Someone heard the rattle of the wagon wheels. Two men who had been smoking pipes near the river—a safe distance from the buildings, she noted—turned to stare at them. One tilted his head, estimating, but evidently decided they were worth talking to; he tapped the dottle from his pipe into the water and, putting the long-stemmed clay pipe into his belt, strolled toward the road, followed by his companion.
“Ho, there!” the first man called, waving. Jamie pulled the horses to a stop and waved back.
“Good afternoon to ye, sir. I’m Jamie Fraser, and this is my daughter, Mrs. MacKenzie. We’re seeking to buy powder.”
“I’d expect ye are,” the man said, rather dryly. “Nobody’d come here for any other reason.” Irish, she thought, smiling at him.
“Oh, that ain’t true, John.” His friend, a stocky man of thirty or so, nudged him amiably in the ribs, grinning at Brianna. “Some of us come to drink your wine and smoke your tobacco.”
“John Patton, sir,” the Irishman said, ignoring his friend. He offered Jamie his hand, and having shaken it invited them to drive in beside the stone building nearest the water.
“It’s the least likely to blow up,” the other man—who had introduced himself as Isaac Shelby—said, laughing. Brianna noticed that John Patton didn’t laugh.
The stone building was a mill. A constant dull rumble came through the walls, beneath the plash of the waterwheel, and the smell was quite different here: damp stone, waterweed, and a faint smell that reminded her of doused campfires and rain on the ashes of a burnt place in the forest. It gave her an odd quiver, low in her belly.
Her father got down and set about unhitching the horses; he gave her an eye and tilted his head toward one of the ramshackle sheds higher up the bank, where three people were standing in a group, evidently arguing about something. One of them was a woman, and her posture—arms folded and head bent, but in a way that suggested not submission, but a barely restrained urge to butt her interlocutor in the nose—argued that here was The Boss.
Brianna nodded and set off toward the shed, aware from the sudden silence behind her that either Mr. Patton, Mr. Shelby, or both were eyeing her rear aspect. Not that they’d see much; she was wearing a hunting shirt that came nearly to her knees, but the mere fact that she had on breeches under it …
She heard Shelby cough suddenly, and deduced that he’d just met her father’s eye.
“Jamie Fraser,” she heard Shelby say, trying for nonchalance. “I know a good many Frasers. Would you be from up around the Nolichucky?”
“No, we have a place near the Treaty Line in Rowan County,” her father said. “It’s called Fraser’s Ridge.”
“Ah! Then I’ll know you, sir!” Shelby sounded relieved. “Benjamin Cleveland told me of meeting you. He—”
The voices behind her faded as the group near the shed noticed her. All of them looked startled, but the woman’s look changed almost immediately into a dour amusement.
“Good day to ye, Missus,” she said, openly eyeing Brianna’s hunting clothes. She was about Brianna’s age and wearing a canvas apron, much worn and stained, with small blackened holes where sparks appeared to have fallen. The dark-brown skirt and long-sleeved man’s shirt beneath were rough homespun, though fairly clean. “What might I be doin’ for ye?”
“I’m Brianna MacKenzie,” Bree said, wondering whether she ought to offer a hand to shake. Mrs. Patton—for surely she had to be—didn’t extend one, so Brianna contented herself with a cordial nod. “My father and I are, um, seeking to buy some gunpowder. Are you by chance Mrs. Patton?” she added, as the woman made no move to introduce herself.
The lady in question glanced over her shoulder, then slowly gazed round from side to side, as though looking for someone. One of the young men she’d been arguing with giggled, but shut up sharp when Mrs. Patton’s eye fell on him.
“I don’t know who else I’d be,” she said, but not unpleasantly. “What make of powder are ye after, and how much?”
That stopped Brianna cold for a moment. She knew absolutely nothing about makes of powder—or even how to refer to them. What she wanted to know was how to make the stuff in quantity and with a reasonable degree of safety.
“Powder for hunting,” she said, opting for simplicity. “And maybe something for … blowing up stumps?”
Mary Patton blinked, then laughed. The two young men joined her.
“Stumps?”
“Well, ye could set one on fire, I suppose, if ye touched off a bit of powder on top of it,” the elder of the young men said, smiling at her. The “on top” triggered belated realization, and she smacked her head in annoyance.
“Bloody hell,” she said. “Of course—you’d have to shape the charge. So … more something like a grenade, then.”
Mrs. Patton’s rather square face shifted instantly to surprise, and just as swiftly to wary calculation.
“Grenadoes, is it?” she said, and looked Brianna over with more interest. Then she glanced beyond Bree, and realization came into her eyes.
“Yer father, is it? That him?”
“Yes.” The woman was staring in a way that made Bree turn to look over her own shoulder. Her father had taken the horses down the bank to drink and was standing on the gravel there, talking to Mr. Shelby. He’d taken his hat off in order to splash water on his face, and the sun was sparking off his hair, which, while streaked with silver, was still overall a noticeable red.
“Red Jamie Fraser?” Mrs. Patton looked back sharply at her. “He’s the one they called Red Jamie, back in the old country?”
“I—suppose so.” Bree was flabbergasted. “How do you know that name?”
“Hmp.” Mrs. Patton nodded in a satisfied sort of way, her eyes still fixed on Jamie. “My pap’s older brothers, two of ’em, fought on both sides of the Jacobite Rising. One was transported to the Indies, but his brother went and found him, bought his indenture, and the two of them came to settle here where John and I had land. Those”—she gave a deprecating nod to the two young men, who had retired to a respectful distance—“are their sons.”
“Quite the family concern, isn’t it?” Bree nodded round to the mill and sheds, now noticing that there was a small cluster of cabins and a good-sized house standing perhaps a quarter mile away, inside a copse of maple trees.
“’Tis,” Mrs. Patton agreed, now amiable. “One o’ my uncles spoke often of your pa, fought with him at Prestonpans and Falkirk. He had some bits and pieces kept by, mementos o’ the war. And one thing he had was a broadsheet with a drawing of Red Jamie Fraser on it, offering a reward. A handsome man, even on a broadsheet. Five hundred pounds the Crown offered for him! Wonder what he’d be worth now?” she said, and laughed, with another look at the man in question, this one longer.
Bree assumed this to be a joke, and gave a tight smile in return. Just in case, she noted primly that her father had been pardoned after the Rising, and then firmly returned the conversation to gunpowder.
Mrs. Patton appeared to feel that they were now on friendly terms, and willingly showed her the two milling sheds, noting casually the crude construction of the walls.