Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [94]
River Run did a great deal of business with the navy, it seemed, judging from Jocasta’s conversation; masts, spars, laths, timbers, pitch, turpentine, and tar. Jamie rode close by her side, listening intently as she explained everything in detail, leaving me and Ian to trail behind. Evidently, she had worked closely with her husband in building River Run; I wondered how she managed the place by herself, now that he was gone.
“Look!” Ian said, pointing. “What’s that?”
I pulled up and walked my horse, along with his, to the tree he had pointed out. A great slab of bark had been taken off, exposing the inner wood for a stretch of four feet or more on one side. Within this area, the yellow-white wood was crosshatched in a sort of herringbone pattern, as though it had been slashed back and forth with a knife.
“We’re near,” Jocasta said. Jamie had seen us stop, and they had ridden back to join us. “That will be a turpentine tree you’re seeing; I smell it.”
We all could; the scent of cut wood and pungent resin was so strong that even I could have found the tree blindfolded. Now that we had stopped, I could hear noises in the distance; the rumblings and thumps of men at work, the chunk of an ax and voices calling back and forth. Breathing in, I also caught a whiff of something burning.
Jocasta edged Corinna close to the cut tree.
“Here,” she said, touching the bottom of the cut, where a rough hollow had been chiseled out of the wood. “We call it the box; that’s where the sap and the raw turpentine drip down and collect. This one is nearly full; there’ll be a slave along soon to dip it out.”
No sooner had she spoken than a man appeared through the trees; a slave dressed in no more than a loincloth, leading a large white mule with a broad strap slung across its back, a barrel suspended on either side. The mule stopped dead when he saw us, flung back his head, and brayed hysterically.
“That will be Clarence,” Jocasta said, loudly enough to be heard above the noise. “He likes to see folk. And who is that with him? Is it you, Pompey?”
“Yah’m. S’me.” The slave gripped the mule by the upper lip and gave it a vicious twist. “Lea’f, vassar!” As I made the mental translation of this expression into “Leave off, you bastard!” the man turned toward us, and I saw that his slurred speech was caused by the fact that the lower left half of his jaw was gone; his face below the cheekbone simply fell away into a deep depression filled with white scar tissue.
Jocasta must have heard my gasp of shock—or only have expected such a response—for she turned her blindfold toward me.
“It was a pitch explosion—fortunate he was not killed. Come, we’re near the works.” Without waiting for her groom, she turned her horse’s head expertly, and made off through the trees, toward the scent of burning.
The contrast of the turpentine works with the quiet of the forest was amazing; a large clearing full of people, all in a hum of activity. Most were slaves, dressed in the minimum of clothing, limbs and bodies smudged with charcoal.
“Is anyone at the sheds?” Jocasta turned her head toward me.
I rose in my stirrups to look; at the far side of the clearing, near a row of ramshackle sheds, I caught a flash of color; three men in the uniform of the British Navy, and another in a bottle-green coat.
“That will be my particular friend,” Jocasta said, smiling in satisfaction at my description. “Mr. Farquard Campbell. Come, Nephew; I should like ye to meet him.”
Seen up close, Campbell proved to be a man of sixty or so, no more than middle height, but with that particular brand of leathery toughness that some Scotsmen exhibit as they age—not so much a weathering as a tanning process that results in a surface like a leather targe, capable of turning the sharpest blade.
Campbell greeted Jocasta with pleasure, bowed courteously to me, acknowledged Ian with the flick of a brow, then turned the