The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [405]
With a mental shrug, he bent and took off his shoes and stockings. It must be the circumstances, he thought. Not that one could quite compare wading a shallow creek in search of a Quaker rabble-rouser to flying a Spitfire across the night-time Channel on a bombing run to Germany. A mission was a mission, though, he supposed.
He looked round once again, but saw only tadpoles wriggling in the shallows. With a slightly crooked smile, he stepped into the water, sending the tadpoles into frenzied flight.
“Over the top, then,” he said to a wood-duck. The bird ignored him, going on with its foraging among the dark-green rafts of floating cress.
No challenge came from the trees on either side; no sounds at all, bar the cheerful racket of nesting birds. It was as he sat on a sunwarmed rock, drying his feet before putting his shoes and stockings back on, that he finally heard some indication that the far side of the creek was populated by humans.
“So what do you want then, sweeting?”
The voice came from the shrubbery behind him, and he froze, blood thundering in his ears. It was a woman’s voice. Before he could move or think to answer, though, he heard a laugh, deeper in pitch, and with a particular tone to it that made him relax.
Instinct informed him before his reason did that voices with that particular intonation were not a threat.
“Dunno, hinney, what will it cost me?”
“Ooh, hark at him! Not the time to count your pennies, is it?”
“Don’t you worry, ladies, we’ll take up a collection amongst us if we have to.”
“Oh, is that the way of it? Well and good, sir, but be you aware, in this congregation, the collection comes before the singing!”
Listening to this amiable wrangling, Roger deduced that the voices in question belonged to three men and two women, all of whom seemed confident that whatever the financial arrangements, three would go into two quite evenly, with no awkward remainders.
Picking up his shoes, he stole quietly away, leaving the unseen sentries—if that’s what they were—to their sums. Evidently, the army of the Regulation wasn’t quite so organized as the government troops.
Less organized was putting it mildly, he thought, a little later. He had kept to the creek bank for some distance, unsure where the main body of the army might be. He had walked nearly a quarter-mile, with neither sight nor sound of a soul other than the two whores and their customers. Feeling increasingly surreal, he wandered through small pine groves, and across the edges of grassy meadows, with no company save courting birds and small gossamer butterflies in shades of orange and yellow.
“What the hell sort of way is this to run a war?” he muttered, shoving his way through a blackberry bramble. It was like one of those science fiction stories, in which everyone but the hero had suddenly vanished from the face of the earth. He was beginning to be anxious; what if he didn’t manage to find the bloody Quaker—or even the army—before the shooting started?
Then he rounded a bend in the creek, and caught his first glimpse of the Regulators proper; a group of women, washing clothes in the rushing waters by a cluster of boulders.
He ducked back into the brush before they should see him, and turned away from the creek, heartened. If the women were here, the men weren’t far away.
They weren’t. Within a few more yards, he heard the sounds of camp—casual voices, laughter, the clank of spoons and tea-kettles and the clunk of splitting wood. Rounding a clump of hawthorn, he was nearly knocked over by a gang of young men who ran past, hooting and yelling, as they chased one of their number who brandished a fresh-cut racoon’s tail overhead, floating in the breeze as he ran.
They charged past Roger without a second glance, and he went on, a bit less warily. He wasn’t challenged; there were no sentries. In fact, a strange face appeared to be neither a novelty nor a threat. A few men glanced casually at him, but then turned back to their talk, seeing nothing odd in his