On the outskirts of the city, they saw Continental soldiers.
“Lots of soldiers!” The boys were now hanging out of the wagon, pulling at each other’s sleeves to see a new marvel. Small canvas tents, only large enough to shelter a man from the rain, but hundreds of them, seeming to breathe as a breeze from the distant river fluttered through them. The breeze brought the sound of rhythmic shouting: men drilling, marching to and fro in a distant cleared square of trodden dirt, muskets on their shoulders. And then a pair of cannon, dark and lethal, on their limbers and ready to move, with their caissons full of crates of balls and barrels of powder. The boys were struck speechless.
“Jesus Christ.” Brianna, parochial-school girl that she was, seldom took the Lord’s name in vain, but this was a muttered prayer. Roger heard it and glanced at her.
“Aye,” he said, seeing what she was looking at. “They look harmless in a museum, don’t they?” His mouth tightened a little as he looked at the openmouthed boys, but he gave Brianna a wry smile and handed her the reins.
“Distraction,” he said briefly, and hoisted Mandy onto his lap, where he took a firm grip on her waist and began pointing out flights of snowy egrets and what just might be the hazy masts of ships in the distant harbor.
HOW LONG HAD it been since she’d seen a city? Brianna had been so keyed up when they came within sight of Charles Town that she’d scarcely noticed the city itself. She’d felt the heavy slosh of the sauerkraut barrels with every bump in the road, and when they reached the cobblestoned streets of Charles Town and the sloshing turned to a constant judder through the frame of the wagon, between nightmare visions of a barrel tipping out and bursting on the road and the necessity of keeping a grip on Mandy, she had little attention to spare.
But now, at last, they’d stopped. She felt weak-kneed, like someone stepping ashore after a long sea voyage, and thought she might smell of sauerkraut for the rest of her life, but such considerations weighed little against the relief of arrival. They’d had to leave the wagon in the yard of an inn and make their way on foot to the printshop. Charles Town had broad, gracious streets, but Fergus’s establishment lurked modestly on a smaller lane near the edge of the business district, tree-lined and pleasant, with several small shops about it—but not a street wide enough for wagons to pass each other.
Roger had given the inn’s ostler a few pennies to mind the wagon while they walked to the printshop, but he still felt uneasy at leaving it. On the other hand, the ostler had reared back, catching a whiff of sauerkraut, then spat on the cobbles and gave Roger a look indicating that a niggardly threepence was in no way enough for this.
The MacKenzies had long since ceased to notice the reek of fermenting cabbage, but their noses were twitching now, avid for the smells of a city—particularly the city’s food. They were near the river, and the scents of frying fish, chowder, and the briny whiff of fresh oysters mingled with the smell of grain and flowers and rose in an appetizing miasma around them.
“Oh, my God. Shrimp and grits?” Brianna’s stomach gave an audible growl, throwing all the children into giggles.
“What’s grits?” Mandy asked, sniffing hard. “I smell fish!”
“Grits are ground-up corn that’s been soaked in lye,” Roger told her absently. Hungry as he was, he was more taken by the houses, painted in brilliant blues and pinks and yellows like a kid’s crayon box. “Ye put butter or gravy on them.”
“Lye?” all three children chorused, aghast. All of them had been routinely threatened since babyhood not to go within a yard of the eye-watering lye bucket, Or Else.
“You wash the lye off it before you grind it up and eat it,” Brianna assured them. “You’ve eaten it before.” She glanced at Mandy, then at Roger. “Should we get something to eat before we …”
“No,” he said firmly, barely forestalling an outburst of enthusiasm from his troops. He was looking at Germain, who looked like he might throw up at any moment. “We need to go to the printshop first.”
Germain didn’t say anything, but swallowed visibly and licked his lips. He’d been doing that for the last couple of days; his lips were dry and cracked at the corners.
Brianna touched his shoulder gently.
“Je suis prest,” she said, and the look of apprehension lifted briefly from his face.
“You’re a girl, Auntie,” he said, with a roll of his eyes. “You have to say, ‘Je suis preste.’”