The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [30]
“I’d five acres in late barley,” Abel explained. “Ripe and yellochtie, achin’ for the scythe. I couldna leave it to be spoilt, and my Abby—she was a wee, slight woman, she couldna be scything and threshing.”
Unable to spare a week from his harvest, Abel had instead sought help from his neighbors.
“They’re guid folk,” he insisted. “One or two could spare me the odd penny—but they’d their ain taxes to pay, hadn’t they?” Still hoping somehow to scrape up the necessary coin without undertaking the arduous trip to Salem, Abel had delayed—and delayed too long.
“Howard Travers is Sheriff,” he said, and wiped unconsciously at the drop of moisture that formed at the end of his nose. “He came with a paper, and said he mun’ put us oot, and the taxes not paid.”
Faced with necessity, Abel had left his wife in their cabin, and gone posthaste to Salem. But by the time he returned, six shillings in hand, his property had been seized and sold—to Howard Travers’s father-in-law—and his cabin was inhabited by strangers, his wife gone.
“I kent she’d no go far,” he explained. “She’d not leave the bairns.”
And that in fact was where he found her, wrapped in a threadbare quilt and shivering under the big spruce tree on the hill that sheltered the graves of the four MacLennan children, all dead in their first year of life. In spite of his entreaties, Abigail would not go down to the cabin that had been theirs, would seek no aid from those who had dispossessed her. If it was madness from the fever that gripped her, or only stubbornness, he could not tell; she had clung to the branches of the tree with demented strength, crying out the names of her children—and there had died in the night.
His whisky cup was empty. He set it carefully on the ground by his feet, ignoring Jamie’s gesture toward the bottle.
“They’d given her leave to carry awa what she could. She’d a bundle with her, and her grave-claes in it. I ken weel her sitting down the day after we were wed, to spin her winding-sheet. It had wee flowers all along one edge, that she’d made; she was a good hand wi’ a needle.”
He had wrapped Abigail in her embroidered shroud, buried her by the side of their youngest child, and then walked two miles down the road, intending, he thought, to tell the Hobsons what had happened.
“But I came to the house, and found them all abuzzing like hornets—Hugh Fowles had had a visit from Travers, come for the tax, and no money to pay. Travers grinned like an ape and said it was all one to him—and sure enough, ten days later he came along wi’ a paper and three men, and put them oot.”
Hobson had scraped up the money to pay his own taxes, and the Fowleses were crowded in safely enough with the rest of the family—but Joe Hobson was foaming with wrath over the treatment of his son-in-law.
“He was a-rantin’, Joe, bleezin’ mad wi’ fury. Janet Hobson bid me come and sit, and offered me supper, and there was Joe shoutin’ that he’d take the price of the land out of Howard Travers’s hide, and Hugh slumped down like a trampled dog, and his wife greetin’, and the weans all squealin’ for their dinners like a brood o’ piglets, and . . . well, I thought of telling them, but then . . .” He shook his head, as though confused anew.
Sitting half-forgotten in the chimney-corner, he had been overcome by a strange sort of fatigue, one that made him so tired that his head nodded on his neck, lethargy stealing over him. It was warm, and he was overcome with a sense of unreality. If the crowded confines of the Hobsons’ one-roomed cabin were not real, neither was the quiet hillside and its fresh grave beneath the spruce tree.
He slept under the table, and woke before dawn, to find that the sense of unreality persisted. Everything around him seemed no more than a waking dream. MacLennan himself seemed to have ceased to exist; his body rose, washed itself, and ate, nodded and spoke without his cognizance. None of the outer world existed any longer. And so it was that when Joe Hobson had risen and announced that