“Mrs. Fraser.” He’d turned when I came in, and now bowed to me, looking me over with a deliberately appraising, un-butler-like gaze. “I’m pleased to see you well.”
“Thank you. You’re looking quite … well, yourself. Captain Stevens.” He was. Tall and imposing in a well-tailored uniform, broad-shouldered and fit. Despite his apparent health, though, his face showed the marks of hard living—and his eyes were different. No longer the courteous blankness of a servant. These eyes were deep-lined, fierce, and, quite frankly, made me want to take a step backward.
He saw that, and his lips drew in a little in amusement, but he looked away.
Jamie was reaching into his cupboard for whisky. He nodded Ulysses to the visitor’s chair across the desk and set the battered pewter tray with bottle and glasses on the desk before taking his own chair.
“May I?” I said, and at Ulysses’s nod I poured him a respectable dram, and the same for Jamie. And for me. I wasn’t going anywhere until I found out what “Captain Stevens” was doing here. I took my glass and sat down on a stool, a little behind Jamie.
“Slàinte.” Jamie lifted his glass briefly, and Ulysses smiled slightly.
“Slàinte mhath,” he said.
“Ye’ll have kept your Gàidhlig, then,” Jamie said, a deliberate reference, I thought, to River Run, where most of the servants had had at least a passing acquaintance with the language of the Highlands.
“Not surprising,” Ulysses replied, not at all discomposed. He took a sip of the whisky, paused to let it spread through his mouth, and shook his head with a small “mm” of approval. “I joined Lord Dunmore’s company in ’74. You’ll know his lordship, of course.”
Jamie stiffened slightly.
“I do,” he said politely. “Though I’ve not had the pleasure of his acquaintance since the days before Culloden.”
“What?” I said. “I don’t recall a Lord Dunmore.”
“Well, he hadna got the title then.” Jamie glanced back at me and smiled a little, a rueful sharing of the memory of those fraught days. “But ye kent him, too, Sassenach—John Murray, he was then; just a lad, a page to Charles Stuart.”
“Oh. Yes.” I did recall him, just barely—a homely boy with receding chin, a large nose, and red hair that stuck out in tufts. “So now he’s Lord Dunmore …？”
“Yes. Of late, governor of the Colony of Virginia,” Ulysses said. “And more recently, commander of a major force against the Shawnee Indians in Ohio. A successful venture in which I was privileged to take part.” He did smile then, and I felt a small qualm in the pit of my stomach at the look of it. Indian wars were a messy business.
“Aye,” Jamie said, dismissively. “But surely the army has nay business of that kind wi’ the Cherokee. Though perhaps ye’ve come wi’ their allowance of powder and bullets from the government?”
“I have no army business with the Cherokee, no,” Ulysses replied politely. “In fact, I think of retiring from the army soon. Perhaps I shall follow your example, Mr. Fraser, and set up for a landlord. But for the moment, sir, my business is with you—though this visit is a personal one, rather than an official call. As yet.”
“A personal visit,” Jamie repeated, and leaned back a little in his chair, tilting his head. “And what might your personal business be with me?”
“Your aunt,” Ulysses said, and leaned forward, eyes fixed on Jamie’s face. “Does she still live?”
I was taken aback but at the same time realized that I wasn’t really surprised at all. Neither was Jamie, who didn’t change his expression but took a long, slow breath before replying.
“She does,” he said. “Though I canna tell ye a great deal more than that.”
Ulysses’s expression had certainly changed. His face was vivid, charged with urgency. “You can tell me where she is.”
I couldn’t always tell what Jamie was thinking, but in this instance, I was reasonably sure we were thinking the same thing.
Jocasta had married one of Jamie’s friends, Duncan Innes—while still carrying on her long-term affair with Ulysses, as we learned much later. In the chaotic aftermath of events at River Run and the subsequent dramatic revelations, Ulysses had fled, Jocasta had sold River Run, and she and Duncan had moved to Nova Scotia, and thence to a small farm on St. John’s Island.
I knew that the British army offered freedom to slaves who would join their ranks, and obviously that was the path Ulysses had chosen with Lord Dunmore. Jocasta had secretly manumitted him years before, but officially recognized freedom was a much safer path, especially in North Carolina, where a slave freed by his or her master must leave the colony within ten days or be subject to recapture and sale.