The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [394]
“No,” I said at last, and set my chin down again with a contented sigh. “It’s still you.”
He gave a small grunt of amusement, but lay still. I could hear one of the cooks stumbling round nearby, cursing as he tripped over a wagon-tongue. The camp was still in the process of assembling; a few of the companies—those with a high proportion of ex-soldiers among their officers and men—were tidy and organized. A good many were not, and tipsy tents and strewn equipment sprawled across the meadow in a quasi-military hodgepodge.
A drum began to beat, to no apparent effect. The army continued to snooze.
“Do you think the Governor is going to be able to do anything with these troops?” I asked dubiously.
The local avatar of the army appeared to have gone back to sleep as well. At my question, though, the long auburn lashes lifted in lazy response.
“Oh, aye. Tryon’s a soldier. He kens well enough what to do—at least to start. It’s no so verra difficult to make men march in column and dig latrines, ken. To make them fight is another thing.”
“Can he do that?”
The chest under my chin lifted in a deep sigh.
“Maybe so. Maybe no. The question is—will he have to?”
That was the question, all right. Rumors had flown round us like autumn leaves in a gale, all the way from Fraser’s Ridge. The Regulators had ten thousand men, who were marching in a body upon New Bern. General Gage was sailing from New York with a regiment of official troops to subdue the Colony. The Orange County militia had rioted and killed their officers. Half the Wake County men had deserted. Hermon Husband had been arrested and spirited onto a ship, to be taken to London for trial on charges of treason. Hillsborough had been taken by the Regulators, who were preparing to fire the town and put Edmund Fanning and all his associates to the sword. I did hope that one wasn’t true—or if it was, that Hubert Sherston was not one of Fanning’s intimates.
Sorting through the mass of hearsay, supposition, and sheer wild invention, the only fact of which we could be sure appeared to be that Governor Tryon was en route to join the militia. After which, we would just see, I supposed.
Jamie’s free hand rested on my back, his thumb idly stroking the edge of my shoulder blade. With his usual capacity for mental discipline, he appeared to have dismissed the uncertainty of the military prospects completely from his mind, and was thinking of something else entirely.
“Do ye ever think—” he began, and then broke off.
“Think what?” I bent and kissed his chest, arching my back to encourage him to rub it, which he did.
“Well . . . I’m no so sure I can explain, but it’s struck me that now I have lived longer than my father did—which is not something I expected to happen,” he added, with faint wryness. “It’s only . . . well, it seems odd, is all. I only wondered, did ye ever think of that, yourself—having lost your mother young, I mean?”
“Yes.” My face was buried in his chest, my voice muffled in the folds of his shirt. “I used to—when I was younger. Like going on a journey without a map.”
His hand on my back paused for a moment.
“Aye, that’s it.” He sounded a little surprised. “I kent more or less what it would be like to be a man of thirty, or of forty—but now what?” His chest moved briefly, with a small noise that might have been a mixture of amusement and puzzlement.
“You invent yourself,” I said softly, to the shadows inside the hair that had fallen over my face. “You look at other women—or men; you try on their lives for size. You take what you can use, and you look inside yourself for what you can’t find elsewhere. And always . . . always . . . you wonder if you’re doing it right.”
His hand was warm and heavy on my back. He felt the tears that ran unexpectedly from the corners of my eyes to dampen his shirt, and his other hand came up to touch my head and smooth my hair.
“Aye, that’s it,” he said again, very softly.
The camp was beginning to stir outside, with clangings and thumps, and the hoarse sound of sleep-rough voices. Overhead, the grasshopper