The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [319]
“He says it’s true—though I hadna doubted it. There are more than a thousand men, camped near Salisbury. And more joining them each day, he says. The auld mumper is pleased about it!” He frowned, drumming the two stiff fingers of his right hand lightly against his leg, and I realized that he was rather worried.
Not without cause. Putting aside the threat of conflict itself, it was spring. Only the fact that River Run was in the piedmont had allowed us to come to Jocasta’s wedding; down here, the woods were cloudy with blossom and crocuses popped through the earth like orange and purple dragon’s-teeth, but the mountains were still cloaked in snow, the tree branches sporting swollen buds. In two weeks or so, those buds would burst, and it would be time for the spring planting on Fraser’s Ridge.
True, Jamie had provided for such an emergency by finding old Arch Bug, but Arch could manage only so much by himself. And as for the tenants and homesteaders . . . if the militia were raised again, the women would be left to do the planting alone.
“The men in this camp—they’re men who’ve left their land, then?” Salisbury was in the piedmont, as well. It wasn’t thinkable for working farmers to abandon their land at this time of year for the sake of protest against the government, no matter how annoyed they were.
“Left it, or lost it,” he said briefly. The frown deepened as he looked at me. “Have ye spoken wi’ my aunt?”
“Ah . . . no,” I said, feeling guilty. “Not yet. I was just going . . . oh—you said there was another problem. What else has happened?”
He made a sound like a hissing teakettle, which for him betokened rare impatience.
“Christ, I’d nearly forgot her. One of the slave women’s been poisoned, I think.”
“What? Who? How?” My hands dropped from my hair as I stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I am telling ye, am I not? Dinna fash yourself, she’s in no danger. Only stinking drunk.” He twitched his shoulders irritably. “The only difficulty is that perhaps it wasna her that was meant to be poisoned. I’ve sent Roger Mac and Brianna to look, and they’ve not come back to say anyone’s dead, so maybe not.”
“Maybe not?” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, distracted from the extant worries by this new development. “I grant you, alcohol is poisonous, not that anyone seems ever to realize it, but there’s a difference between being drunk and being deliberately poisoned. What do you mean—”
“Sassenach,” he interrupted.
“What?”
“What in the name o’ God have ye been doing?” he burst out.
I stared at him in bewilderment. His face had been growing redder as we talked, though I had supposed it to be only frustration and worry over Ninian, and the Regulators. It dawned on me, catching a dangerous blue glint in his eye, that there was something rather more personal about his attitude. I tilted my head to one side, giving him a wary look.
“What do you mean, what have I been doing?”
His lips pressed tight together, and he didn’t answer. Instead, he extended a forefinger and touched it, very delicately, beside my mouth. He turned his hand over then, and presented me with a small dark object clinging to the tip of his finger—Phillip Wylie’s star-shaped black beauty mark.
“Oh.” I felt a distinct buzzing in my ears. “That. Er . . .” My head felt light, and small spots—all shaped like black stars—danced before my eyes.
“Yes, that,” he snapped. “Christ, woman! I’m deviled to death wi’ Duncan’s havers and Ninian’s pranks—and why did ye not tell me he’d been fighting wi’ Barlow?”
“I’d scarcely describe it as a fight,” I said, struggling to regain a sense of coolness. “Besides, Major MacDonald put a stop to it since you were nowhere to be found. And if you want to be told things, the Major wants—”
“I ken what he wants.” He dismissed the Major with a curt flick of his hand. “Aye, I’m up to my ears in Majors and Regulators and drunken maid servants, and you’re out in the stable, canoodling wi’ that fop!”
I felt the blood rising behind my eyes, and curled my fists,