An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana - Страница 166

It wasn’t that I was uninterested in her randomly dropped remarks about her first husband; they were, if anything, too interesting. The late Mr. Evans appeared to have been a violent drunkard on shore—which was far from unusual—with a penchant for cutting off the ears or noses of people who displeased him, which was a trifle more individualistic.

“He nailed the ears to the lintel of my goat shed,” she said, in the tone one might use to describe one’s breakfast. “Up high, so the goats couldn’t get at them. They shrivel up in the sun, you know, like dried mushrooms.”

“Ah,” I said. I thought of remarking that smoking a severed ear prevented that little problem, but thought better of it. I didn’t know whether Ian was still carrying a lawyer’s ear in his sporran, but I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t welcome Mrs. Raven’s eager interest in it, if so. Both he and Jamie made off when they saw her coming, as though she had the plague.

“They say the Indians cut pieces off their captives,” she said, her voice going low, as one imparting a secret. “The fingers first, one joint at a time.”

“How very revolting,” I said. “Do please go to the dispensary and get me a bag of fresh lint, would you?”

She went off obediently—she always did—but I thought I heard her talking to herself under her breath as she did so. As the days crept on and tension mounted in the fort, I became convinced of it.

Her conversational swings were getting wider—and wilder. Now she ranged from the distant past of her idealized childhood in Maryland to an equally distant future—a rather grisly one, in which we had all been either killed by the British army or captured by Indians, with consequences ranging from rape to dismemberment—these procedures often accomplished simultaneously, though I told her that most men had neither the necessary concentration nor yet the coordination for it. She was still capable of focusing on something directly in front of her, but not for long.

“Could you speak to her husband, do you think?” I asked Jamie, who had just come in at sunset to tell me that he’d seen her trudging in circles round and round the big cistern near the parade ground, counting under her breath.

“D’ye think he hasn’t noticed that his wife’s going mad?” he replied. “If he hasn’t, I think he’ll no appreciate being told. And if he has,” he added logically, “what d’ye expect him to do about it?”

There was in fact not much anyone could do about it, bar keep an eye on her and try to soothe her more vivid fancies—or at least keep her from talking about them to the more impressionable patients.

As the days went on, though, Mrs. Raven’s eccentricities seemed not much more pronounced than the anxieties of most of the fort’s inhabitants, particularly the women, who could do nothing but tend their children, wash the laundry—under heavy guard on the lakeshore, or in small mobs round the steaming cauldrons—and wait.

The woods were not safe; a few days before, two picket guards had been found no more than a mile from the fort, murdered and scalped. This grisly discovery had had the worst effect on Mrs. Raven, but I couldn’t say that it did much for my own fortitude. I couldn’t look out from the batteries with my earlier sense of pleasure in the endless miles of thick green; the very vigor of the forest itself seemed a threat now. I still wanted clean linen, but my skin tingled and crept whenever I left the fort.

“Thirteen days,” I said, running a thumb down the doorpost of our sanctum. Jamie had, with no comment, cut a notch for each day of the enlistment period, slashing through each notch when he came to bed at night. “Did you notch the posts when you were in prison?”

“Not in Fort William or the Bastille,” he said, considering. “Ardsmuir… aye, we did then. There wasna any sentence to keep track of, but… ye lose so much, so fast. It seemed important to keep a hold on something, even if it was only the day of the week.”

He came to stand beside me, looking at the doorpost and its long line of neat notches.

“I think I might have been tempted to run,” he said, very quietly. “If it weren’t for Ian being gone.”

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t thought—or been aware of him thinking. It was becoming more obvious by the second that the fort couldn’t stand attack by the size of the force that was—indubitably—on its way. Scouts were coming in more frequently with reports on Burgoyne’s army, and while they were whisked instantly into the commandant’s office and just as hastily trundled out of the fort again, everyone knew within an hour what news they had brought—precious little so far, but that little, alarming. And yet Arthur St. Clair could not bring himself to order the evacuation of the fort.

“A blot on his record,” Jamie said, with an evenness that betrayed his anger. “He canna bear to have it said that he lost Ticonderoga.”

“But he will lose it,” I said. “He must, mustn’t he?”

“He will. But if he fights and loses it, that’s one thing. To fight and lose it to a superior force is honorable. To abandon it to the enemy without a fight? He canna reconcile himself to it. Though he’s no a wicked man,” he added thoughtfully. “I’ll talk to him again. We all will.”

“All” being the militia officers, who could afford to be outspoken. A number of the regular army officers shared the militia’s feelings, but discipline prevented most of them from speaking bluntly to St. Clair.

I didn’t think Arthur St. Clair was a wicked man, either—nor yet a stupid one. He knew—must know—what the cost of fighting would be. Or the cost of surrender.

“He’s waiting for Whitcomb, ken,” Jamie said conversationally. “Hoping he’ll tell him Burgoyne hasna got any artillery to speak of.” The fort could indeed hold out against standard siege tactics; forage and provisions had been coming in from the surrounding countryside in abundance, and Ticonderoga still had some artillery defenses and the small wooden fort on Mount Independence, as well as a substantial garrison decently supplied with muskets and powder. It could not hold out against major artillery placed on Mount Defiance, though. Jamie had been up there, and told me that the entire interior of the fort was visible—and thus subject to enfiladement at the enemy’s discretion.

“He can’t really think that, surely?”

“No, but until he knows for sure, he hasna got to make up his mind for sure, either. And none of the scouts has yet brought him anything certain.”

I sighed and pressed a hand to my bosom, blotting a tickle of sweat.

“I can’t sleep in there,” I said abruptly. “It’s like sleeping in hell.”

That took him by surprise and made him laugh.

“All right for you,” I said, rather cross. “You get to go sleep under canvas tomorrow.” Half the garrison was being moved to tents outside the fort, the better to be out and maneuverable, ready in case of Burgoyne’s approach.

The British were coming; how close they were, how many men they had, and how well armed they were was unknown.

Benjamin Whitcomb had gone to find out. Whitcomb was a lanky, pockmarked man in his thirties, one of the men known as the Long Hunters, men who could—and did—spend weeks in the wilderness, living off the land. Such men were not sociable, having no use for civilization, but they were valuable. Whitcomb was the best of St. Clair’s scouts; he had taken five men to go and find Burgoyne’s main force. I hoped they would return before the enlistment period was up; Jamie wanted to be gone—so did I, badly—but plainly we couldn’t go without Ian.

Jamie moved abruptly, turning and going back into our room.

“What do you need?” He was digging in the small blanket chest that contained our few spare clothes and the other oddments we’d picked up since coming to the fort.

“My kilt. If I’m going to make representations to St. Clair, I’d best be formal about it.”