A WHITER SHADE OF PALE
MRS. SHERSTON, with an unexpected generosity, offered us her hospitality. I moved to the Sherstons’ large house in Hillsborough with Brianna, Jemmy, and my two patients; Jamie divided his time between Hillsborough and the militia camp, which remained in place at Alamance Creek while Tryon satisfied himself that the Regulation had indeed been decisively crushed.
While I couldn’t reach the bullet lodged in Morton’s lung with my forceps, it didn’t appear to be troubling him greatly, and the wound had begun to seal itself in a satisfactory fashion. There was no telling exactly where the bullet was, but plainly it hadn’t pierced any major vessels; as long as it didn’t move further, it was quite possible for him simply to live with the bullet embedded in his body; I had known a good many war veterans who had—Archie Hayes among them.
I was not at all sure how stable my small stock of penicillin might prove to be, but it seemed to work; there was a little redness and seepage at the wound site, but no infection, and very little fever. Beyond penicillin, the appearance a few days after the battle of Alicia Brown, now enormously pregnant, was the most important boost to Morton’s recovery. Within an hour of her arrival, he was sitting up in his cot, pale but jubilant, hair sticking up on end and his hand lovingly pressed against the writhing bulges of his unborn child.
Roger was another matter. He was not badly injured, beyond the crushing of his throat—though that was bad enough. The fractures to his fingers were simple; I had set them with splints and they should heal with no trouble. The bruising faded fairly quickly from livid reds and blues into a spectacular array of purple, green, and yellow that made him look as though he had just been exhumed after having been dead for a week or so. His vital signs were excellent. His vitality was not.
He slept a great deal, which should have been good. His slumber wasn’t restful, though; it had about it something unsettling, as though he sought unconsciousness with a fierce desire, and once achieved, clung to it with a stubbornness that bothered me more than I wanted to admit.
Brianna, who possessed her own brand of stubbornness, had the job of forcing him back to wakefulness every few hours, to take some nourishment and have the tube and its incision cleansed and tended. During these procedures, he would fix his eyes on the middle distance, and stare darkly at nothing, making the barest acknowledgment of remarks addressed to him. Once finished, his eyes would close again, and he would lie back on his pillow, bandaged hands folded across his chest like a tomb-figure, with no sound save the soft, breathy whistle from the tube in his neck.
Two days after the battle of Alamance, Jamie arrived at the Sherstons’ house in Hillsborough just before supper, tired from long riding, and covered with reddish dust.
“I had a wee talk wi’ the Governor today,” he said, taking the cup of water I had brought out to him in the yard. He drained it in a gulp and sighed, wiping sweat from his face with a coat-sleeve. “He was fashed about wi’ all the to-do, and of no mind to think about what happened after the battle—but I was of no mind to let it be.”
“I don’t imagine it was much of a contest,” I murmured, helping him to peel off the dusty coat. “William Tryon’s not even Scots, let alone a Fraser.”
That got me a reluctant half-smile. “Stubborn as rocks,” was the succinct description of the Fraser clan I had been given years before—and nothing in the intervening time period had given me cause to think it inaccurate in any way.
“Aye, well.” He shrugged and stretched luxuriously, his vertebrae cracking from the long ride. “Oh, Christ. I’m starved; is there food?” He relaxed and lifted his long nose, sniffing the air hopefully.
“Baked ham and sweet potato pie,” I told him, unnecessarily, since the honey-soaked fragrances of both were thick on the humid air. “So what did the Governor say, once you’d got him properly browbeaten?”
His teeth showed briefly at that description of his interview with Tryon, but I gathered from his faint air of satisfaction that it wasn’t totally incorrect.
“Oh, a number of things. But to begin with, I insisted he recall to me the circumstances when Roger Mac was taken; who gave him up, and what was said. I mean to get to the bottom of it.” He pulled the thong from his hair and shook out the damp locks, dark with sweat.
“Did he remember anything when you pressed him?”
“Aye, a bit more. Tryon says there were three men who had Roger Mac captive; one of them had a badge for Fraser’s Company, so of course he thought the man was one of mine. He says,” he added, with irony.
That would have been a reasonable assumption for the Governor to make, I thought—but Jamie was plainly in no mood to be reasonable.
“It must have been Roger’s badge that the man had,” I said. “The rest of your company came back with you—all except the Browns, and it wouldn’t have been them.” The two Browns had vanished, seizing the opportunity of the confusion of battle to take their vengeance on Isaiah Morton and then to escape before anyone discovered the crime. They wouldn’t have hung about to frame Roger, even had they some motive for doing so.
He nodded, dismissing the conclusion with a brief gesture.
“Aye. But why? He said Roger Mac was bound and gagged—a dishonorable way to treat a prisoner of war, as I said to him.”
“And what did he say to that?” Tryon might be slightly less stubborn than Jamie; he wasn’t any more amenable to insult.
“He said it wasna war; it was treasonable insurrection, and he was justified in taking summary measures. But to seize and hang a man, without allowing him to speak a word in his own behalf—” The color was rising dangerously in his face. “I swear to ye, Claire, if Roger Mac had died at the end of yon rope, I would have snapped Tryon’s neck and left him for the crows!”
I hadn’t the slightest doubt that he meant it; I could still see his hand, fitting itself so slowly, so gently, about the Governor’s neck above the silver gorget. I wondered whether William Tryon had had the slightest notion of the danger in which he had stood, that night after the battle.
“He didn’t die, and he isn’t going to.” I hoped I was right, but spoke as firmly as I could, laying a hand on his arm. The muscles in his forearm bulged and shifted with the restrained desire to hit someone, but stilled under my touch, as he looked down at me. He took a deep breath, then another, drummed his stiff fingers twice against his thigh, then got his anger under control once more.
“Well, so. He said the man identified Roger Mac as James MacQuiston, one of the ring-leaders of the Regulation. I have been asking after MacQuiston,” he added, with another glance at me. He was growing slightly calmer, talking. “Would it surprise ye, Sassenach, to discover that no one kens MacQuiston, by his face?”
It would, and I said so. He nodded, the high color receding slightly from his cheeks.
“So it did me. But it’s so; the man’s words are there in the papers for all to see—but no one has ever seen the man. Not auld Ninian, not Hermon Husband—no one of the Regulators that I could find to speak to—though the most of them are lying low, to be sure,” he added.
“I even found the printer who set one of MacQuiston’s speeches in type; he said the script of it was left upon his doorstep one morning, with a brick of cheese and two certificates of proclamation money to pay for the printing.”
“Well, that is interesting,” I said. I took my hand gingerly off his arm, but he seemed under control now. “So you think ‘James MacQuiston’ is likely an assumed name.”
“Verra likely indeed.”
Pursuing the implications of that line of thought, I had a sudden idea.
“Do you think that perhaps the man who identified Roger to the Governor as MacQuiston might have been MacQuiston himself?”
Jamie’s brows went up, and he nodded slowly.
“And he sought to shield himself, by having Roger Mac hanged in his place? Being dead is an excellent protection against arrest. Aye, that’s a bonnie idea—if a trifle vicious,” he added judiciously.
“Oh, just a trifle.”
He seemed less angry with the vicious and fictitious MacQuiston than with the Governor—but then, there was no doubt as to what Tryon had done.
We had moved across the yard to the well. There was a half-filled bucket sitting on the coping, warm and brackish from the day’s heat. He rolled up his sleeves, cupped his hands, and dashed water from the bucket up into his face, then shook his head violently, spattering droplets into Mrs. Sherston’s hydrangeas.
“Did the Governor recall what any of these men who had Roger looked like?” I asked, handing him a crumpled linen towel from the well-coping. He took it and wiped his face, shaking his head.
“Only the one. The one who had the badge, who did most of the talking. He said it was a fair-haired fellow, verra tall and well set up. Green-eyed, he thought. Tryon wasna taking careful note of his appearance, of course, bein’ exercised in his mind at the time. But he recalled that much.”
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said, struck by a thought. “Tall, fair-haired, and green-eyed. Do you think it could have been Stephen Bonnet?”
His eyes opened wide and he stared at me over the towel for a moment, face blank with astonishment.
“Jesus,” he said, and set the towel down absentmindedly. “I never thought of such a thing.”
Neither had I. What I knew of Bonnet didn’t seem to fit the picture of a Regulator; most of them were poor and desperate men, like Joe Hobson, Hugh Fowles, and Abel MacLennan. A few were outraged idealists, like Husband and Hamilton. Stephen Bonnet might occasionally have been poor and desperate—but I was reasonably sure that the notion of seeking redress from the government by protest wasn’t one that would have occurred to him. Take it by force, certainly. Kill a judge or sheriff in vengeance for some offense, quite possibly. But—no, it was ridiculous. If I was certain of anything regarding Stephen Bonnet, it was that he didn’t pay taxes.
“No.” Jamie shook his head, having evidently come to the same conclusions. He wiped a lingering droplet off the end of his nose. “There’s nay money anywhere in this affair. Even Tryon had to appeal to the Earl of Hillsborough for funds to pay his militia. And the Regulators—” He waved a hand, dismissing the thought of the Regulators paying anyone for anything. “I dinna ken everything about Stephen Bonnet, but from what I’ve seen of the man, I think that only gold or the promise of it would bring him to a battlefield.”
“True.” The clink of china and chime of silver came faintly through the open window, accompanying the soft voices of slaves; the table was being set for dinner. “I don’t suppose there’s any way Bonnet could be James MacQuiston, is there?”
He laughed at that, his face relaxing for the first time.
“No, Sassenach. That I can be sure of. Stephen Bonnet canna read, nor write much more than his name.”
I stared at him.
“How do you know that?”
“Samuel Cornell told me so. He hasna met Bonnet himself, but he said that Walter Priestly came to him once, to borrow money urgently. He was surprised, for Priestly’s a wealthy man—but Priestly told him that he had a shipment coming that must be paid for in gold—for the man bringing it would not take warehouse receipts, proclamation money, or even bank-drafts. He didna trust words on paper that he couldna read himself, nor would he trust anyone to read them to him. Only gold would do.”
“Yes, that does sound like Bonnet.” I had been holding his coat, folded over one arm. Now I shook it out, and began to beat the red dust from its skirts, averting my face from the resultant clouds. “What you said about gold... do you think Bonnet could have been at Alamance by accident? On his way to River Run, perhaps?”
He considered that one for a moment, but then shook his head, rolling down the cuffs of his shirt.
“It wasna a great war, Sassenach—not the sort of thing where a man might be caught up unawares and carried along. The armies faced each other for more than two days, and the sentry lines had holes like a fishing seine; anyone could have left Alamance, or ridden round it. And Alamance is nowhere near River Run. No, whoever it was that tried to kill wee Roger, it was someone who was there on his own account.”
“So we’re back to the mysterious Mr. MacQuiston—whoever he might be.”
“Perhaps,” he said dubiously.
“But who else could it be?” I protested. “Surely no one among the Regulators could have had anything personal against Roger!”
“Ye wouldna think so,” Jamie admitted. “But we’re no going to know until the lad can tell us, aye?”
AFTER SUPPER—during which there was naturally no mention of MacQuiston, Stephen Bonnet, or anything else of an upsetting nature—I went up to check on Roger. Jamie came with me, and quietly dismissed the slave woman who sat by the window, mending. Someone had to stay with Roger at all times, to make sure the tube in his throat didn’t become clogged or dislodged, as it was still his only means of breathing. It would be several days yet before the swelling of the mangled tissues in his throat subsided enough for me to risk removing it.
Jamie waited until I had checked Roger’s pulse and breathing, then at my nod, sat down by his bedside.
“Do ye ken the names of the men who denounced ye?” he asked without preliminaries. Roger looked up at him, frowning, dark brows drawn together. Then he nodded slowly, and held up one finger.
“One of them. How many were there?”
Three fingers. That agreed with Tryon’s recollection, then.
“They were Regulators?”
A nod.
Jamie glanced at me, then back at Roger.
“It wasna Stephen Bonnet?”
Roger sat up bolt upright, mouth open. He clutched at the tube in his throat, struggling vainly to speak, and shaking his head violently.
I grabbed for his shoulder, one hand reaching for the tube; the violence of his movement had jerked it nearly out of the incision, and a trickle of blood ran down his neck where the wound had reopened. Roger himself seemed oblivious; his eyes were fixed on Jamie’s and his mouth was working urgently, asking silent questions.
“No, no. If ye didna see him, then he wasna there.” Jamie took him firmly by the other shoulder, helping me to ease him back on the pillow. “It was only that Tryon described the man who betrayed ye as a tall, fair-haired fellow. Green-eyed, maybe. We thought perhaps...”
Roger’s face relaxed at that. He shook his head again and sank back, mouth twisted a little. Jamie pressed on.
“Ye kent the man, though; ye’d met him before?” Roger glanced away, nodded, then shrugged. He looked both irritated and helpless; I could hear his breathing quicken, whistling through the amber tube. I cleared my throat signficantly, frowning at Jamie. Roger was out of immediate danger; that didn’t mean he was well, or anywhere near it.
Jamie ignored me. He’d picked up Bree’s sketching-box on his way upstairs; laying a sheet of paper on it, he put it on Roger’s lap, then extended one of the sticks of hardened charcoal to him.
“Will ye try again?” He had been trying to get Roger to communicate on paper ever since he had regained full consciousness, but Roger’s hands had been too swollen even to close around a pen. They were still puffed and bruised, but repeated leeching and gentle massage had improved them to the point that they did at least look vaguely like hands again.
Roger’s lips pressed together momentarily, but he wrapped his hand clumsily around the charcoal. The first two fingers on that hand were broken; the splints stuck out in a crude “V” sign—which I thought rather appropriate, under the circumstances.
Roger frowned in concentration, and began to scrawl something slowly. Jamie watched intently, holding the paper flat with both hands to keep it from sliding.
The stick of charcoal snapped in two, the fragments flying off across the floor. I went to pick them up, while Jamie leaned frowning over the smeared sheet of paper. There was a sprawling “W” and an “M,” then a space, and an awkward “MAC.”
“William?” He looked up at Roger for verification. Sweat shone on Roger’s cheekbones, but he nodded, very briefly.
“William Mac,” I said, peering over Jamie’s shoulder. “A Scotsman, then—or a Scottish name, at least?” Not that that narrowed down the possibilities a great deal: MacLeod, MacPherson, MacDonald, MacDonnel, Mac... Quiston?
Roger raised his hand and thumped it against his chest. He thumped it again, and mouthed a word. Recalling television shows based on charades, I was for once quicker than Jamie.
“MacKenzie?” I asked, and was rewarded with a quick flash of green eyes, and a nod.
“MacKenzie. William MacKenzie.” Jamie was frowning, obviously running through his mental roster of names and faces, but not turning up a match.
I was watching Roger’s face. Still heavily bruised, it too was beginning to look more normal, despite the livid weal under his jaw, and I thought there was something odd about his expression. I could see physical pain in his eyes, helplessness, and frustration at his immediate inability to tell Jamie what he wanted to know, but I thought there was something else there, too. Anger, certainly, but something like bafflement, as well.
“Do you know any William MacKenzies?” I asked Jamie, who was tapping his fingers lightly on the table as he thought.
“Aye, four or five,” he replied, brows still knotted in concentration. “In Scotland. But none here, and none that—”
Roger’s hand lifted abruptly at the word “Scotland,” and Jamie stopped, fixed on Roger’s face like a pointing bird dog.
“Scotland,” he said. “Something about Scotland? The man is a new immigrant?”
Roger shook his head violently, then stopped abruptly, grimacing in pain. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them, and waved urgently at the bits of charcoal I still held in my hand.
It took several tries, and at the end of it Roger lay back exhausted on the pillow, the neck of his nightshirt damp with sweat and spotted with blood from his throat. The result of his effort was smeared and straggling, but I could read the word clearly.
Dougal, it said. Jamie’s look of interest sharpened into something like wariness.
“Dougal,” he repeated carefully. He knew several Dougals as well; a few of them resident in North Carolina. “Dougal Chisholm? Dougal O’Neill?”
Roger shook his head and the tube in his throat wheezed with his exhalation. He lifted his hand and pointed emphatically at Jamie, the splinted fingers jabbing. Getting only a blank look in response, he fumbled for the bit of charcoal again, but it rolled off the sketch-box and shattered on the floor.
His fingers were smeared with charcoal dust. Grimacing, he pressed the tip of his ring finger against the page, and by dint of using all the fingers in turn, produced a faint and ghostly scrawl that sent a small electric shock shooting up from the base of my spine.
Geilie, it said.
Jamie stared at the name for a moment. Then I saw a small shiver move over him, and he crossed himself.
“A Dhia,” he said softly, and looked at me. Awareness thickened between us; Roger saw it and fell back on his pillow, exhaling loudly through his breathing-tube.
“Dougal’s son by Geillis Duncan,” Jamie said, turning to Roger with incredulity writ large on his face. “He was named William, I think. Ye mean it? Ye’re sure of it?”
A brief nod, and Roger’s eyes closed. Then they opened again; one splinted finger rose wavering, and pointed to his own eye—a deep, clear green, the color of moss. He was white as the linen he lay on, and his charcoal-smeared fingers were trembling. His mouth was twitching; he wanted badly to talk, to explain—but further explanations were going to have to wait, for a little while, at least.
His hand dropped, and his eyes closed again.
THE REVELATION of William Buccleigh MacKenzie’s identity didn’t alter Jamie’s urgent desire to find the man, but it did change his intention of murdering him immediately, once found. On the whole, I was grateful for small favors.
Brianna, summoned from her painting to consult, arrived in my room in her smock, smelling strongly of turpentine and linseed oil, with a smear of cobalt blue on one earlobe.
“Yes,” she said, bewildered by Jamie’s abrupt questions. “I’ve heard of him. William Buccleigh MacKenzie. The changeling.”
“The what?” Jamie’s brows shot up toward his hairline.
“That’s what I called him,” I said. “When I saw Roger’s family tree, and realized who William Buccleigh MacKenzie must be. Dougal gave the child to William and Sarah MacKenzie, remember? And they gave him the name of the child they’d lost two months before.”
“Roger mentioned that he’d seen William MacKenzie and his wife, on board the Gloriana, when he sailed from Scotland to North Carolina,” Bree put in. “But he said he didn’t realize who the man was until later, and didn’t have a chance to talk to him. So he is here—William, I mean—but why on earth would he try to kill Roger—and why that way?” She shuddered briefly, though the room was very warm. It was early summer, and even with the windows open, the air was hot and liquid with humidity.
“He’s the witch’s get,” Jamie said shortly, as though that was sufficient answer—as perhaps it was.
“They thought I was a witch, too,” I reminded him, a little tartly. That got me a sideways blue glance, and a curve of the mouth.
“So they did,” he said. He cleared his throat, and wiped a sleeve across his sweating brow. “Aye, well. I suppose we must just wait and find out. And having a name helps. I shall send to Duncan and Farquard; have them put out word.” He drew a deep breath of exasperation, and blew it out again.
“What am I to do when I find him, though? Witch-son or no, he’s my own blood; I canna kill him. Not after Dougal—” He caught himself in time, and coughed. “I mean, he’s Dougal’s son. He’s my own cousin, for God’s sake.”
I knew what he really meant. Four people knew what had happened in that attic room at Culloden House, the day before that distant battle. One of those was dead, the other disappeared and almost certainly dead too, in the tumult of the Rising. Only I was left as the witness to Dougal’s blood and the hand that had spilled it. No matter what crime William Buccleigh MacKenzie had committed, Jamie would not kill him, for his father’s sake.
“You were going to kill him? Before you found out who he was?” Bree didn’t look shocked at the thought. She had a stained paint-rag in her hands, and was twisting it slowly.
Jamie turned to look at her.
“Roger Mac is your man, the son of my house,” he said, very seriously. “Of course I would avenge him.”
Brianna flicked a glance at me, then looked away. She looked thoughtful, with a certain intentness that gave me a slight chill to see.
“Good,” she said, very softly. “When you find William Buccleigh MacKenzie, I want to know about it.” She folded up the rag, thrust it into the pocket of her smock, and went back to her work.
BRIANNA SCRAPED a tiny blob of viridian onto the edge of her palette, and feathered a touch of it into the big smear of pale gray she had created. She hesitated a moment, tilting the palette back and forth in the light from the window to judge the color, then added the faintest dab of cobalt to the other side of the smear, producing a range of subtle tones that ran from blue-gray to green-gray, all so faint as scarcely to be distinguishable from white by the uneducated eye.
She took one of the short, thick brushes, and worked the gray tones along the curve of the jaw on her canvas with tiny overlapping strokes. Yes, that was just about right; pale as fired porcelain, but with a vivid shadow under it—something both delicate and earthy.
She painted with a deep absorption that shut out her surroundings, engrossed in an artist’s double vision, comparing the evolving image on the canvas with the one so immutably etched in her memory. It wasn’t that she had never seen a dead person before. Her father—Frank—had had an open-casket funeral, and she had been to the obsequies of older family friends in her own time, as well. But the colors of the embalmer’s art were crude, almost coarse by comparison with those of a fresh corpse. She had been staggered by the contrast.
It was the blood, she thought, taking a fine two-haired brush to add a dot of pure viridian in the deep curve of the eye socket. Blood and bone—but death didn’t alter the curves of the bones, nor the shadows they cast. Blood, though, colored those shadows. In life, you got the blues and reds and pinks and lavenders of moving blood beneath the skin; in death, the blood stilled and pooled and darkened... clay-blue, violet, indigo, purple-brown... and something new: that delicate, transient green, barely there, that her artist’s mind classified with brutal clarity as “early rot.”
Unfamiliar voices came from the hall, and she looked up, wary. Phoebe Sherston was fond of bringing in visitors to admire the painting in progress. Normally, Brianna didn’t mind being watched, or talking about what she was doing, but this was a tricky job, and one with limited time; she couldn’t work with such subtle colors save for a short period just before sunset, when the light was clear but diffuse.
The voices passed on to the parlor, though, and she relaxed, taking up the thicker brush again.
She resummoned the vision in her mind; the dead man they had laid under a tree at Alamance, near her mother’s makeshift field hospital. She had expected to be shocked by battle-wounds and death—and was instead shocked by her own fascination. She had seen terrible things, but it wasn’t like attending at her mother’s normal surgeries, where there was time to empathize with the patients, to take note of all the small indignities and nastinesses of weak flesh. Things happened too fast on a battlefield; there was too much to be done for squeamishness to take hold.
And in spite of the haste and urgency, each time she had passed near that tree, she had paused for an instant. Bent to turn back the blanket over the corpse and look at the man’s face; appalled at her own fascination but making no effort to resist it—committing to memory the amazing, inexorable change of color and shadow, the stiffening of muscle and shifting of shape, as skin settled and clung to bone, and the processes of death and decay began to work their awful magic.
She hadn’t thought to ask the dead man’s name. Was that unfeeling? she wondered. Probably; the fact was that all her feelings had been otherwise engaged at the time—and still were. Still, she closed her eyes for a moment and said a quick prayer for the repose of the soul of her unknown sitter.
She opened her eyes to see that the light was fading. She scraped the palette and began to clean her brushes and hands, returning slowly and reluctantly to the world outside her work.
Jem would have been fed his supper and bathed already, but he refused to go to bed without being nursed and rocked to sleep. Her breasts tingled slightly at the thought; they were pleasantly full, though they seldom became excruciatingly engorged since he had taken to eating solid food and thus decreased his voracious demands on her flesh.
She’d nurse Jem and put him down, and then go have her own belated supper in the kitchen. She had not eaten with the others, wanting to take advantage of the evening light, and her stomach was growling softly, as the lingering smells of food in the air replaced the astringent scents of turps and linseed oil.
And then... then she would go upstairs to Roger. Her lips tightened at the thought; she realized it, and forced her mouth to relax, blowing air out so that her lips vibrated with a flatulent noise like a motorboat.
At this unfortunate moment, Phoebe Sherston’s capped head popped through the door. She blinked slightly, but had sufficiently good manners to pretend that she hadn’t seen anything.
“Oh, my dear, there you are! Do come into the parlor for a moment, won’t you? Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur are so eager to make your acquaintance.”
“Oh—well, yes, of course,” Brianna said, with what graciousness she could summon. She gestured at her paint-stained smock. “Let me just go and change—”
Mrs. Sherston waved away the smock, obviously wanting to show off her tame artist in costume.
“No, no, don’t trouble about that. We are quite simple this evening. No one will mind.”
Brianna moved reluctantly toward the drawing room.
“All right. Only for a minute, though; I need to put Jem to bed.”
Mrs. Sherston’s rosebud mouth primmed slightly at that; she saw no reason why her slaves could not take care of the child altogether—but she had heard Brianna’s opinions on the subject before, and was wise enough not to press the issue.
