Then it stopped. Cunningham still stood, unmoving save for his eyes, which took note in turn of each face in the room. Jamie had been listening intently, not so much for Cunningham’s words but composing answers to them. Then Jamie rose to his feet. His own words fell away, and others rose in their place.
“I will say but one thing to ye all, a charaidean. And that is not my own, but a thing said by our forefathers, four hundred years ago.” A faint stir broke the sense of ice, and men shifted on their stools, drawing themselves up to hear. Glancing sideways, to see how matters lay.
It had been a long—a very long—time since he’d read the Declaration of Arbroath, but they weren’t words you’d forget.
“As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting …” He paused and looked Cunningham straight in the eyes. “… but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”
He didn’t wait for the deep rumble of response but turned on his heel and went out the door, as quick as he could, and broke into a run as soon as he was outside, knife in hand.
There were three or four of them, waiting for him. But they’d thought he’d talk on, and he caught them staring, moon-faced in the light from the suddenly open door. He hit one in the jaw, shouldered another out of the way, and was into the wood before they could move. He heard the shouting and confusion as the men in the Meeting House all tried either to get out or to punch each other.
The moon wasn’t yet up and the woods were pitch-dark, but he’d chosen a large boulder near a huge spruce for his hiding place and had the pistol in his hand within moments. It was loaded and primed, but he didn’t cock it yet.
His heart was pounding in his ears as he slid through the brush—he daren’t run, in earshot of the Meeting House—but he thought he heard Cunningham’s quarterdeck roar. He was bellowing, “All hands!” and Jamie would have laughed, if he’d had breath.
His freedom—and probably his life—depended on two things now, and he had no control over either one. If Scotchee Cameron had got his note, and if he thought it was worth keeping the Cherokee from being involved in a fracas over the Line—that was one thing. The other was whether John Sevier had been able to find Partland and his men at Ninety-Six and stop them.
Hiram Crombie and the rest were keeping Cunningham and his men busy, from the sounds of it. But if either Cameron or Sevier had failed him, it was going to be a bloody night.
IT WAS WELL past midnight; I’d sent the girls and Bluebell up to bed two hours ago, and now exhaustion hung over the kitchen like a low veil of chimney smoke. We had exhausted everything: prayer, conversation, industry, food, milk, and chicory coffee. Elspeth didn’t drink alcohol recreationally, pious Christian that she was, and had refused more than the one medicinal cup of whisky tonight. While I longed to obliviate myself, I felt that I had to stay sober, had to be ready. For what, I didn’t want to think—thinking was another thing I had exhausted.
For a time, I had been conscious every moment of what might be happening at the Meeting House. Visualizing the Lodge meeting—or what I knew of it, for Jamie observed the Masonic vows of secrecy, and while he laughed with me over the apron and dagger, he said nothing about their rituals. Wondering where the crisis would come.
“Nothing will happen during the meeting, Sassenach,” he’d said, in an effort to be reassuring. “Cunningham’s an officer and a gentleman, and a Mason of the Thirty-third Degree. He takes an oath seriously.”
“Such men are dangerous,” I’d said, quoting Julius Caesar. I was striving for levity, but Jamie had just nodded soberly and taken the best of his pistols from its place above the mantelpiece.
But now my mind was blank, having room only for a formless dread. I’d stirred up the fire; I stared into the flames, my face hot and my hands cold as ice, lying useless in my lap.
“It’s raining.” Elspeth broke the silence, lifting her head at the sound of the spatter of raindrops against the closed shutters. We were sitting by the kitchen fire again, having left the surgery spick-and-span. Fresh bandages. Linen towels. Surgical instruments recleaned and sterilized, laid out on their own fresh towel on the counter. The brazier cleaned and filled with new hickory chips, a selection of cautery irons ready beside it. Without speaking a word to each other about what we were doing, we had prepared for sudden and dire emergency.