The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [64]
Jamie rubbed a hand over his face and through his hair, and shrugged, sighing.
“’Twas luck I should have come across auld Arch Bug and his wife today. If it comes to the fighting—and it will, I suppose, later, if not now—then Claire will ride with us. I shouldna like to leave Brianna to manage on her own, and it can be helped.”
Roger felt the small nagging weight of doubt drop away, as all became suddenly clear.
“On her own. You mean—ye want me to come? To help raise men for the militia?”
Jamie gave him a puzzled look.
“Aye, who else?”
He pulled the edges of his plaid higher about his shoulders, hunched against the rising wind. “Come along, then, Captain MacKenzie,” he said, a wry note in his voice. “We’ve work to do before you’re wed.”
9
GERM OF DISSENT
I PEERED UP THE NOSE of one of Farquard Campbell’s slaves, half my mind on the nasal polyp obstructing the nostril, the other half on Governor Tryon. Of the two, I felt more charitably toward the polyp, and I intended to cauterize that out of existence with a hot iron.
It seemed so bloody unfair, I thought, frowning as I sterilized my scalpel and set the smallest cauterizing iron in a dish of hot coals.
Was this the beginning? Or one of them? It was the end of 1770; in five years more, all of the thirteen Colonies would be at war. But each colony would come to that point by a different process. Having lived in Boston for so long, I knew from Bree’s school lessons what the process had been—or would be—for Massachusetts. Tax, Boston Massacre, Harbor, Hancock, Adams, Tea Party, all that. But North Carolina? How had it happened—how would it happen—here?
It could be happening now. Dissension had been simmering for several years between the planters of the eastern seaboard and the hardscrabble homesteaders of the western backcountry. The Regulators were mostly drawn from the latter class; the former were wholeheartedly in Tryon’s camp—on the side of the Crown, that was to say.
“All right now?” I had given the slave a good slug of medicinal whisky, by way of fortification. I smiled encouragingly, and he nodded, looking uncertain but resigned.
I had never heard of Regulators, but here they were, nonetheless—and I had seen enough by now to know just how much the history books left out. Were the seeds of revolution being sown directly under my own nose?
Murmuring soothingly, I wrapped a linen napkin round my left hand, took firm hold of the slave’s chin with it, poked the scalpel up his nostril and severed the polyp with a deft flick of the blade. It bled profusely, of course, the blood gushing warmly through the cloth round my hand, but evidently was not very painful. The slave looked surprised, but not distressed.
The cautery iron was shaped like a tiny spade, a bit of square, flattened metal on the end of a slender rod with a wooden handle. The flat bit was smoking in the fire, the edges glowing red. I pressed the cloth hard against the man’s nose to blot the blood, took it away, and in the split second before the blood spurted out again, pressed the hot iron up his nose against the septum, hoping against hope that I’d got the proper spot.
The slave made a strangled noise in his throat, but didn’t move, though tears poured down his cheeks, wet and warm on my fingers. The smell of searing blood and flesh was just the same as the scent that rose from the barbecue pits. My stomach growled loudly; the slave’s bulging, bloodshot eye met mine, astonished. My mouth twitched, and he giggled faintly through the tears and snot.
I took the iron away, cloth poised. No fresh blood flowed. I tilted the man’s head far back, squinting to see, and was pleased to find the small, clean mark, high on the mucosa. The burn would be a vivid red, I knew, but without the light of a scope, it looked black, a small scab hidden like a tick in the hairy shadows of the nostril.
The man