The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [242]
“Here.” Jamie stretched across the foot-wide span of rock-strewn water to hand me the pins extracted from the old diaper.
I took them, careful not to drop them in the stream. My fingers were stiff and chilly, but the pins were valuable; Bree had made them of heated wire, and Roger had carved the capped heads from wood, in accordance with her drawings. Honest-to-goodness safety pins, if a bit larger and cruder than the modern version. The only real defect was the glue used to hold the wooden heads to the wire; a casein glue made from boiled milk, it was by no means waterproof, and the heads had to be reglued periodically.
I folded the diaper snugly about Jemmy’s loins and thrust a pin through the cloth, smiling at the sight of the wooden cap. Bree had taken one set and carved a small, comical frog—each with a wide, toothless grin—onto each one.
“All right, Froggie, here you go then.” Diaper securely fastened, I sat down and boosted him into my lap, smoothing down his smock and attempting to rewrap his blanket.
“Where did Duncan go?” I asked. “Down to see the Leftenant?”
Jamie shook his head, bent over his task.
“I told him not. He was in Hillsborough during the troubles there. Best he should wait a bit; then if Hayes should ask, he can swear honestly there’s no man here who took part in the riots.” He looked up and smiled, without humor. “There won’t be, come morning.”
I watched his hands, large and capable, wringing out the rinsed clout. The scars on his right hand were usually almost invisible, but they stood out now, ragged white lines against his cold-reddened skin. The whole business made me mildly uneasy, though there seemed no direct connection with us.
For the most part, I could think of Governor Tryon with no more than a faint sense of edginess; he was, after all, safely tucked away in his nice new palace in New Bern, separated from our tiny settlement on Fraser’s Ridge by three hundred miles of coastal towns, inland plantations, pine forest, piedmont, trackless mountains, and sheer, howling wilderness. With all the other things he had to worry about, such as the self-styled “Regulators” who had terrorized Hillsborough, and the corrupt sheriffs and judges who had provoked the terror, I hardly thought he would have time to spare a thought for us and our peaceable existence.
The uncomfortable fact remained that Jamie held title to a large grant of land in the North Carolina mountains as the gift of Governor Tryon—and Tryon in turn held one small but important fact tucked away in his vest pocket; Jamie was a Catholic. And Royal grants of land were made only to Protestants, by law.
Given the small numbers of Catholics in the colony, and the lack of organization among them—there were no Catholic churches, no resident Catholic priests; Father Donahue, who would perform the weddings this afternoon, had made the arduous journey down from Baltimore—the question of religion was rarely an issue. Jamie’s aunt, Jocasta Cameron, and her late husband had been influential among the Scottish community here for so long that no one would have thought of questioning their religious background, and I thought it likely that few of the Scots with whom we had been celebrating all week knew that we were Papists.
They were, however, likely to notice quite soon. Bree and Roger, who had been handfast for a year, were to be married by the priest today, along with two other Catholic couples from Barbecue Creek—and with Jocasta and Duncan Innes.
“Archie Hayes,” I said suddenly. “Is he a Catholic?”
Jamie hung the wet clout from a nearby branch and shook water from his hands.
“I havena asked him,” he said. “But I shouldna think so. That is, his father was not; I should be surprised if he was—and him an officer.”
“True.” The disadvantages of Scottish birth, poverty, and being an ex-Jacobite were sufficiently staggering; amazing enough that Hayes had overcome these