It was twilight and there was no one on the beach here, though he could smell a wood fire and boiling crabs from a distant cluster of shacks. His belly rumbled.
“I must be thawing out,” he said aloud, his voice sounding rough and cracked to his ears. He hadn’t consciously thought of food since recovering from the bang on the head in Morristown. Denzell Hunter had fed him then, insisting he eat something before setting out on the road home. He had tried to refuse, knowing that it was likely Denzell’s entire ration for the day—but hunger and Hunter’s insistence had won out. He’d eaten now and then, of course, on his way south, but without much noticing what.
He wished he had been able to persuade the Hunters to come back with him, but at least Dottie had written a letter for her parents. He touched the inner pocket of his coat and was reassured by the crackle of paper.
The wind had dropped, and there was no sound but the soft hiss of the tide coming in.
Thought of Dottie’s letter brought Uncle Hal to mind—not that he’d been far distant. The feel of sand underfoot and the sight of his own footprints, long and high-arched, like a series of commas following him down the beach, brought back again that conversation by the marsh in Savannah. Treason.
“At least there’re no bloody alligators,” he muttered, but looked over his shoulder by reflex, then snorted and laughed at himself. What with one thing and another, he’d given the quandary of his earldom not a single thought in weeks, and realized with some surprise that he felt at peace with himself and was reluctant to pick that burden up again. He didn’t care who he was—but he wasn’t the Earl of Ellesmere. He’d have to do something about that, but not now.
At least Amaranthus’s suggestion is right out. Not, he assured himself, that he would have taken her up on it in any case, but knowing that her husband was still alive quashed the notion out of hand.
The hand in question closed involuntarily, wet with rain, and he rubbed his fingers against his palm, erasing the memory of the kiss she’d left there, with a tiny warm touch from the tip of her tongue.
Damn Ben. Selfish sod.
A sudden rush of seawater surged up about his ankles, the cold running through his body like the electric shock from a Leyden jar, the water sucking the sand out from under his feet. He staggered back, blinking rain from his lashes and realizing that his shirt was damp and the shoulders of his jacket wet.
A lift of the air brought him once more the smell of food, and he left the beach, his footprints disappearing behind him as the tide came in.
106
The High Ground
Kings Mountain, Tennessee County
April 1780
TAKING POSSESSION OF THE high ground was one of the cornerstones of military strategy. Jamie’s da had told him that, once, when he and Murtagh had sat up late before the fire, drinking whisky and talking. Jamie had been hunched up on the floor in a corner with the dogs, hoping to be overlooked so he could stay and listen.
Neither man was unobservant, though, and they’d spotted him soon enough—but by then, they’d had a few drams and so his da had let him stay, now curled up next to Da on the settle, warmed by the fire and the heat of his father’s solid body, the big hand that wasn’t holding a whisky glass resting absently on Jamie’s back.
“Ye remember hidin’ in the bracken?” Murtagh was saying, his eyes glinting with memory. “Up on the hillside, waitin’ for the start of it?” A small rumble of laughter under his father’s ribs had tickled Jamie’s ear.
“I remember you standin’ up to piss and Enoch Grant behind ye pokin’ ye in the arse with the end of his bow and hissin’ like a snake through his teeth to make ye set down again. Not that ye did set yourself down,” Da added, fairly.
Murtagh had made a disgruntled hmph! and Jamie had ventured to ask what he’d done instead then?
The result was another, louder hmph! and his da laughed again, out loud this time.
“He turned round and pissed on Enoch Grant and then jumped down his throat and gave him laldy wi’ the hilt of his dirk.”
“Mm,” said Murtagh, clearly relishing the memory.
The hapless Grant had escaped worse injury, though, because just then the officers started shouting and the enemy—visible on the field at Sheriffmuir these last two hours—began to move.
“And a few minutes later, we popped out o’ the bracken like a swarm o’ brobhadan and the archers fired their arrows and those of us wi’ swords and targes ran down upon the Sassunaich,” Da said to Jamie.
“Aye, much good havin’ the high ground did us,” Murtagh said, glowering slightly. “I near as breakfast got an arrow in the back from our own men. It went through the sleeve o’ my shirt!”
“Well, ye did piss on Enoch Grant,” Da said reasonably. “What would ye expect him to do?”
Jamie smiled to himself, hearing the two of them talking, clear as day, and feeling in his bones the memory of the comfort of sleep coming for him, wrapped in the warmth of the firelit room at Lallybroch.
He was warm now, sweating from the climb, and he wasn’t sleepy. It was a small mountain, not even half the height of a Scottish beinn, but the sides were steep and thickly forested. He was following a cattle track across the face of the mountain—the local people grazed their stock sometimes on the top of the mountain, because there was a good meadow—but oak and maple saplings and a scurf of low bushes were creeping over it, and the track had vanished altogether by the time he made it to the summit through a screen of pines.
He stood at the edge of a long meadow, growing in a sort of saddle-shaped depression. It was late in the afternoon by now, and several deer were grazing at the far end, close to the shelter of the trees. One or two lifted their heads and looked at him, but he was still, and they went back to their business among the growing shadows.
There were rocky outcroppings near the edges of the plateau. Not large ones, but for a single rifleman, a decent vantage point—if you could make it that far and not be picked off struggling up the mountainside.
Aye, he could see well enough what Patrick Ferguson would think. With plenty of ammunition and a well-armed band of militia, it would be a simple matter to hunker down near the edges and fire downhill at the attackers.
Except, as Frank Randall had recounted it, this strategy would work only so long as the attackers were kept at a distance. Let them get too high, too close to the wee meadow, and Ferguson would switch to bayonet tactics at that point. But the problem was that the attackers who’d survived to get high enough and had eluded the bayonets would come over the edge with their weapons loaded and mow down the Loyalists who were fighting with unloaded guns equipped with butcher knives for bayonets. According to the damned book, Ferguson had little experience in battle—he’d been shot in the elbow in the only battle he’d fought, and the wound had crippled him—and he’d not understood either the terrain or the character of the men who would be climbing that mountain.
Randall hadn’t mentioned it, but Jamie was sure that Ferguson would have been using his own patented breech-loading rifle—he’d always use it, being unable to load a regular gun with his crippled elbow.
Strange to think of this man, this Ferguson, minding his own business somewhere just this minute, having no notion what was coming for him.