A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [506]
“Well,” I said, rising to my feet and stretching, “don’t do anything drastic just yet awhile. Let me talk with Jamie; you don’t mind if I tell him?”
“I wish ye would, Auntie. I dinna think I could face him, myself.” He still sat on the bench, bony shoulders slumped. Rollo lay on the ground at his feet, the big wolf head resting on Ian’s moccasined foot. Moved with pity, I put my arms round Ian, and he leaned his head against me, simply, like a child.
“It isn’t the end of the world,” I said.
The sun was touching the edge of the mountain, and the sky burned red and gold, the light of it falling in blazing bars through the palisades.
“No,” he said, but there was no conviction in his voice.
83
DECLARATIONS
Charlotte, Mecklenberg County
May 20, 1775
THE ONE THING ROGER HAD NOT envisioned about the making of history was the sheer amount of alcohol involved. He should have, he thought; if there was anything a career in academia had taught him, it was that almost all worthwhile business was conducted in the pub.
The public houses, taverns, ordinaries, and pothouses in Charlotte were doing a roaring business, as delegates, spectators, and hangers-on seethed through them, men of Loyalist sentiments collecting in the King’s Arms, those of rabidly opposing views in the Blue Boar, with shifting currents of the unallied and undecided eddying to and fro, purling through the Goose and Oyster, Thomas’s ordinary, the Groats, Simon’s, Buchanan’s, Mueller’s, and two or three nameless places that barely qualified as shebeens.
Jamie visited all of them. And drank in all of them, sharing beer, ale, rum punch, shandy, cordial, porter, stout, cider, brandywine, persimmon beer, rhubarb wine, blackberry wine, cherry bounce, perry, merry brew, and scrumpy. Not all of them were alcoholic, but the great majority were.
Roger confined himself largely to beer, and found himself glad of his restraint, when he happened to meet with Davy Caldwell in the street, turning from a fruiterer’s stall with a handful of early apricots.
“Mr. MacKenzie!” Caldwell cried, his face lighting with welcome. “I had nay thought to meet you here, but what blessing that I have!”
“Blessing indeed,” Roger said, shaking the minister’s hand with cordial fervor. Caldwell had married him and Brianna, and had examined him at the Presbyterian Academy regarding his own calling, some months before. “How d’ye do, Mr. Caldwell?”
“Och, for myself, well enough—but my heart misgives me for the fate of my poor brethren!” Caldwell shook his head in dismay, gesturing at a group of men crowding into Simon’s ordinary, laughing and talking. “What is to come of this, I ask ye, Mr. MacKenzie—what’s to come?”
Roger was, for an unbalanced instant, tempted to tell him what was to come of it, exactly. As it was, though, he gestured to Jamie—who had been stopped by an acquaintance in the street—to go along without him, and turned away to walk a bit with Caldwell.
“Have ye come for the conference, then, Mr. Caldwell?” he asked.
“I have that, Mr. MacKenzie, I have that. Little hope have I that my words will make the slightest difference, but it is my duty to speak as I find, and so I shall.”
What Davy Caldwell found was a shocking condition of human slothfulness, for which he blamed the entire current situation, convinced that unreflective apathy and “a stupid concern with personal comfort” on the part of the colonists both tempted and provoked the exercise of tyrannical powers on the part of Crown and Parliament.
“It’s a point, sure,” Roger said, aware that Caldwell’s impassioned gestures were attracting a certain amount of notice, even amongst the crowds in the street, most of them reasonably argumentative themselves.
“A point!” Caldwell cried. “Aye, it is, and the