The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [233]
I blinked blearily across a stretch of rough grass, to where a detachment of the 67th Highland regiment was drawn up in full splendor by the creek, grandly impervious to the rain.
The weather for Gatherings was always chancy, since they must perforce be held in late autumn, after the harvest was done. We had been lucky this year, though, and the weather had held fine—until today. A spatter of rain in the face had wakened me abruptly to the sight of gray sky above and a fog that lay like smoke in the hollows all round; a cloud had settled on Mount Helicon like a broody hen on a single egg, and the air was thick with damp.
“By his EXCELLENCY, WILLIAM TRYON, Esquire, His Majesty’s Captain-General, Governor, and Commander-in-Chief, in and over the said Province,” Hayes read, lifting his voice in a bellow to carry above the noises of wind and water, and the premonitory murmurs of the crowd.
The moisture shrouded trees and rocks with dripping mist, the clouds spat intermittent sleet and freezing rain, and erratic winds had lowered the temperature by some thirty degrees. My left shin, sensitive to cold, throbbed at the spot where I had broken the bone two years before. A person given to portents and metaphors might have been tempted to draw comparisons between the nasty weather and the reading of the Governor’s Proclamation, I thought—the prospects were similarly chill and foreboding.
“Whereas I have received information that a great Number of outrageous and disorderly Persons did tumultuously assemble themselves together in the Town of Hillsborough, on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of last Month, during the sitting of the Superior Court of Justice of that District to oppose the Just Measures of Government and in open Violation of the Laws of their Country, audaciously attacking his Majesty’s Associate Justice in the Execution of his Office, and barbarously beating and wounding several persons in and during the sitting of said court, and offering other enormous Indignities and Insults to his Majesty’s Government, committing the most violent Outrages on the Persons and properties of the Inhabitants of the said Town, drinking Damnation to their lawful Sovereign King George and Success to the Pretender: To the End therefore, that the Persons concerned in the said outrageous Acts may be brought to Justice, I do, by the Advice and consent of his Majesty’s Council, issue this my Proclamation, hereby requiring and strictly enjoining all his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace in this Government to make diligent Inquiry into the above recited Crimes, and to receive the Deposition of such person or persons as shall appear before them to make Information of and concerning the same; which depositions are to be transmitted to me, in Order to be laid before the General Assembly, at New Bern, on the thirtieth day of November next, to which time it stands Prorogued for the immediate Dispatch of Public Business.
Given under my Hand, and the Great Seal of the Province, at New Bern, the Eighteenth Day of October, in the Tenth Year of his Majesty’s Reign, Anno Domini 1770.”
“Signed, William Tryon,” Hayes concluded, with a puff of steamy breath.
There was a subdued rumble from the crowd behind me, of interest and consternation—touched with a certain amount of amusement at the phrases regarding treasonous toasts.
This was a Gathering of Highlanders, many of them exiled to the Colonies in the wake of the Stuart Rising, and had Archie Hayes chosen to take official notice of what was said over the cups of whisky passed round the fires the night before… but then, he had but forty soldiers with him, and whatever his own opinions of King