21
Lighting a Fuse
THEY SMELLED IT FIRST. Brianna felt her nose twitch at the mingled stench of urine and sulfur. Beside her on the wagon bench, reins in hand, her father coughed. With a fine coating of charcoal dust …
“Mama says it’s got medicinal purposes—or at least some people used to think it had.”
“What, gunpowder?” He spared her a sideways glance, but most of his attention was focused on the small cluster of buildings that had just come into view, charmingly situated at a bend in the river.
“Mm-hmm. A little Gunpowder tyed up in a rag, and held so in the mouth, that it may touch the aking tooth, instantly easeth the pains of the teeth. Nicholas Culpeper, 1647.”
Her father grunted.
“That likely works. Ye’d be too busy trying to decide whether to vomit or cough to be worrit about your teeth.”
Someone heard the rattle of the wagon wheels. Two men who had been smoking pipes near the river—a safe distance from the buildings, she noted—turned to stare at them. One tilted his head, estimating, but evidently decided they were worth talking to; he tapped the dottle from his pipe into the water and, putting the long-stemmed clay pipe into his belt, strolled toward the road, followed by his companion.
“Ho, there!” the first man called, waving. Jamie pulled the horses to a stop and waved back.
“Good afternoon to ye, sir. I’m Jamie Fraser, and this is my daughter, Mrs. MacKenzie. We’re seeking to buy powder.”
“I’d expect ye are,” the man said, rather dryly. “Nobody’d come here for any other reason.” Irish, she thought, smiling at him.
“Oh, that ain’t true, John.” His friend, a stocky man of thirty or so, nudged him amiably in the ribs, grinning at Brianna. “Some of us come to drink your wine and smoke your tobacco.”
“John Patton, sir,” the Irishman said, ignoring his friend. He offered Jamie his hand, and having shaken it invited them to drive in beside the stone building nearest the water.
“It’s the least likely to blow up,” the other man—who had introduced himself as Isaac Shelby—said, laughing. Brianna noticed that John Patton didn’t laugh.
The stone building was a mill. A constant dull rumble came through the walls, beneath the plash of the waterwheel, and the smell was quite different here: damp stone, waterweed, and a faint smell that reminded her of doused campfires and rain on the ashes of a burnt place in the forest. It gave her an odd quiver, low in her belly.
Her father got down and set about unhitching the horses; he gave her an eye and tilted his head toward one of the ramshackle sheds higher up the bank, where three people were standing in a group, evidently arguing about something. One of them was a woman, and her posture—arms folded and head bent, but in a way that suggested not submission, but a barely restrained urge to butt her interlocutor in the nose—argued that here was The Boss.
Brianna nodded and set off toward the shed, aware from the sudden silence behind her that either Mr. Patton, Mr. Shelby, or both were eyeing her rear aspect. Not that they’d see much; she was wearing a hunting shirt that came nearly to her knees, but the mere fact that she had on breeches under it …
She heard Shelby cough suddenly, and deduced that he’d just met her father’s eye.
“Jamie Fraser,” she heard Shelby say, trying for nonchalance. “I know a good many Frasers. Would you be from up around the Nolichucky?”
“No, we have a place near the Treaty Line in Rowan County,” her father said. “It’s called Fraser’s Ridge.”
“Ah! Then I’ll know you, sir!” Shelby sounded relieved. “Benjamin Cleveland told me of meeting you. He—”
The voices behind her faded as the group near the shed noticed her. All of them looked startled, but the woman’s look changed almost immediately into a dour amusement.
“Good day to ye, Missus,” she said, openly eyeing Brianna’s hunting clothes. She was about Brianna’s age and wearing a canvas apron, much worn and stained, with small blackened holes where sparks appeared to have fallen. The dark-brown skirt and long-sleeved man’s shirt beneath were rough homespun, though fairly clean. “What might I be doin’ for ye?”
“I’m Brianna MacKenzie,” Bree said, wondering whether she ought to offer a hand to shake. Mrs. Patton—for surely she had to be—didn’t extend one, so Brianna contented herself with a cordial nod. “My father and I are, um, seeking to buy some gunpowder. Are you by chance Mrs. Patton?” she added, as the woman made no move to introduce herself.