Did you know? he thought suddenly, toward Frank Randall. The man was a historian—and Jack Randall had been his ancestor, or at least he’d thought so. That was how it had all begun, Claire had told him: Frank had wanted to go to Scotland, to see what he could find regarding his five-times-great-grandfather. Maybe he had found out what happened to him, found some survivor’s account that told about Red Jamie, the Jacobite who’d gutted the gallant British captain. And maybe that finding-out had set Frank Randall on that Jacobite’s trail …
He snorted, watching the breath curl away from him, white in the dark. Claire stirred and huddled closer and he put a hand on her, patting her as he might reassure a dog who’d just heard thunder in the distance.
“Uncle Jamie?” Ian’s voice came out of the darkness near his shoulder, making him start, and Claire shuddered, waking.
“Aye,” he said. “I’m here, Ian.”
Ian’s lanky shape separated itself briefly from the night, and he crouched beside Jamie, dripping.
“The colonels want ye, Uncle,” he said, low-voiced. “Someone’s brought in some Tory prisoners and they’re arguing whether to hang the lot of them, or only one or two as an example.”
“Christ. Ye dinna need to tell me whose idea that was.”
“What?” Claire said blearily. She’d lifted her head off his leg, and he felt the sudden chill of the spot where she’d lain. She shook off the fold of his cloak, emerging into the rain-chilled air. “What’s going on? Is someone hurt?”
“No, a nighean,” he said. “I’ve got to go for a bit, though. Here, it’s only damp where I’ve been sitting; curl up there, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She cleared her throat—everyone had catarrh from spending day and night in wet clothes beside smoky fires—and shook her head to clear that, too, but Ian was wise enough to keep quiet, and she settled into the little half-warm hollow he’d made, scuttering into the wet leaves and drawing herself up into a ball.
THE RAIN HAD actually stopped, he realized. It was only that the dripping foliage all around made the same sound as the rain itself. The respite had allowed someone to light a tiny fire—no doubt someone had thought to bring a bit of kindling in his pack—but it hissed and fumed in the damp, billowing smoke over the gathered men as the wind changed. Jamie caught a sudden lungful and coughed, squinting through watering eyes at the hulking dark shape of Benjamin Cleveland, who was addressing a number of smaller shapes with violent language and gestures of the same nature.
“Ian,” he said, wiping his face on his sleeve, “go and find Colonel Campbell, aye? Tell him what’s afoot.”
Ian shook his head, the movement visible only because he was wearing a hat.
“No, Uncle,” he said. “Whatever’s afoot is going to happen in the next few minutes.”
“Damn you for a lily-livered pig-son,” Cleveland said—fairly mildly—to one of the smaller figures. “We’ve got no place to keep prisoners, and no need to try ’em in any case. I know the smell of a Tory. We’ll string ’em up and there’s an end to it!”
There was a shuffling and mumbling among the men, but Young Ian was right; Jamie could feel the shift of sentiment among them. The doubters were still trying to make a case for mercy, but were being overwhelmed by a rising flame of anger, lit and encouraged by Cleveland himself, who was visible in the fitful light, brandishing a large coil of rope.
Does he travel about with a dozen nooses, just in case of need? Jamie thought, unnerved and growing angry himself. He shoved between two men and got close enough to Cleveland to shout loud enough to interrupt him.
“Stad an sin!” he bellowed. Cleveland, as he’d hoped, turned toward him in puzzlement.
“Fraser?” he said, squinting into the hazy dark. “That you?”
“It is,” Jamie said, still loud. “And I dinna mean to let ye make me a murderer!”
“Why, if that troubles you, Mister Fraser,” Cleveland said with elaborate courtesy, “you just turn round and trot back to your wife, and your conscience won’t itch you a bit.”
That made most of the crowd laugh, though there were still dissenters calling out, “Murder! He’s right! It’s goddamned murder, ’thout a trial!” The breeze changed again and the cloud of smoke that had hidden the prisoners fled away, showing a line of six men, each with his hands bound behind his back, swaying to keep his balance. And then the clouds split for an instance, and Jamie saw the prisoners’ faces.
“Holy Mary!” he said, loud enough that Young Ian, at his shoulder, glanced at him, then at what Jamie was looking at, and said something that was probably the Mohawk equivalent.
At the end of the line stood Lachlan Hunt, one of the tenants Jamie had banished from the Ridge. Lachlan hadn’t let his wife go to plead for him; he was among the men who had left. Jamie’s wame clenched into a ball.
Lachlan had seen him, too, and was directing a wide-eyed look of terror at him.
He hesitated, but not more than a few seconds.
“Stop!” he shouted, as loud as he could, and Young Ian backed him up.
“This man—” Jamie said, pointing at Hunt. “He’s one of my tenants.”
“He’s a hell-bound Tory, is what he is!” Cleveland riposted smartly, and lunging forward, dropped a noose over Lachlan Hunt’s head. Jamie flexed his shoulders and felt Young Ian draw up close behind him.
Before he could carry out his plan of butting Cleveland in his massive belly and knocking him over, then jumping on him and enduring whatever Cleveland might do to him long enough for Young Ian to get Hunt away into the darkness, another voice rang out in anguish.
“Locky!” it called. “That’s my brother!” A young man was elbowing his way through the crowd, which was beginning to be amused by this second interruption.
“And I s’pose that’un is somebody’s grandpa, eh?” some wag shouted, pitching a wet pine cone that hit the youngest prisoner in the chest. That caused laughter, and Jamie managed a breath.
“Don’t matter who they are!” someone else yelled. “They’re Tories and they’re gonna die!”
“Not without a trial!”
“Please, please—let me say goodbye to him!” Lachlan’s brother was pushing urgently through the crowd—which, Jamie saw, was letting him. There was even a murmur of sympathy; both prisoner and brother were young men, no more than twenty.
Jamie didn’t wait; he elbowed Ian and slid sideways through the crowd.
The clouds had closed again, and the light beneath the chosen hanging-tree was no more than scattered patches of lighter dark. The tiny fire expired in a final puff of smoke, and Young Ian let fly with the sort of Indian yips and howls that were calculated to startle and freeze the blood of all who heard them. Jamie dived under the tree and grabbed Hunt by his bound arms, propelling him violently away into the nearby forest.
Lachlan staggered, off-balance, but lunged along as well as he could, and within moments they were out of sight of the fire and the stramash that was starting there.
Jamie drew his dirk and sawed at the rope.
“D’ye ken where we are?” he asked Hunt. There was a great deal of racket back by the tree.