The erstwhile butler had got halfway into the saddle. He booted his horse and shot straight into the creek toward Jamie, who leapt to the side, then fell again as a slippery stone rolled under his foot. The horse clipped him in the hip with a hind foot as he tried to rise and knocked him sprawling.
He was too infuriated even to curse coherently. His left eye was watering profusely and he dashed his sleeve over it—to no effect, the sleeve being sodden.
The Lindsays had taken off in pursuit of Ulysses and the small group of his nearby soldiers—the McHughs had chased their own game away from the creek, up into a tangled growth of alders and hemlocks; he could hear shouts and the occasional ring of swords and gun barrels clashing.
He didn’t want any killing, and had said so, but the young McHughs might not remember that in the heat of their first real fight. And Ulysses’s soldiers were likely not under any such proscription. His own horse was still standing where he’d left it, mirabile dictu. Phineas wasn’t at all pleased to see his owner still moving, and when he clambered into the saddle sopping wet, the horse tried to bite him in the leg. He snapped the rein smartly across Phin’s nose, pulled the horse’s head round, and turned back uphill, heading for the sounds of affray.
The storm had broken and it was raining hard; he could barely make out the dark traces of a deer’s trail that led upward. But then they burst out suddenly into a small, dark clearing, filled with layers of dead leaves, trampled into the mud by stamping horses. Some of the British soldiers had muskets, but the attackers were keeping them too busy to aim.
For the most part. One gun went off with a foom! and a cloud of white smoke, and before he could see was anyone hurt by it, the ground in front of him moved. It bloody moved! Phineas had had enough, and when he kept the gelding from turning tail, the horse suddenly changed his mind and, with a furious squeal, charged the moving shape.
An enormous black boar exploded from the leaves under which it had been sleeping, and all of the horses went mad.
THE SOUND OF horses and men came faintly to me through the trees from the direction of the house. I was in the root cellar, turning over yams and checking for rot, but I dropped the yam I was holding and popped out of the cellar like a groundhog from its hole, listening hard.
Not fighting. There were several men, but no screaming or sounds of violence. I slammed the cellar door and ran for the house, but slowed a bit when I heard Bluebell barking. Not her hysterical “Strangers!” bark, nor yet the view-halloo version reserved for skunks, possums, raccoons, woodchucks, or anything else she might consider worth chasing. It was her delighted yap of welcome, and the dart of terror that had struck me in the cellar dissolved in relief. Probably no one was dead, then.
I trotted up the path, rubbing the dirt off my hands with my grubby gardening apron, and wondering how many men Jamie had brought with him and what in God’s name I could feed them for supper. I also wondered whether Jamie had retrieved Lord George Germain’s ruinous letter.
I arrived just in time to say goodbye to the Lindsays, who were away home, they said; Kenny’s wife would have something on for supper.
“The rest went on afore us,” Murdo said, nodding vaguely toward the eastern side of the ridge. “We only came this way in case Mac Dubh should need a hand.”
A hand with what? I wondered, but didn’t detain Murdo, who was already mounted and clearly anxious to be away—it was late afternoon and the sky was still black and roiling overhead. I waved them farewell and went inside to see what—or who—Jamie had brought back. Surely not Ulysses …
It wasn’t. I heard him talking to someone in my surgery, in a courteous way, and another man’s reply, but not a man I knew.
I twitched back the curtain—maybe he’ll be home long enough to build me a proper door one of these days—and stopped dead in surprise. It wasn’t Ulysses, nor either of the soldiers who had accompanied him to the door, but plainly this was one of his soldiers, for the man was black and wore a wet British military uniform, though not one I’d ever seen before: black breeches and a scarlet coat, without decoration beyond the shoulder-knot insignia of a corporal, but sporting a stained white sash that ran from his shoulder across his chest, bearing the embroidered words “Liberty to the Slaves.”
“Ah, there ye are, Sassenach.” Jamie rose from my workbench stool. His clothes clung to him, obviously wet. “I hoped ye’d be back soon. May I have the pleasure to present to ye Corporal Sipio Jackson—of His Majesty’s Company of Black Pioneers?” He gestured to the man lying on the table. “Dinna mind the courtesies, Corporal; I dinna want to have to pick ye up again.”