Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [349]
“Aye?” Roger said skeptically. “And this made you go to Jamaica, and—”
“It made me think,” she said sharply. “You’d looked; you couldn’t find them anywhere in Scotland after 1766, and you couldn’t find them on any of the emigration rolls to the Colonies. That was when you said you thought we should give up; that there wasn’t any more we could find out.”
Roger was glad of the darkness that hid his guilt. He kissed the top of her head, quickly.
“But I wondered; the place I saw them in the dream was in the tropics. What if they were in the Indies?”
“I looked,” Roger said. “I checked the passenger rolls of every ship that left Edinburgh or London in the late 1760s and ’70s—headed for anyplace. I did tell you,” he added, an edge in his voice.
“I know that,” she said, with a matching edge. “But what if they weren’t passengers? Why did people go to the Indies then—now, I mean?” She caught herself, voice cracking a little in realization.
“For trade, mostly.”
“Right. So what if they went on a cargo ship? They wouldn’t show up on the passenger rolls.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “Right, they wouldn’t. But then how would you look for them?”
“Warehouse registers, plantation account books, port manifests. I spent the whole vacation in libraries and museums. And—and I found them,” she said, with a small catch in her voice.
Christ, she’d seen the notice.
“Aye?” he said, striving for calmness.
She laughed, a little tremulously.
“A Captain James Fraser, of a ship named Artemis, sold five tons of bat guano to a planter in Montego Bay on April 2, 1767.”
Roger couldn’t help a grunt of amusement, but at the same time, couldn’t help objecting.
“Aye, but a ship’s captain? After all your mother said about the man’s seasickness? And not to be discouraging, but there must be literally hundreds of James Frasers; how could you possibly know—”
“There might; but on April the first, a woman named Claire Fraser bought a slave from the slave market in Kingston.”
“She what?”
“I don’t know why,” Brianna said firmly, “but I’m sure she had a good reason.”
“Well, sure, but—”
“The papers gave the slave’s name as ‘Temeraire,’ and described him as having one arm. Makes him stand out, doesn’t it? Anyway, I started looking through collections of old newspapers; not just from the Indies, from all the southern colonies, looking for that name—my mother wouldn’t keep a slave; if she bought him, she’d free him somehow, and the notices of manumission were sometimes printed in the local papers. I thought I could maybe find where the slave was freed.”
“And did you?”
“No.” She was quiet for a minute. “I—I found something else. A notice of their … deaths. My parents.”
Even knowing that she must have found it, to hear it from her lips was still a shock. He pulled her tight against him, wrapping his arms around her.
“Where?” he said softly. “How?”
He should have known better. He wasn’t listening to her half-choked explanation; he was too busy cursing himself. He should have known she was too stubborn to be dissuaded. All he’d done with his fatheaded interference was to drive her into secrecy. And it had been he who’d paid for that—in months of worry.
“But we’re in time,” she said. “It said 1776; we’ve got time to find them.” She sighed hugely. “I’m so glad you’re here. I was so worried you’d find out before I could get back and I didn’t know what you’d do.”
“What I did do.… You know,” he said conversationally, “I have a friend with a two-year-old child. He says that he’d never in life condone child abuse—but by God, he understands what makes people do it. I feel very much the same about wife beating just now.”
There was a small quiver of laughter from the heavy weight on his chest.
“What do you mean by that?”
He slid a hand down her back and got a firm grip on one round