A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [626]
The man had brought a dark-lantern, not trusting that he could find the necessary bits of harness and apply them in the dark. He drew back the slide and turned the lantern slowly, letting the shaft of light travel over the stalls, one by one. The three horses Jocasta had brought were here, but done in. Jamie heard the man click his tongue softly in consideration, turning the light back and forth between the mare, Jerusha, and Gideon.
Making up his mind, Ulysses set the lantern on the floor, and made to pull the pin fastening the door to Gideon’s stall.
“It would serve ye right, and I let ye take him,” Jamie said conversationally.
The butler let out a sharp yelp and whirled round, glaring, his fists clenched. He couldn’t see Jamie in the dark, but the evidence of his ears caught up with him a second later, and he breathed deeply and lowered his fists, realizing who it was.
“Mr. Fraser,” he said. His eyes were live in the lantern light, and watchful. “You took me by surprise.”
“Well, I did intend to,” Jamie replied equably. “Ye mean to be off, I suppose.”
He could see thoughts flit through the butler’s eyes, quick as dragonflies, wondering, calculating. But Ulysses was no fool, and came to the correct conclusion.
“The girl’s told you, then,” he said, quite calmly. “Shall you kill me—for your aunt’s honor?” Had that last been said with any trace of a sneer, Jamie might have killed him indeed—he’d been of two minds on the matter while he waited. But it was said simply, and Jamie’s finger eased on the trigger.
“If I were a younger man, I would,” he said, matching Ulysses’s tone. And if I did not have a wife and daughter who once called a black man friend.
“As it is,” he went on, lowering the pistol, “I try not to kill these days unless I must.” Or until I must. “Do ye offer me denial? For I think there can be nay defense.”
The butler shook his head slightly. The light gleamed on his skin, dark, with a reddish undertone that made him look as though carved from aged cinnabar.
“I loved her,” he said softly, and spread his hands. “Kill me.” He was dressed for traveling, in cloak and hat, with a pouch and canteen hung at his belt, but no knife. Slaves, even trusted ones, dared not go armed.
Curiosity warred with distaste, and—as usual in such warfare—curiosity won.
“Phaedre said ye lay with my aunt, even before her husband died. Is that true?”
“It is,” Ulysses said softly, his expression unreadable. “I do not justify it. I cannot. But I loved her, and if I must die for that . . .”
Jamie believed the man; his sincerity was evident in voice and gesture. And knowing his aunt as he did, he was less inclined to blame Ulysses than the world at large would be. At the same time, he was not letting down his guard; Ulysses was good-size, and quick. And a man who thought he had nothing to lose was very dangerous indeed.
“Where did ye mean to go?” he asked with a nod toward the horses.
“Virginia,” the black man replied with a barely perceptible hesitation. “Lord Dunsmore has offered freedom to any slave who will join his army.”
He hadn’t meant to ask, though it was a question that had raised itself in his mind from the moment he heard Phaedre’s story. With this opening, though, he could not resist.
“Why did she not free you?” he asked. “After Hector Cameron died?”
“She did” was the surprising answer. The butler touched the breast of his coat. “She wrote the papers of manumission nearly twenty years ago—she said she could not bear to think that I came to her bed only because I must. But a request for manumission must be approved by the Assembly, you know. And if I had been openly freed, I could not have stayed to serve her as I did.” That was true enough; a freed slave was compelled to leave the colony within ten days or risk being enslaved again, by anyone who chose to take him; the vision of large gangs of free Negroes