6

I ENCOUNTER A HERNIA

June 1767

I hate boats,” Jamie said through clenched teeth. “I loathe boats. I view boats with the most profound abhorrence.”

Jamie’s uncle, Hector Cameron, lived on a plantation called River Run, just above Cross Creek. Cross Creek in turn lay some way upriver from Wilmington; some two hundred miles, in fact. At this time of year, we were told, the trip might take four days to a week by boat, depending on wind. If we chose rather to travel overland, the journey could take two weeks or more, depending on such things as washed-out roads, mud, and broken axles.

“Rivers do not have waves,” I said. “And I view the notion of trudging on foot for two hundred miles through the mud with a lot more than abhorrrrence.” Ian grinned broadly, but quickly exchanged the grin for an expression of bland detachment as Jamie’s glare moved in his direction.

“Besides,” I said to Jamie, “if you get seasick, I still have my needles.” I patted the pocket where my tiny set of gold acupuncture needles rested in their ivory case.

Jamie exhaled strongly through his nose, but said no more. That little matter settled, the major problem remaining was to manage the boat-fare.

We were not rich, but did have a little money, as the result of a spot of good fortune on the road. Gypsying our way north from Charleston, and camping well off the road at night, we had discovered an abandoned homestead in the wood, its clearing nearly obliterated by new growth.

Cottonwood saplings shot like spears through the beams of the fallen roof, and a hollybush sprouted through a large crack in the hearthstone. The walls were half collapsed, black with rot and furred with green moss and rusty fungus. There was no telling how long the place had been abandoned, but it was clear that both cabin and clearing would be swallowed by the wilderness within a few years, nothing left to mark its existence save a tumbled cairn of chimney stones.

However, flourishing incongruously among the invading trees were the remains of a small peach orchard, the fruit of it burstingly ripe and swarming with bees. We had eaten as much as we could, slept in the shelter of the ruins, then risen before dawn and loaded the wagon with heaping mounds of smooth gold fruit, all juice and velvet.

We had sold it as we went, and consequently had arrived in Wilmington with sticky hands, a bag of coins—mostly pennies—and a pervasive scent of fermentation that clung to hair, clothes, and skin, as though we had all been dipped in peach brandy.

“You take this,” Jamie advised me, handing me the small leather sack containing our fortune. “Buy what ye can for provisions—dinna buy any peaches, aye?—and perhaps a few bits and pieces so we dinna look quite such beggars when we come to my kinsman. A needle and thread, maybe?” He raised a brow and nodded at the large rent in Fergus’s coat, incurred while falling out of a peach tree.

“Duncan and I will go about and see can we sell the wagon and horses, and inquire for a boat. And if there’s such a thing as a goldsmith here, I’ll maybe see what he’d offer for one of the stones.”

“Be careful, Uncle,” Ian advised, frowning at the motley crew of humanity coming and going from the harbor nearby. “Ye dinna want to be taken advantage of, nor yet be robbed in the street.”

Jamie, gravely straight-faced, assured his nephew that he would take due precaution.

“Take Rollo,” Ian urged him. “He’ll protect ye.”

Jamie glanced down at Rollo, who was surveying the passing crowds with a look of panting alertness that suggested not so much social interest as barely restrained appetite.

“Oh, aye,” he said. “Come along then, wee dog.” He glanced at me as he turned to go. “Perhaps ye’d best buy a few dried fish, as well.”

Wilmington was a small town, but because of its fortuitous situation as a seaport at the mouth of a navigable river, it boasted not only a farmer’s market and a shipping dock, but several shops that stocked imported luxuries from Europe, as well as the homegrown necessities of daily life.

“Beans, all right,” Fergus said. “I like beans, even in large quantities.” He shifted the burlap sack on his shoulder, balancing its unwieldy weight. “And bread, of course we must have bread—and flour and salt and lard. Salt beef, dried cherries, fresh apples, all well and good. Fish, to be sure. Needles and thread I see also are certainly necessary. Even the hairbrush,” he added, with a sidelong glance at my hair, which, inspired by the humidity, was making mad efforts to escape the confinement of my broad-brimmed hat. “And the medicines from the apothecary, naturally. But lace?”

“Lace,” I said firmly. I tucked the small paper packet containing three yards of Brussels lace into the large basket he was carrying. “Likewise ribbons. One yard each of wide silk ribbon,” I told the perspiring young girl behind the counter. “Red—that’s yours, Fergus, so don’t complain—green for Ian, yellow for Duncan, and the very dark blue for Jamie. And no, it isn’t an extravagance; Jamie doesn’t want us to look like ragamuffins when we meet his uncle and aunt.”

“What about you, Auntie?” Ian said, grinning. “Surely ye willna let us men be dandies, and you go plain as a sparrow?”

Fergus blew air between his lips, in mingled exasperation and amusement.

“That one,” he said, pointing to a wide roll of dark pink.

“That’s a color for a young girl,” I protested.

“Women are never too old to wear pink,” Fergus replied firmly. “I have heard les mesdames say so, many times.” I had heard les mesdames’ opinions before; Fergus’s early life had been spent in a brothel, and judging from his reminiscences, not a little of his later life, too. I rather hoped that he could overcome the habit now that he was married to Jamie’s stepdaughter, but with Marsali still in Jamaica awaiting the birth of their first child, I had my doubts. Fergus was a Frenchman born, after all.

“I suppose the Madams would know,” I said. “All right, the pink, too.”

Burdened with baskets and bags of provisions, we made our way out into the street. It was hot and thickly humid, but there was a breeze from the river, and after the stifling confines of the shop, the air seemed sweet and refreshing. I glanced toward the harbor, where the masts of several small ships poked up, swaying gently to the rocking of the current, and saw Jamie’s tall figure stride out between two buildings, Rollo pacing close behind.

Ian hallooed and waved, and Rollo came bounding down the street, tail wagging madly at sight of his master. There were few people out at this time of day; those with business in the narrow street prudently flattened themselves against the nearest wall to avoid the rapturous reunion.

“My Gawd,” said a drawling voice somewhere above me. “That’ll be the biggest dawg I believe I’ve ever seen.” I turned to see a gentleman detach himself from the front of a tavern, and lift his hat politely to me. “Your servant, ma’am. He ain’t partial to human flesh, I do sincerely hope?”

I looked up at the man addressing me—and up. I refrained from expressing the opinion that he, of all people, could scarcely find Rollo a threat.

My interlocutor was one of the tallest men I’d ever seen; taller by several inches even than Jamie. Lanky and rawboned with it, his huge hands dangled at the level of my elbows, and the ornately beaded leather belt about his midriff came to my chest. I could have pressed my nose into his navel, had the urge struck me, which fortunately it didn’t.

“No, he eats fish,” I assured my new acquaintance. Seeing me craning my neck, he courteously dropped to his haunches, his knee joints popping like rifle shots as he did so. His face thus coming into view, I found his features still obscured by a bushy black beard. An incongruous snub nose poked out of the undergrowth, surmounted by a pair of wide and gentle hazel eyes.

“Well, I’m surely obliged to hear that. Wouldn’t care to have a chunk taken out my leg, so early in the day.” He removed a disreputable slouch hat with a ragged turkey feather thrust through the brim, and bowed to me, loose snaky black locks falling forward on his shoulders. “John Quincy Myers, your servant, ma’am.”

“Claire Fraser,” I said, offering him a hand in fascination. He squinted at it a moment, brought my fingers to his nose and sniffed them, then looked up and broke into a broad smile, nonetheless charming for missing half its teeth.

“Why, you’ll maybe be a yarb-woman, won’t you?”

“I will?”

He turned my hand gently over, tracing the chlorophyll stains around my cuticles.

“A green-fingered lady might just be tendin’ her roses, but a lady whose hands smell of sassafras root and Jesuit bark is like to know more than how to make flowers bloom. Don’t you reckon that’s so?” he asked, turning a friendly gaze on Ian, who was viewing Mr. Myers with unconcealed interest.

“Oh, aye,” Ian assured him. “Auntie Claire’s a famous healer. A wise-woman!” He glanced proudly at me.

“That so, boy? Well, now.” Mr. Myers’s eyes went round with interest, and swiveled back to focus on me. “Smite me if this ain’t Lucifer’s own luck! And me thinkin’ I’d have to wait till I come to the mountains and find me a shaman to take care of it.”

“Are you ill, Mr. Myers?” I asked. He didn’t look it, but it was hard to tell, what with the beard, the hair, and a thin layer of greasy brown dirt that seemed to cover everything not concealed by his ragged buckskins. The sole exception was his forehead; normally protected from the sun by the black felt hat, it was now exposed to view, a wide flat slab of purest white.

“Not to say ill, I don’t reckon,” he replied. He suddenly stood up, and began to fumble up the tail of his buckskin shirt. “It ain’t the clap or the French pox, anyhow, ’cause I seen those before.” What I had thought were trousers were in fact long buckskin leggings, surmounted by a breechclout. Still talking, Mr. Myers had hold of the leather thong holding up this latter garment, and was fumbling with the knot.

“Damnedest thing, though; all of a sudden this great big swelling come up just along behind of my balls. Purely inconvenient, as you may imagine, though it don’t hurt me none to speak of, save on horseback. Might be you could take a peep and tell me what I best do for it, hm?”

“Ah.…” I said, with a frantic glance at Fergus, who merely shifted his sack of beans and looked amused, blast him.

“Would I have the pleasure to make the acquaintance of Mr. John Myers?” said a polite Scottish voice over my shoulder.

Mr. Myers ceased fumbling with his breechclout and glanced up inquiringly.

“Can’t say whether it’s a pleasure to you or not, sir,” he replied courteously. “But be you lookin’ for Myers, you’ve found him.”

Jamie stepped up beside me, tactfully inserting his body between me and Mr. Myers’s breechclout. He bowed formally, hat under his arm.

“James Fraser, your servant, sir. I was told to offer the name of Mr. Hector Cameron by way of introduction.”

Mr. Myers looked at Jamie’s red hair with interest.

“Scotch, are you? Be you one of them Highlander fellows?”

“I am a Scotsman, aye, and a Highlander.”

“Be you kin to Old Hector Cameron?”

“He is my uncle by marriage, sir, though I have not met him myself. I was told that he was well known to you, and that you might consent to guide my party to his plantation.”

The two men were frankly sizing each other up, eyes flicking head to toe as they talked, appraising bearing, dress, and armament. Jamie’s eyes rested approvingly on the long sheath-knife at the woodsman’s belt, while Mr. Myers’s nostrils flared wide with interest.

“Comme deux chiens,” Fergus remarked softly behind me. Like two dogs. “…aux culs.” Next thing you know, they will be smelling each other’s backside.

Mr. Myers darted a glance at Fergus, and I saw a quick flash of amusement in the hazel depths before he returned to his assessment of Jamie. Uncultured the woodsman might be, but he plainly had some working knowledge of French.

Given Mr. Myers’s olfactory inclinations and lack of self-consciousness, I might not have been surprised to see him drop to all fours and perform in the manner Fergus had suggested. As it was, he contented himself with a careful inspection that took in not only Jamie but Ian, Fergus, myself, and Rollo.

“Nice dawg,” he said casually, holding out a set of massive knuckles to the latter. Rollo, thus invited, instituted his own inspection, sniffing industriously from moccasins to breechclout as the conversation went on.

“Your uncle, eh? Does he know you’re coming?”

Jamie shook his head.

“I canna say. I sent a letter from Georgia, a month ago, but I’ve no way to tell whether he’s had it yet.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Myers said thoughtfully. His eyes lingered on Jamie’s face, then passed swiftly over the rest of us.

“I’ve met your wife. This’ll be your son?” He nodded at Ian.

“My nephew, Ian. My foster son, Fergus.” Jamie made the introductions with a wave of his hand. “And a friend, Duncan Innes, who’ll be along presently.”

Myers grunted, nodding, and made up his mind.

“Well, I should reckon I can get you to Cameron’s all right. Wanted to be sure you was kin, but you got the look of the widder Cameron, in the face. The boy some, too.”

Jamie’s head jerked up sharply.

“The widow Cameron?”

A sly smile flitted through the thicket of beard.

“Old Hector caught the morbid sore throat, up and died late last winter. Don’t figure they get much mail, wherever he is now.”

Abandoning the Camerons for matters of more immediate personal interest, Myers resumed his interrupted excavations.

“Big purple thing,” he explained to me, fumbling his loosened thong. “Almost as big as one o’ my balls. You don’t think it might could be as I’ve decided sudden-like to grow an extry, do you?”

“Well, no,” I said, biting my lip. “I really doubt it.” He moved very slowly, but had almost got the knot in his thong undone; people in the street were beginning to pause, staring.

“Please don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “I do believe I know what that is—it’s an inguinal hernia.”

The wide hazel eyes got wider.

“It is?” He seemed impressed, and not at all displeased by the news.

“I’d have to look—somewhere indoors, that is,” I added hastily “—to be sure, but it sounds like it. It’s quite easy to repair surgically, but…” I hesitated, looking up at the Colossus. “I really couldn’t—I mean, you’d need to be asleep. Unconscious,” I amplified. “I’d have to cut you, and sew you up again, you see. Perhaps a truss—a brace—might be better, though.”

Myers scratched slowly at his jaw, meditating.

“No, I done tried that, ’twon’t do. Cuttin’, though…You folks be staying here in the town for a spell before you head up to Cameron’s?”

“Not long,” Jamie interrupted firmly. “We shall be sailing upriver to my aunt’s estate, as soon as passage can be arranged.”

“Oh.” The giant pondered this for a moment, then nodded, beaming.

“I know the very man for you, sir. I’ll go this minute and fetch Josh Freeman out the Sailor’s Rest. Sun’s still high, he’ll be not too drunk to do business yet.” He swept me a bow, battered hat to his middle. “And then could be your wife might have the kindness to meet me in yonder tavern—it’s a mite more genteel than the Sailor’s—and have a look at this…this…” I saw his lips try to form themselves around “inguinal hernia,” then give up the effort and relax. “This yere obstruction.”

He clapped the hat back on his head, and with a nod to Jamie, was off.

Jamie watched the mountain man’s stiff-legged retreat down the street, slowed by cordial greetings to all he passed.

“What is it about ye, Sassenach, I wonder?” he said conversationally, eyes still fixed on Myers.

“What is what about me?”

He turned then, and gave me a narrow eye.

“What it is that makes every man ye meet want to take off his breeks within five minutes of meetin’ ye.”

Fergus choked slightly, and Ian went pink. I looked as demure as possible.

“Well, if you don’t know, my dear,” I said, “no one does. I seem to have found us a boat. And what have you been up to this morning?”

Industrious as always, Jamie had found us a potential gem-buyer. And not only a buyer, but an invitation to dinner with the Governor.

“Governor Tryon’s in the town just now,” he explained. “Staying at the house of a Mr. Lillington. I talked this morning wi’ a merchant named Mac-Eachern, who put me on to a man named MacLeod, who—”

“Who introduced you to MacNeil, who took you to drink with MacGregor, who told you all about his nephew Bethune, who’s the second cousin half removed of the boy who cleans the Governor’s boots,” I suggested, familiar by this time with the Byzantine pathways of Scottish business dealings.

Put two Highland Scots in a room together, and within ten minutes they would know each other’s family histories for the last two hundred years, and have discovered a helpful number of mutual relatives and acquaintances.

Jamie grinned.

“It was the Governor’s wife’s secretary,” he corrected, “and his name’s Murray. That’ll be your Da’s cousin Maggie’s eldest boy from Loch Linnhe,” he added, to Ian. “His father emigrated after the Rising.” Ian nodded casually, doubtless docketing the information in his own version of the genetic encyclopedia, stored against the day it would prove useful.

Edwin Murray, the Governor’s wife’s secretary, had welcomed Jamie warmly as a kinsman—if only by marriage—and had obtained an invitation for us to dine at Lillington’s that night, there ostensibly to acquaint the Governor with matters of trade in the Indies. In reality, we were intending to acquaint ourselves with Baron Penzler—a well-to-do German nobleman who would be dining there as well. The Baron was a man not only of wealth but of taste, with a reputation as a collector of fine objects.

“Well, it sounds a good idea,” I said dubiously. “But I think you’d better go alone. I can’t be dining with governors looking like this.”

“Ah, ye look f—” His voice faded as he actually looked at me. His eye roamed slowly over me, taking in my grimy, bedraggled gown, wild hair and ragged bonnet.

He frowned at me. “No, I want ye there, Sassenach; I may need a distraction.”

“Speaking of distraction, how many pints did it take you to wangle an invitation to dinner?” I asked, mindful of our dwindling finances. Jamie didn’t blink, but took my arm, turning me toward the row of shops.

“Six, but he paid half. Come along, Sassenach; dinner’s at seven, and we must find ye something decent to wear.”

“But we can’t afford—”

“It’s an investment,” he said firmly. “And besides, Cousin Edwin has advanced me a bit against the sale of a stone.”

The gown was two years out of fashion by the cosmopolitan standards of Jamaica but it was clean, which was the main thing so far as I was concerned.

“You’re dripping, madame.” The sempstress’s voice was cold. A small, spare woman of middle age, she was the preeminent dressmaker in Wilmington and—I gathered—accustomed to having her fashion dictates obeyed without question. My rejection of a frilled cap in favor of freshly washed hair had been received with bad grace and predictions of pleurisy, and the pins she held in her mouth bristled like porcupine quills at my insistence on replacing the normal heavy corsetry with light boning, scalloped at the top to lift the breasts without pinching them.

“Sorry.” I tucked up the offending wet lock inside the linen towel that wrapped my head.

The guest quarters of Mr. Lillington’s great house being fully occupied by the Governor’s party, I had been relegated to Cousin Edwin’s tiny attic over the stable block, and the fitting of my gown was being accomplished to the accompaniment of muffled stampings and chewings from below, punctuated by the monotonous strains of the groom’s whistling as he mucked out the stalls.

Still, I was not inclined to complain; Mr. Lillington’s stables were a deal cleaner than the inn where Jamie and I had left our companions, and Mrs. Lillington had very graciously seen me provided with a large basin of hot water and a ball of lavender-scented soap—a consideration more important even than the fresh dress. I hoped never to see another peach.

I rose slightly on my toes, trying to see out of the window in case Jamie should be coming, but desisted at a grunt of protest from the sempstress, who was trying to adjust the hem of my skirt.

The gown itself was not at all bad; it was of cream silk, half-sleeved and very simple, but with panniers of wine-striped silk over the hips, and a ruching of claret-colored silk piping that ran in two rows from waist to bosom. With the Brussels lace I had purchased sewn around the sleeves, I thought it would do, even if the cloth was not quite of the first quality.

I had at first been surprised at the price, which was remarkably low, but now observed that the fabric of the dress was coarser than usual, with occasional slubs of thickened thread that caught the light in shimmers. Curious, I rubbed it between my fingers. I was no great judge of silk, but a Chinese acquaintance had spent most of one idle afternoon on board a ship explaining to me the lore of silkworms, and the subtle variation of their output.

“Where does this silk come from?” I asked. “It isn’t China silk; is it French?”

The sempstress looked up, her crossness temporarily relieved by interest.

“No, indeed it’s not. That’s made in South Carolina, that is. There’s a lady, Mrs. Pinckney by name, has gone and put half her land to mulberry trees, and went to raising silkworms on ’em. The cloth’s maybe not quite so fine as the China,” she acknowledged reluctantly, “but ’tisn’t but half the cost, either.”

She squinted up at me, nodding slowly.

“It’ll do for fit, and the bit o’ piping’s good; brings out the color in your cheeks. But begging your pardon, madame, you do need something above the neck, not to look too bare. If you won’t have a cap nor a wig, might be you’d have a ribbon?”

“Oh, ribbon!” I said, remembering. “Yes, what a good idea. Do look in my basket over there, and you’ll find a length that might just do.”

Between us we managed to get my hair piled up, loosely bound with the length of dark pink ribbon, damp curly tendrils coming down—I couldn’t stop them—around my ears and brow.

“Not too much mutton dressed as lamb, is it?” I asked, suddenly worried. I smoothed a hand down the front of the bodice, but it fit snugly—and trimly—around my waist.

“Oh, no, madame,” the sempstress assured me. “Quite appropriate, and I say it myself.” She frowned at me, calculating. “Only it is a bit bare over the bosom, still. You haven’t any jewelry, at all?”

“Just this.” We turned in surprise as Jamie ducked his head to come in the door; neither of us had heard him coming.

He had somewhere managed to have a bath and procure a clean shirt and neckcloth; beyond that, someone had combed and plaited his hair into a smooth queue, bound with the new blue silk ribbon. His serviceable coat had not only been brushed, but improved by the application of a set of silver-gilt buttons, each delicately engraved with a small flower in the center.

“Very nice,” I said, touching one.

“Rented from the goldsmith,” he said. “But they’ll do. So will this, I think.” He drew out a filthy handkerchief from his pocket, from the folds of which he produced a slender gold chain.

“He hadna time for any but the simplest mount,” he said, frowning in concentration as he fastened the chain around my neck. “But I think that’s best, don’t you?”

The ruby hung glinting just above the hollow of my breasts, casting a pale rosy glow against my white skin.

“I’m glad you picked that one,” I said, touching the stone gently. It was warm from his body. “Goes much better with the dress than the sapphire or the emerald would.” The sempstress’s jaw hung slightly open. She glanced from me to Jamie, her impression of our social position evidently going up by leaps and bounds.

Jamie had finally taken time to notice the rest of my costume. His eyes traveled slowly over me from head to hem, and a smile spread across his face.

“Ye make a verra ornamental jewel box, Sassenach,” he said. “A fine distraction, aye?”

He glanced out the window, where a pale peach color stained a hazy evening sky, then turned to me, bowed and made a leg. “Might I claim the pleasure of your company for dinner, madame?”