“All officers are bastards,” Jamie said dryly. “They have to be. So am I. Some ye can trust, though, and some ye can’t. From what I hear, Marion might be one to trust.”
“I see.” And you want a friend in the army before you go to them. A man to help you test the waters before you commit yourself. Or, maybe, to warn you off.
“That’s your choice, isn’t it?” Roger continued. “Whether to commit your—our—militia to fight with the army—or go it alone, like Cleveland and Shelby.”
“They’re not alone,” Jamie corrected. “The Overmountain men have each other to call upon in case of need. But each man keeps his own command. That’s no the way of it in the army.”
Jamie’s hair had come loose on one side; he pulled off the lacing and retied it, squinting his eyes against the wind. There was a late summer storm coming; you could see one approaching for miles, here in the mountains, and the dark clouds were massing fast over Roan Mountain.
“The choice,” Jamie said, still looking at the oncoming weather, “is whether to keep the militia close, to protect the Ridge—so far as that’s possible—or to go out, to seek battle wi’ the British. If we do that, then we can decide how best to go about it.”
Roger contemplated that one for a few moments.
“‘To be, or not to be?’” he asked. “‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind,’ and all that? Because that’s what you—we—are doing, no? We act or we don’t.” He glanced at Jamie, who was giving a good impression of a coiled spring, and smiled. “Get on wi’ ye; you couldna stay out of a fight if someone paid ye to do it.”
Jamie had the grace to laugh at that, though he looked self-conscious.
“Aye. But there is Captain Cunningham. He might get his guns one of these days, and then what?”
“Well, it wouldna be good,” Roger admitted. “But he’s not going to attack the Ridge and start burning down his neighbors’ cabins, is he? I mean … he lives here.”
“True.”
“So the Americans are going to what—lay siege to Savannah?”
“So he says. Randall. But they willna succeed.” There was something odd in Jamie’s voice every time he said that name. No wonder if there was, but Roger couldn’t say exactly what it was: not doubt, not hate, not—not quite—fear …
“Ye think it’s safe, though, for Bree and the kids to be in Savannah while this is going on?”
Jamie shrugged and picked up his discarded jacket.
“The Americans willna take the town, and Brianna will be under Lord John Grey’s protection inside it.”
“And ye trust him. Lord John, I mean.”
It wasn’t a question and Jamie didn’t answer it, but asked another.
“Do ye trust Randall?”
Roger drew in air between his teeth, but nodded.
“About the battles and so on? Aye, I do. I mean—to him it was history; it happened. And to everyone else in the time he published that book. He couldna very well say, ‘This battle happened on this date,’ when it really happened on that date—or didna happen at all. Because there’d be a great many other historians—and publishers, for that matter—who knew that it did. If the book was full of … misinformation, let us say, it would never have got published. I mean—academic publishers check the manuscripts of books they publish.”
They stood a little in silence, watching the storm come in. Roger would find Francis Marion, and, God willing, Fergus would find guns. But Roger found his thoughts sliding away from hard decisions and slippery realities toward his own more imminent personal prospects.
He was wondering whether Bree might possibly be pregnant, and if so, how she might respond to the smell of Sunday dinner in Salem.
51
Wheels within Wheels
“WHAT WAS IT YOUR mam said to your da about this expedition?” Roger rolled up his breeches to mid-thigh, eyeing the wagon wheel whose rim protruded from the burbling middle of a small creek.
“It’s too deep,” Brianna said, frowning at the rushing brown water. “You’d better take your breeches off. And maybe your shirt, too.”
“That’s what she said? Though she’s likely right about it being too deep …”
Brianna made a small, amused snort. He’d taken off his shoes, stockings, coat, waistcoat, and neckcloth, and looked like a man stripped to fight a serious duel.
“The good news is that with a current like that, you won’t get leeches. What she said to Da—or what she quoted herself as having said, which isn’t necessarily the same thing—was: ‘You’re telling me that you mean to turn a perfectly respectable Presbyterian minister into a gunrunner, and send him in a wagon full of dodgy gold and illegal whisky to buy a load of guns from an unknown smuggler, in company with your daughter and three of your grandchildren?’”