The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [578]
“If he’d left the wagon and ridden one o’ the horses, he might ha’ made it,” Kenny said cynically. “But no; he ran smack into a sackful o’ Campbells. Government troops, aye?”
Roger nodded.
“I heard tell as he tried to pass himself off as a peddler, but he’d taken a load of corn from a farmhouse on that road, and the farmer swore himself purple that Christie’d been in his yard no more than three days before, wi’ a white cockade on his breest. So they took him, and that was that.”
Christie had gone first to Berwick Prison, and then—for reasons known only to the Crown—to Ardsmuir, where he had arrived a year before Jamie Fraser.
“I came at the same time.” Kenny peered into his empty mug, then reached for the pitcher. “It was an old prison—half-falling down—but they’d not used it for some years. When the Crown decided to reopen it, they brought men from here and from there; maybe a hundred and fifty men, all told. Mostly convicted Jacobites—the odd thief, and a murderer or two.” Kenny grinned suddenly, and Roger couldn’t help smiling in response.
Kenny was no great storyteller, but he spoke with such simple vividness that Roger had no trouble seeing the scene he described: the soot-streaked stones and the ragged men. Men from all over Scotland, ripped from home, deprived of kin and companions, thrown like bits of rubbish into a heap of compost, where filth, starvation, and close quarters generated a heat of rot that broke down both sensibility and civilness.
Small groups had formed, for protection or for the comfort of society, and there was constant conflict between one group and another. They banged to and fro like pebbles in the surf, bruising each other and now and then crushing some hapless individual who got in between.
“It’s food and warmth, aye?” Kenny said dispassionately. “There’s naught else to care for, in a place like that.”
Among the groups had been a small obdurate knot of Calvinists, headed by Thomas Christie. Mindful of their own, they shared food and blankets, defended each other—and behaved with a dour self-righteousness that roused the Catholics to fury.
“If one of us was to catch afire—and now and then, someone would, bein’ pushed into the hearth whilst sleepin’—they wouldna piss on him to put it out,” Kenny said, shaking his head. “They wouldna be stealing food, to be sure, but they would stand in the corner and pray out loud, rattlin’ on and on about whore-mongers and usurers and idolaters and the lot—and makin’ damn sure we kent who was meant by it!”
“And then came Mac Dubh.” The late autumn sun was sinking; Kenny’s stubbled face was blurred with shadow, but Roger could see the slight softening that came across it, relaxing the grimness of expression that accompanied Lindsay’s reminiscence.
“Something like the Second Coming, was it?” Roger said. He spoke half under his breath, and was surprised when Kenny laughed.
“Only if ye mean some of us kent Sheumais ruaidh already. No, man, they’d brought him by boat. Ye’ll ken Jamie Roy doesna take to boats, aye?”
“I’d heard something of the sort,” Roger answered dryly.
“Whatever ye heard, it’s true,” Kenny assured him, grinning. “He staggered into the cell green as a lass, vomited in the corner, then crawled under a bench and stayed there for the next day or two.”
Upon his emergence, Fraser had kept quiet for a time, watching to see who was who and what was what. But he was a gentleman born, and had been both a laird and a fierce warrior; a man much respected among the Highlanders. The men deferred to him naturally, seeking his opinion, asking his judgment, and the weaker sheltering in his presence.
“And that griped Tom Christie’s arse like a saddle-gall,” Kenny said, nodding wisely. “See, he’d got to thinking as how he