A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [20]
The sheriffs could no longer be trusted to keep order; the scandals that had inspired the Regulator movement had assured that. The difficulty, of course, was that since the committees were self-appointed, there was no more reason to trust them than the sheriffs.
There were other committees, too. The Committees of Correspondence, loose associations of men who wrote letters to and fro, spreading news and rumor between the colonies. And it was out of these various committees that the seeds of rebellion would spring—were germinating even now, somewhere out in the cold spring night.
As I did now and then—and much more often, now—I reckoned up the time remaining. It was nearly April of 1773 And on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five . . . as Longfellow so quaintly put it . . .
Two years. But war has a long fuse, and a slow match. This one had been lit at Alamance, and the bright, hot lines of the creeping fire in North Carolina were already visible—for those who knew to look.
The lead balls in the shot pouch I held rolled and clicked together; my fingers had tightened on the leather. Jamie saw it and touched my knee, quick and light, in reassurance, then took the pouch and rolled it up, tucking it into the cartridge box.
“Good time,” he repeated, looking at MacDonald. “What d’ye mean by that, Donald?”
“Why, who should lead such a committee other than yourself, Colonel? I had suggested as much to the Governor.” MacDonald tried to look modest, and failed.
“Verra obliging of ye, Major,” Jamie said dryly. He raised an eyebrow at me. The state of the colony’s government must be worse even than he had supposed, for Governor Martin to be not only tolerating the existence of the committees—but clandestinely sanctioning them.
The long-drawn whine of a dog’s yawn reached me faintly from the hall, and I excused myself, to go and check on Ian.
I wondered whether Governor Martin had the slightest idea what he was loosing. I rather thought he did, and was making the best of a bad job, by trying to ensure that some, at least, of the Committees of Safety were run by men who had backed the Crown during the War of the Regulation. The fact remained that he could not control—or even know about—many such committees. But the colony was beginning to seethe and bump like a teakettle on the boil, and Martin had no official troops at his command, only such irregulars as MacDonald—and the militia.
Which was why MacDonald was calling Jamie “Colonel,” of course. The previous governor, William Tryon, had appointed Jamie—quite against his will—colonel of militia for the backcountry above the Yadkin.
“Hmph,” I said to myself. Neither MacDonald nor Martin was a fool. Inviting Jamie to set up a Committee of Safety meant that he would call upon those men who had served under him in the militia—but would commit the government to nothing, in terms of paying or equipping them—and the Governor would be clear of any responsibility for their actions, since a Committee of Safety was not an official body.
The danger to Jamie—and all of us—in accepting such a proposal, though—that was considerable.
It was dark in the hall, with no light but the spill from the kitchen behind me, and the faint glow of the single candle in the surgery. Ian was asleep, but restless, a faint frown of discomfort wrinkling the soft skin between his brows. Rollo raised his head, thick tail swishing to and fro across the floor in greeting.
Ian didn’t respond when I spoke his name, or when I set a hand on his shoulder. I shook him gently, then harder. I could see him struggling, somewhere under the layers of unconsciousness, like a man drifting in the underwater currents, yielding to the beckoning depths, then snagged by an unexpected fishhook, a stab of pain in cold-numbed flesh.
His eyes opened suddenly, dark and lost, and he stared at me in incomprehension.
“Hallo there,” I said softly, relieved to see him wake. “What’s your name?”
I could see that the question made no sense to him at once, and repeated it, patiently. Awareness stirred somewhere in