An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana. Страница 186

“Find the other man and send him to my tent, so he can tell me exactly where your brother is. I’ll go to fetch Ian and we’ll get him back.” He squeezed her arm gently to make her look at him, and she did, though so distracted he thought she barely saw him.

“Dinna fash yourself. We’ll get him back for ye,” he repeated gently. “I swear it, by Christ and His Mother.”

“Thee must not swear—oh, the devil with it!” she cried, then clapped a hand over her mouth. She shut her eyes, swallowed, and took it away again.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Ye’re welcome,” he said, with an eye to the sinking sun. Did the British prefer to hang people at sunset or at dawn? “We’ll get him back,” he said once more, firmly. Dead or alive.

THE CAMP’S commanding officer had built a gibbet in the center of the camp. It was a crude affair of unbarked logs and rough timber, and from the holes and gouges round its nails, had been disassembled and moved several times. It looked effective, though, and the dangling noose gave Jamie a feeling of ice in his water.

“We’ve played the deserter game once too often,” Jamie whispered to his nephew. “Or maybe three.”

“D’ye think he’s ever used it?” Ian murmured back, peering down at the sinister thing through their screen of oak saplings.

“He wouldna go to that much work only to scare someone.”

It scared him, badly. He didn’t point out to Ian the spot near the bottom of the main upright, where someone’s—or someones’—desperately flailing feet had kicked away chunks of the bark. The makeshift gibbet wasn’t high enough for the drop to break a man’s neck; a man hanged on it would strangle slowly.

He touched his own neck in reflexive aversion, Roger Mac’s mangled throat and its ugly raw scar clear in his mind. Even clearer was the memory of the grief that had overwhelmed him, coming to take down Roger Mac from the tree they’d hanged him on, knowing him dead and the world changed forever. It had been, too, though he hadn’t died.

Well, it wasn’t going to change for Rachel Hunter. They weren’t too late, that was the important thing. He said as much to Ian, who didn’t reply but gave him a brief glance of surprise.

How do you know? it said, plain as words. He lifted a shoulder and inclined his head toward a spot a little farther down the hill, where an outcrop of rock covered in moss and bearberry would give them cover. They moved off silently, keeping low, making their movements in the same slow rhythm to which the wood was moving. It was twilight and the world was full of shadows; it was no trick to be two more.

He knew they hadn’t hanged Denny Hunter yet, because he’d seen men hanged. Execution left a stain upon the air and marked the souls of those who saw it.

The camp was quiet. Not literally—the soldiers were making considerable racket, and a good thing, too—but in terms of its spirit. There was neither a sense of dread oppression nor the sick excitement that sprang from the same source; you could feel such things. So Denny Hunter was either here, alive—or had been sent elsewhere. If he was here, where would he be?

Confined somehow, and under guard. This wasn’t a permanent camp; there was no stockade. It was a big camp, though, and it took them some time to circle it, checking to see whether Hunter might be somewhere in the open, tied to a tree or shackled to a wagon. He was nowhere in sight, though. That left the tents.

There were four large ones, and one of these plainly housed the commissary; it stood apart and had a small cluster of wagons near it. It had also a constant stream of men going in and out, emerging with sacks of flour or dried peas. No meat, though he could smell cooking rabbit and squirrel from some of the campfires. The German deserters had been right, then; the army was living off the land, as well as it could.

“The commander’s tent?” Ian whispered softly to him. It was plain to see, with its pennants and the knot of men who stood about just outside its entrance.

“I hope not.” Plainly they’d have taken Denny Hunter to the commander for interrogation. And if he were still in doubt as to Hunter’s bona fides, he might have kept the man close at hand for further questioning.

Had he already made up his mind on the matter, though—and Rachel had been convinced of it—he wouldn’t keep him. He would have been sent somewhere under guard to await his reckoning. Under guard and out of sight, though Jamie doubted the British commander feared a rescue attempt.

“Eeny-meeny-miney-mo,” he muttered under his breath, twitching a finger back and forth between the two remaining tents. A guard with a musket was standing more or less between them; no telling which he was set to guard. “That one.” He lifted his chin to the one on the right, but even as he did so felt Ian stiffen beside him.

“Nay,” Ian said softly, eyes riveted. “The other.”

There was something strange in Ian’s voice, and Jamie glanced at him in surprise, then down at the tent.

At first, his only thought was a fleeting sense of confusion. Then the world changed.

It was twilight, but they were by now no more than fifty yards away; there was no mistaking it. He hadn’t seen the boy since he was twelve, but he had memorized every moment they’d spent in each other’s presence: the way he carried himself, the quick, graceful movement—that’s from his mother, he thought in a daze of shock, seeing the tall young officer make a gesture of the hand that was Geneva Dunsany to the life—the shape of his back, his head and ears, though the slender shoulders had thickened to a man’s. Mine, he thought, with a surge of pride that shocked him nearly as much as William’s sudden appearance had. They’re mine.

Jarring as they were, these thoughts took less than half a second to dash through his head and out again. He breathed in, very slowly, and out again. Had Ian remembered William from their meeting seven years earlier? Or was the resemblance so instantly visible to a casual eye?

It didn’t matter now. The camp was beginning its supper preparations; within minutes everyone would be engrossed in the meal. It was better to move then, even without the cover of darkness.

“It has to be me, aye?” Ian gripped his wrist, compelling his attention. “D’ye want to make the diversion before or after?”

“After.” He’d been thinking, in the back of his mind, all the time they were creeping toward the camp, and now the decision lay ready, as though someone else had made it. “Best if we can get him away quiet. Try, and if things go wrong, screech.”

Ian nodded and, with no further conversation, dropped to his belly and began a stealthy worming through the brush. The evening was cool and pleasant after the heat of the day, but Jamie’s hands felt cold and he cupped them round the clay belly of the little firepot. He’d carried it from their own camp, feeding it bits of dry stick along the way. It was hissing softly to itself as it fed on a chunk of dried hickory, both the sight and the smell of it safely hidden in the haze of campfire smoke that drifted through the trees, dispelling the gnats and the bloodthirsty mosquitoes, thank God and His mother.

Wondering at his own twitching—it wasn’t like him—he touched his sporran, checking yet again that the cork had not come loose from the bottle of turpentine, even though he knew well it hadn’t; he’d smell it.

The arrows in his quiver shifted as he shifted his weight, the fletchings rustling. He was in easy bowshot of the commander’s tent, could have the canvas well alight in seconds if Ian screeched. If he didn’t…

He began to move again, eyes flitting over the ground, searching for a patch that would do. Dry grass there was in plenty, but it would go up too fast if that was all there was. He wanted a fast flame but a big one.

The soldiers would have already scavenged the nearby forest for firewood, but he spotted a fallen fir snag, too heavy to carry away. Foragers had snapped the lower branches off, but there were plenty left, thick with dried needles that the wind hadn’t taken yet. He moved back slowly, far enough out of sight that he could move quickly again, gathering armfuls of dry grass, bark scraped hasty from a log, anything that would kindle.