to the novelty of the experience to divert William from his grief—which I am pleased to observe, it seems to have done. He has been much more cheerful these past weeks.”

  I opened my mouth to say that Fraser’s Ridge seemed a bit out of his way, regardless, but then thought better of it.

  He appeared to guess what I was thinking, for he gave me a brief wry smile. I really would have to do something about my face, I thought. Having Jamie read my thoughts was one thing, and not at all unpleasant, on the whole. Having total strangers walk in and out of my mind at will was something else.

  “Where is the plantation?” Jamie asked, with somewhat more tact but the same implication.

  “The nearest town of any sort is called Lynchburg—on the James River.” Lord John looked at me, still wry, but apparent good humor restored. “It is in fact no more than a few days deviation in our journey to come here, in spite of the remoteness of your aerie.”

  He switched his attention to Jamie, frowning slightly.

  “I told Willie that you are an old acquaintance of mine, from my soldiering days—I trust you do not object to the deception?”

  Jamie shook his head, one side of his mouth turning up a bit. “Deception, is it? I shouldna think I could well mind what ye called me, under the circumstances. And so far as that bit goes, it’s true enough.”

  “You don’t think he’ll remember you?” I asked Jamie. He had been a groom on Willie’s home estate; a prisoner of war following the Jacobite Rising.

  He hesitated, but then shook his head.

  “I dinna think so. He was barely six when I left Helwater; that will be half a lifetime ago, to a lad—and a world away. And there’s no reason he should think to recall a groom named MacKenzie, let alone connect the name wi’ me.”

  Willie hadn’t recognized Jamie on sight, certainly, but then he had been too concerned with the leeches to take much notice of anyone. A thought struck me, and I turned to Lord John, who was fiddling with a snuffbox he had taken from his pocket.

  “Tell me,” I said, moved by a sudden impulse. “I don’t mean to distress you—but…do you know how your wife died?”

  “How?” He looked startled at the question, but collected himself at once. “She died of a bloody flux, so her maid said.” His mouth twisted slightly. “It was…not a pleasant death, I believe.” Bloody flux, eh? That was the standard description for anything from amebic dysentery to cholera.

  “Was there a doctor? Someone on board who took care of her?”

  “There was,” he said, a li
ttle sharply. “What do you imply, ma’am?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s only that I wondered whether perhaps that was where Willie saw leeches used.”

  A flicker of understanding crossed his face.

  “Oh, I see. I hadn’t thought—”

  At this point, I noticed Ian, who was hovering in the doorway, obviously reluctant to interrupt but with a marked look of urgency on his face.

  “Did you want something, Ian?” I asked, interrupting Lord John.

  He shook his head, brown hair flying.

  “No, I thank ye, Auntie. It’s only—” He cast a helpless glance at Jamie. “Well, I’m sorry, Uncle, I ken I shouldna ha’ let him do it, but—”

  “What?” Alarmed by Ian’s tone of voice, Jamie was already on his feet. “What have ye done?”

  The lad twisted his big hands together, cracking his knuckles in embarrassment.

  “Well, ye see, his Lordship asked for the privy, and so I told him about the snake, and that he’d best go into the wood instead. So he did, but then he wanted to see the snake, and…and…”

  “He’s not bitten?” Jamie asked anxiously. Lord John, who had obviously been about to ask the same thing, gave him a glance.

  “Oh, no!” Ian looked surprised. “We couldna see it to start with, because it was too dark below. So we lifted off the benchtop to get more light. We could see the serpent fine, then, and we poked at it a bit wi’ a long branch, so it was lashin’ to and fro like the wee book said, but it didna seem inclined to bite itself. And—and—” He darted a glance at Lord John, and swallowed audibly.

  “It was my fault,” he said, nobly squaring his shoulders, the better to accept blame. “I said as how I’d thought to shoot it earlier, but we didna want to waste the powder. And so his Lordship said as how he would fetch his papa’s pistol from the saddlebag and deal with the thing at once. And so—”

  “Ian,” said Jamie between his teeth. “Stop blethering this instant and tell me straight what ye’ve done wi’ the lad. Ye’ve not shot him by mistake, I hope?”

  Ian looked offended at this slur upon his marksmanship.

  “Of course not!” he said.

  Lord John coughed politely, forestalling further recriminations.

  “Perhaps you would be good enough to tell me the whereabouts of my son at this moment?”

  Ian took a deep breath and visibly commended his soul to God.

  “He’s in the bottom of the privy,” he said. “Have ye got a bit o’ rope, Uncle Jamie?”

  With an admirable economy of both words and motion, Jamie reached the door in two strides and disappeared, closely followed by Lord John.

  “Is he in there with the snake?” I asked, hastily scrabbling through the washbasket for something to use as a tourniquet, just in case.

  “Oh, no, Auntie,” Ian assured me. “Ye dinna think I’d have left him, and the serpent was still there? Maybe I’d best go help,” he added, and disappeared as well.

  I hurried after him, to find Jamie and Lord John standing shoulder to shoulder in the doorway of the privy, conversing with the depths. Standing on tiptoe to peer over Lord John’s shoulder, I saw the torn butt end of a long, slender hickory branch protruding a few inches above the edge of the oblong hole. I held my breath; Lord Ellesmere’s struggles had stirred up the contents of the privy, and the reek was enough to sear the cilia off my nasal membranes.

  “He says he’s not hurt,” Jamie assured me, turning away from the hole and unlimbering a coil of rope from his shoulder.

  “Good,” I said. “Where’s the snake, though?” I peeked nervously into the outhouse, but couldn’t see anything beyond the silvery cedar boards and the dark recesses of the pit.

  “It went that way,” Ian said, gesturing vaguely down the path by which I had come. “The laddie couldna quite get a clear shot, so I gave the thing a wee snoove wi’ the stick, and damned if the bugger didna turn and come at me, right up the branch! It scairt me so I let out a skelloch and let go, and I bumped the lad, and—well, that’s how it happened,” he ended lamely.

  Trying to avoid Jamie’s eye, he sidled toward the pit and, leaning over, yelled awkwardly, “Hey! I’m glad ye didna break your neck!”

  Jamie gave him a look that said rather plainly that if necks were to be broken…but forbore further remarks in the interests of extracting William promptly from his oubliette. This procedure was carried out without further incident, and the would-be marksman was lifted out, clinging to the rope like a caterpillar on a string.

  There had luckily been enough sewage in the bottom of the pit to break his fall. From appearances, the ninth Earl of Ellesmere had landed facedown. Lord John stood for a moment on the path, wiping his hands on his breeches and surveying the encrusted object before him. He rubbed the back of a hand over his mouth, trying either to hide a smile or to stifle his sense of smell.

  Then his shoulders started to shake.

  “What news from the Underworld, Persephone?” he said, unable to keep the quaver of laughter out of his voice.

  A pair of slanted eyes looked blue murder out of the mask of filth obscuring his Lordship’s features. It was a thoroughly Fraser expression, and I felt a qualm go through me at the sight. By my side, Ian gave a sudden start. He glanced quickly from the Earl to Jamie and back, then he caught my eye and his own face went perfectly and unnaturally blank.

  Jamie was saying something in Greek, to which Lord John replied in the same language, whereupon both men laughed like loons. Trying to ignore Ian, I bent an eye in Jamie’s direction. Shoulders still shaking with suppressed mirth, he saw fit to enlighten me.

  “Epicharmus,” he explained. “At the Oracle of Delphi, seekers after enlightenment would throw down a dead python into the pit, and then hang about, breathing in the fumes as it decayed.”

  Lord John declaimed, gesturing grandly. “ ‘The spirit toward the heavens, the body to the earth.’ ”

  William exhaled strongly through his nose, precisely as Jamie did when tried beyond bearing. Ian twitched beside me. Good grief, I thought, freshly unnerved. Does the boy have nothing from his mother?

  “And have you attained any spiritual insights as a result of your recent m-mystical experience, William?” Lord John asked, making a poor attempt at self-control. He and Jamie were both flushed, with a laughter that I thought due as much to the release of nervous tension as to brandy or hilarity.

  His Lordship, glowering, pulled off his neckcloth and flung it on the path with a soggy splat. Now Ian was giggling nervously, too, unable to help himself. My own belly muscles were quivering under the strain, but I could see that the patches of exposed flesh above William’s collar were the color of the ripe tomatoes by the privy. Knowing all too well what usually happened to a Fraser who reached that particular level of incandescence, I thought the time had come to break up the party.

  “Er-hem,” I said, clearing my throat. “If you will allow me, gentlemen? Unlearned as I am in Greek philosophy, there is one small epigram I know by heart.”

  I handed William the jar of lye soap I had brought in lieu of a tourniquet.

  “Pindar,” I said. “ ‘Water is best.’ ”

  A small flash of what might have been gratitude showed through the muck. His Lordship bowed to me, with utmost correctness, then turned, gave Ian a fishy stare, and stomped off through the grass toward the creek, dripping. He seemed to have lost his shoes.

  “Puir clarty bugger,” Ian said, shaking his head mournfully. “It’ll be days before he gets the stink off.”

  “No doubt.” Lord John’s lips were still twitching, but the urge to declaim Greek poetry seemed to have left him, replaced by less elevated concerns. “Do you know what has become of my pistol, by the way? The one William was using before his unfortunate accident?”

  “Oh.” Ian looked uncomfortable. He lifted his chin in the direction of the privy. “I…ah…well, I’m verra much afraid—”

  “I see.” Lord John rubbed his own immaculately bar
bered chin.

  Jamie fixed Ian with a long stare.

  “Ah…” said Ian, backing up a pace or two.

  “Get it,” said Jamie, in a tone that brooked no contradiction.

  “But—” said Ian.

  “Now,” said his uncle, and dropped the slimy rope at his feet.

  Ian’s Adam’s apple bobbed, once. He looked at me, wide-eyed as a rabbit.

  “Take your clothes off first,” I said helpfully. “We don’t want to have to burn them, do we?”

  26

  PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE

  I left the house just before sunset, to check on my patient in the corncrib. He was no better, but neither was he visibly worse; the same labored breathing and burning fever. This time, though, the sunken eyes met mine when I entered the shed, and stayed on my face as I examined him.

  He still had the raven’s-feather amulet, clutched in his hand. I touched it and smiled at him, then gave him a drink. He still would take no food but had a little milk, and swallowed without protest another dose of my febrifuge. He lay motionless through examination and feeding, but as I was wringing out a hot cloth to poultice his chest, he suddenly reached out a hand and grabbed my arm.

  He thumped his chest with his other hand, and made an odd humming noise. This puzzled me for a moment, until I realized that he was humming.

  “Really?” I said. I reached for the packet of poulticing herbs and folded them into the cloth. “Well, all right then. Let me think.”

  I settled on “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” which he appeared to like—I was obliged to sing it through three times before he seemed satisfied and sank back on his blanket with a small spate of coughing, wrapped in camphor fumes.

  I paused outside the house, cleansing my hands carefully with the bottle of alcohol I carried. I was sure I was safe from contagion—I had had measles as a child—but wanted to take no chance of infecting anyone else.

  “There was talk of an outbreak of the red measle in Cross Creek,” Lord John remarked, upon my reporting to Jamie the condition of our guest. “Is it true, Mrs. Fraser, that the savage is congenitally less able to withstand infection than are Europeans, while African slaves are yet more hardy than their masters?”

  “Depends on the infection,” I said, peering into the cauldron and giving the stew bottle a cautious poke. “The Indians are a lot more resistant to the parasitic diseases—malaria, say—caused by organisms here, and the Africans deal better with things like dengue fever—which came with them from Africa, after all. But the Indians haven’t much resistance to European plagues like smallpox and syphilis, no.”

  Lord John looked a bit taken aback, which gave me a small sense of satisfaction; evidently he had only asked out of courtesy—he hadn’t actually expected me to know anything.

  “How fascinating,” he said, though, sounding truly interested. “You refer to organisms? Do you then subscribe to Mister Evan Hunter’s theory of miasmatical creatures?”

  Now it was my turn to be taken aback.

  “Er…not precisely, no,” I said, and changed the subject.

  We passed a pleasant enough evening, Jamie and Lord John exchanging anecdotes of hunting and fishing, with remarks on the amazing abundance of the countryside, while I darned stockings.

  Willie and Ian had a game of chess, which the latter won, to his evident satisfaction. His Lordship yawned hugely, then catching his father’s minatory eye, made a belated attempt to cover his mouth. He relaxed into a sleepy smile of contentment, brought on by repletion; he and Ian between them had demolished an entire currant cake, following their huge supper.

  Jamie saw it, and cocked a brow at Ian, who obligingly rose and towed his Lordship away to share his pallet in the herb shed. Two down, I thought, keeping my eyes resolutely away from the bed—and three to go.

  In the event, the delicate problem of bedtime was solved by my retiring, cloaked in modesty—or at least in my nightgown—while Jamie and Lord John took over the chess table, drinking the last of the brandy by firelight.

  Lord John was a much better chess player than I—or so I deduced from the fact that the game took them a good hour. Jamie could normally beat me in twenty minutes flat. The play was mostly silent, though with brief spurts of conversation.

  At last Lord John made a move, sat back and stretched, as though concluding something.

  “I collect you will not see much disturbance in the political way, here in your mountain refuge?” he said casually. He squinted at the board, considering.

  “I do envy you, Jamie, removed from such petty difficulties as afflict the merchants and gentry of the lowlands. If your life has its hardships—as cannot help but be the case—you have the not inconsiderable consolation of knowing your struggles to be significant and heroic.”

  Jamie snorted briefly.

  “Oh, aye. Verra heroic, to be sure. At the moment, my most heroic struggle is like to be with the pig in my pantry.” He nodded toward the board, one eyebrow raised. “Ye really mean to make that move?”

  Grey narrowed his eyes at Jamie, then looked down, studying the board with pursed lips.

  “Yes, I do,” he answered firmly.

  “Damn,” said Jamie, and with a grin, reached out and tipped over his king in