Jamie felt his dislike of the man alter slightly, sliding reluctantly toward curiosity.
“And if I were?” he said.
Cleveland shrugged.
“It would be good to keep in touch with other groups. There’s no tellin’ where the British might pop up, but when they do—mark me, Mr. Fraser, when they do—I for one would like to know about it in time to take action.”
Jamie looked down into the wagon: muskets, and old ones, for the most part, with dry, cracked stocks and scratched muzzles—but a few regular British Brown Besses in better condition. Bought, traded, or stolen? he wondered.
“Action,” he repeated carefully. “And who are some of these men you speak of?”
“Oh, they exist,” Cleveland said, answering the thought rather than the question. “John Sevier. Isaac Shelby. William Campbell and Frederick Hambright. A good many others thinking on it, I can tell you.”
Jamie nodded but didn’t say more.
“One other thing I heard about you, Mr. Fraser,” said Cleveland, picking up one of the muskets from the wagon bed, idly checking the flint, “is that you were an Indian agent. That true?”
“I was.”
“And a good one, by report.” Cleveland smiled, suddenly clumsily playful. “I hear tell there’s quite a few redheaded children down in the Cherokee villages, hey?”
Jamie felt as though Cleveland had struck him across the face with the musket. Was that really being said, or was this some piece of foolery by which Cleveland hoped to involve him in something shabby?
“I’ll wish ye good day, sir,” he said stiffly. “My men will be down with tools to mend your wheel directly.”
He started walking back up the trace, but Cleveland, who moved quickly despite his bulk, was right beside him.
“If we’re to have militia, we need guns,” Cleveland said. “That stands to reason, don’t it?” Seeing that Jamie wasn’t disposed to answer rhetorical questions, he tried another tack.
“The Indians have guns,” he said. “The British government gives the Cherokee a good-sized allotment of shot and powder every year, for hunting. Was that the case when you were an agent?”
“Good day, Mr. Cleveland.” He walked faster, though the exercise was making his wounded leg throb. Cleveland grabbed his arm and jerked him to a stop.
“We can talk about guns later,” Cleveland said. “There’s just the one other thing I had in mind to speak to you about.”
“Take your hand off me.” The tone of his voice made Cleveland let go, but he didn’t back away.
“A man named Cunningham,” he said, his small brown eyes steady on Jamie’s. “Ex-navy captain. A Tory. Loyalist.”
That made a small, cold hole in Jamie’s middle. Captain Cunningham was indeed a Loyalist—so were a dozen others of his tenants.
“I hate a Tory,” Cleveland said, reflectively. He shook his head, but Jamie could see the gleam of his eyes beneath his hat brim. “Hung a few of ’em, down home. Put a scare into the others, and they left.” He cleared his throat and spat, landing a gob of yellowish phlegm near Jamie’s foot.
“Now. This Captain Cunningham writes letters. Essays in the papers. Someone with the captain’s welfare in mind might want to have a word with him about that. Don’t you think?”
WHEN JAMIE CAME back to the house site, he found the fire made up and a good smell of something cooking in the cauldron. Roger and Ian were there, talking to Claire while the shouts of children playing echoed among the trees near the creek. That’s right; Jenny would be coming to dinner tonight. He’d nearly forgot, in his annoyance with the blether of yon Cleveland.
“Someone with the captain’s welfare in mind might want to have a word with him about that. Don’t you think?”
This was not, in fact, bad advice, but knowing that didn’t help his mood any. He disliked being threatened, he disliked being condescended to, and he very much disliked being loomed at by a man larger than himself. He didn’t like Cleveland’s news, either, but he didn’t hold the man responsible for that.
The air of peaceful domesticity reached out for him, soothing, tempting him to join his family, drink the cold beer Fanny had pulled out of the well, sit down, and rest his aching leg. But the conversation with Cleveland was still boiling under his breastbone and he didn’t want to talk to anyone about it until he’d parsed it for himself.
He waved briefly to Claire as he passed through the site to where his shovel was waiting, thrust into the ground by the half-dug privy; the effort of digging would calm him as he thought things through. He hoped.
ROGER HAD SEEN Jamie disappear quietly into the shadows behind the half-built chimney and assumed that he’d gone for a piss. But when he didn’t reappear within a few minutes, Roger detached himself from the conversation—this presently centering on the infinite possibilities for wee Oglethorpe’s eventual real name—and followed his father-in-law into the gloaming.
He found Jamie standing on the edge of a large rectangular hole in the ground, evidently lost in contemplation of its depths.
“New privy?” he asked, nodding into the pit. Jamie looked up, smiling at sight of him, and Roger felt a rush of warmth—on more than one account.
“Aye. I’d only meant it to be the usual, ken, wi’ a single seat of ease.” Jamie gestured at the hole, the last of the sun touching his hair and skin with a golden light. “But with four more—and maybe yet more, in time? As ye say ye mean to stay, I mean.” He glanced sideways at Roger, and the smile came again.
“Then there’s the folk who come to see Claire, too. One of the Crombie boys came down last week to get a remedy for a case o’ the blazing shits, and he spent so long gruntin’ and groanin’ in Bobby Higgins’s privy that the family were all havin’ to trot into the woods, and Amy wasna best pleased at the state of the privy when he left, I can tell ye.”
Roger nodded.
“So ye mean to make it bigger, or make two privies?”
“Aye, that’s the question.” Jamie seemed pleased that Roger had grasped the essence of the situation so quickly. “See, most o’ the places wi’ families have a necessary that will accommodate two at once—the McHughs have a three-hole privy, and a thing of beauty it is, too; Sean McHugh is a canny man with his tools, and a good thing, what wi’ seven bairns. But the thing is—” He frowned a little and turned to look back toward the fire, presently hidden behind the dark bulk of the chimney stack. “The women, ken?”
“Claire and Brianna, you mean.” Roger took Jamie’s meaning at once. “Aye, they’ve notions of privacy. But a wee latch on the inside of the door …?”
“Aye, I thought of that.” Jamie waved a hand, dismissing it. “The difficulty’s more what they think of … germs.” He pronounced the word very carefully and glanced quickly at Roger under his brows, as though to see if he’d said it right, or as if he weren’t sure it was a real word to start with.
“Oh. Hadn’t thought of that. Ye mean the sick folk who come—they might leave …” He waved his own hand toward the hole.