“Ye’re sure, yourself?” Jamie asked, not moving. Ian hadn’t asked him that, but he couldn’t help himself. Ian touched his shoulder.
“I’m sure this man is no concern of ours,” he said firmly. “Ought we to leave him with a blessing, though? He’s a stranger.”
They stood close together and murmured the short form of the death dirge. Jamie’s eyes were accustomed now to the dark of the shed, and he saw the words come out of their mouths in white wisps, insubstantial as the soul they blessed.
They left, and Jamie closed the shed door quietly behind them.
THE MAN WAS still in their minds, though, as they walked down the street. Not the dead man they had just left. The other.
“Ye didna go to look for him, did ye?” Jamie asked Ian as they turned in to the main street. “After ye learnt his name, I mean.”
“Och, no. I kent ye’d dealt with him.” They were near the square, and there was enough light from the taverns that he saw Ian glance at him, one brow raised.
“Ken, I had some business in the forest near the bottom of the Ridge, and I heard your horse comin’ along the wagon road just after dawn, so I went and looked. Ye had your rifle with ye and ye looked grim enough. I could tell ye were hunting, but it wouldna be an animal, of course, not on horseback.” Ian’s head turned briefly toward him.
“Ye didna look like ye needed help, but I said the prayer for ye, Uncle—for a warrior goin’ out.”
The knot between Jamie’s shoulder blades relaxed a bit. He found it oddly comforting to know that he had not in fact gone alone on that journey, even though he’d not known it at the time.
“I thank ye, Ian. It was a help, I’m sure.” The cold oppression of the shed had lifted with the advent of torchlights and the noise of the town, so they walked for a bit by silent consent, leaving the women time to settle themselves and put the bairn to bed.
The moon was well above the housetops of Salisbury, but there were still men abroad in the streets, and the place had a restless air about it.
They passed a group of men, twenty or so, faceless under the dark brims of their hats, but the moon lit a pale cloud of the dust kicked up by their boots, so it seemed they walked knee-deep through a rising fog. They were Scotch-Irish, talking loudly, noticeably drunk and arguing among themselves, and Jamie and Ian passed by unnoticed. Francis Locke had said there were a number of militia companies in the town; these men had the look of new militia—self-important and unsure at the same time, and wanting to show that they weren’t.
They crossed through the square and the streets behind it and found silence again amid the calling of owls from the trees near Town Creek. Ian broke it, talking low, halfway to himself and halfway not.
“Last time I walked like this—at night, I mean, just walking, not huntin’—was just after Monmouth,” he said. “I’d been in the British camp, wi’ his lordship, and he asked me to stay, because I’d an arrow in my arm—ye recall that, aye? Ye broke the shaft for me, earlier that day.”
“I’d forgot,” Jamie admitted.
“Well, it was a long day.”
“Aye. I remember bits and pieces—I lost my horse when he went off a bridge into one of those hellish morasses, and I’m never going to forget the sound o’ that.” A deep shudder curdled his wame, recalling the taste of his own vomit. “And then I remember General Washington—were ye there, Ian, when he turned back the retreat after Lee made a collieshangie of it?”
“Aye,” Ian said, and laughed a little. “Though I didna take much notice. I had my own bit o’ trouble to settle, with the Abenaki. And I did settle it, too,” he added, grimness coming into his voice. “Your men got one o’ them, but I killed the other in the British camp that night, wi’ his own tomahawk.”
“I hadna heard about that,” Jamie said, surprised. “Ye did it in the British camp? Ye never told me that. How did ye come to be there, for that matter? Last I saw ye was just before the battle, and the next I saw ye, your cousin William was bringin’ what I thought was your corpse into Freehold on a mule.”
And the next time he’d seen William had been in Savannah, when his son had come to ask his help in saving Jane Pocock. They’d been too late. That failure had been neither of their faults, but his heart still hurt for the poor wee lassie … and for his poor lad.
“I dinna mind most o’ that, myself,” Ian said. “I came in wi’ Lord John—we got arrested together—but then I walked out o’ the camp, meanin’ to go find Rachel or you, but I was bad wi’ the fever, the night goin’ in and out around me like as if it was breathin’ and I was walkin’ along through the stars wi’ my da beside me, just talkin’ to him, as if …”