The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [193]
“Here,” I whispered, giving him back the cup. “Drink it, and lie down. You should sleep a little.”
He shook his head and lifted the cup to his lips. He swallowed, grimacing at the bitterness.
“Not worth it,” he croaked. He nodded toward the east, where the tufted pines were now inked black on a graying sky. “And besides, I’ve got to think what the hell to do now.”
27
DEATH COMES CALLING
I COULD SCARCELY CONTAIN my impatience until the men had roused and eaten, broken camp—in an irritatingly leisurely fashion—and mounted. At last, though, I found myself once more on horseback, riding through a morning so crisp and cold, I thought the air might shatter as I breathed it.
“Right,” I said without preamble, as my mount nosed her way up next to Jamie’s. “Talk.”
He glanced back at me and smiled. His face was creased with tiredness, but the brisk air—and a lot of very strong coffee—had revived him. Despite the troubled night, I felt quick and lively myself, blood coursing near the surface of my skin and blooming in my cheeks.
“Ye dinna mean to wait for wee Roger?”
“I’ll tell him later—or you can.” There was no way of riding three abreast; it was only owing to a washout that had left a fan of gravel down the mountainside that we were able to pick our way side by side for the moment, out of hearing of the others. I nudged my mount closer to Jamie’s, my knees wreathed in steam from the horse’s nostrils.
Jamie rubbed a hand over his face, and shook himself, as though to throw off fatigue.
“Aye, well,” he said. “You’ll have seen they were brothers?”
“I did notice that, yes. Where the hell did the other one come from?”
“From there.” He lifted his chin, pointing toward the west. Thanks to the washout, there was an unimpeded view of a small cove in the hollow below—one of those natural breaks in the wilderness, where the trees gave way to meadow and stream. From the trees at the edge of the cove, a thin plume of smoke rose upward, pointing like a finger in the still, cold air.
Squinting, I could make out what looked like a small farmhouse, with a couple of rickety outbuildings. As I watched, a tiny figure emerged from the house and headed toward one of the sheds.
“They’re just about to discover that he’s gone,” Jamie said, a trifle grimly. “Though with luck, they’ll think he’s only gone to the privy, or to milk the goats.”
I didn’t bother asking how he knew they had goats.
“Is that their home? Josiah and his brother?”
“In a manner of speaking, Sassenach. They were bond servants.”
“Were?” I said skeptically. Somehow I doubted that the brothers’ terms of indenture had just happened to expire the night before.
Jamie lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and wiped a dripping nose on his sleeve.
“Unless someone catches them, aye.”
“You caught Josiah,” I pointed out. “What did he tell you?”
“The truth,” he said, with a slight twist of the mouth. “Or at least I think so.”
He had hunted Josiah through the dark, guided by the sound of the boy’s frantic wheezing, and trapped him at last in a rocky hollow, seizing him in the dark. He had wrapped the freezing boy in his plaid, sat him down, and with judicious application of patience and firmness—augmented with sips of whisky from his flask—had succeeded at last in extracting the story.
“The family were immigrants—father, mother, and six bairns. Only the twins survived the passage; the rest perished of illness at sea. There were no relatives here—or none that met the boat, at any rate—and so the ship’s master sold them. The price wouldna cover the cost of the family’s passage, so the lads were indentured for thirty years, their wages to be put toward the debt.”
His voice in the telling was matter-of-fact; these things happened. I knew they did, but was much less inclined to accept them without comment.
“Thirty years! Why, that’s—how old were they at the time?”
“Two or three,” he said.
I was taken aback at that. Overlooking the basic tragedy, that was some mitigation, I supposed; if the boys’ purchaser had been providing for their welfare as children . . . but I remembered