“Jamie says he’ll need a dozen more of the small whisky casks by the end of the month, and I’ll need a large barrel of hickory wood for the smoked meat, as soon as you can manage.”
He nodded and made a number of cryptic marks on a slab of pine that hung on the wall. Oddly for a Scot, Sinclair couldn’t write but had some sort of private shorthand that enabled him to keep track of orders and accounts.
“Right, Missus Fraser. Anything else?”
I paused, trying to reckon up all the possible necessities for cooperage that might spring up before snowfall. There would be fish and meat to salt down, but those did better in stoneware jars; wooden casks left them tasting of turpentine. I had a good seasoned barrel for apples and another for squash already; the potatoes would be stored on shelves to keep from rotting.
“No,” I decided. “That will be all.”
“Aye, missus.” He hesitated, twirling the cask band faster. “Will Himself be coming down before the casks are ready?”
“No; he has the barley to get in, and the slaughtering to do, as well as the distilling. Everything’s late, because of the trial.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Why, though? Do you have a message for him?”
Sited at the foot of the cove nearest the wagon road, the cooper’s shop was the first building most visitors encountered, and thus a reception point for most gossip that came from outside Fraser’s Ridge.
Sinclair tilted his gingerly head, considering.
“Och, likely it’s nothing. Only that I’ve heard of a stranger in the district, asking questions about Jamie Fraser.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Brianna’s head snap round, distracted at once from her inspection of the spokeshavers, mallets, saws, and axes on the wall. She turned, skirt rustling in the wood shavings that littered the shop, ankle-deep.
“Do you know the stranger’s name?” she asked anxiously. “Or what he looks like?”
Sinclair shot her a look of surprise. He was oddly proportioned, with slender shoulders but muscular arms, and hands so huge that they might have belonged to a man twice his height. He looked at her, and his broad thumb unconsciously stroked the metal of the ring, slowly, over and over again.
“Why, I couldna speak to his appearance, mistress,” he said, politely enough, but with a hungry look in his eyes that made me want to take the truss ring away from him and wrap it around his neck. “He gave his name as Hodgepile, though.”
Brianna’s face lost its look of hope, though the muscle at the edge of her mouth curved slightly at the name.
“I don’t suppose that could be Roger,” she murmured to me.
“Likely not,” I agreed. “He wouldn’t have any reason to use a false name, anyway.” I turned back to Sinclair.
“You won’t have heard of a man called Wakefield, will you? Roger Wakefield?”
Sinclair shook his head decisively.
“No, missus. Himself has put word about that if such a one should come, he’s to be taken to the Ridge at once. If yon Wakefield sets foot within the county, you’ll hear of it as soon as I do.”
Brianna sighed, and I heard her swallow her disappointment. It was mid-October, and while she said nothing, she was clearly growing more anxious by the day. She wasn’t the only one, either; she had told us what Roger was trying to do, and the thought of the variety of disasters that might have befallen him in the attempt was enough to keep me wakeful at night.
“—about the whisky,” Sinclair was saying, jerking my attention back to him.
“The whisky? Hodgepile was asking about Jamie and whisky?”
Sinclair nodded, and set down the truss ring.
“In Cross Creek. No one would say a word to him, o’ course. But the one who told me did say as the one who spoke to the man thought him a soldier.” He grimaced briefly. “Hard for a lobsterback to wash the flour from his hair.”
“He wasn’t dressed as a soldier, surely?” Foot soldiers wore their hair in a tight folded queue, wrapped round a core of lamb’s wool and powdered with rice flour—which, in this climate, rapidly turned to paste as the flour mixed with sweat. Still, I imagined Sinclair meant the man’s attitude rather than his appearance.
“Och, no; he did claim to be a fur trader—but he walked wi’ a ramrod up his arse, and ye could hear the leather creak when he talked. So Geordie McClintock said.”
“Likely one of Murchison’s men. I’ll tell Jamie—thank you.”
I left the cooper’s shop with Brianna, wondering just how much trouble this Hodgepile might prove to be. Likely not much; the sheer distance from civilization and the inaccessibility of the Ridge was protection against most intrusions; one of Jamie’s purposes in choosing it. The multiple inconveniences of remoteness would be outweighed by its benefits, when it came to war. No battle would be fought on Fraser’s Ridge, I was sure of that.
And no matter how virulent Murchison’s grudge might be, or how good his spies, I couldn’t see his superiors allowing him to mount an armed expedition more than a hundred miles into the mountains, for the sole purpose of extirpating an illegal distillery whose total output was less than a hundred gallons a year.
Lizzie and Ian were waiting for us outside, occupied in gathering kindling from Sinclair’s rubbish heap. A cooper’s work generated immense quantities of shavings, splinters, and discarded chunks of wood and bark, and it was worth the labor of picking them up, to save splitting kindling by hand at home.
“Can you and Ian load the barrels, honey?” I asked Brianna. “I want a look at Lizzie in the sunlight.”
Brianna nodded, still looking abstracted, and went to help Ian heave the half-dozen small kegs outside the shop into the wagon. They were small, but heavy.
It was the skill that went into these particular barrels that had earned Ronnie Sinclair his land and shop, in spite of his less than prepossessing personality; not every cooper knew the trick of charring the inside of an oak barrel so as to lend a beautiful amber color and deep smoky flavor to the whisky aging gently inside.
“Come here, sweetie. Let me see your eyes.” Lizzie obediently widened her eyes, and let me pull down the lower lid to see the white sclera of the eyeball.
The girl was still shockingly thin, but the nasty yellow tinge of jaundice was fading from her skin, and her eyes were nearly white again. I cupped my fingers gently under her jaw; lymph glands only slightly swollen—that was better, too.
“Feeling all right?” I asked. She smiled shyly, and nodded. It was the first time she had been outside the cabin since her arrival with Ian three weeks before; she was still wobbly as a new calf. Frequent infusions of Jesuit bark had helped, though; she had had no fresh attacks of fever in the last week, and I had hopes of clearing up the liver involvement in short order.
“Mrs. Fraser?” she said, and I jumped, startled to hear her talk. She was so shy that she could seldom bring herself to say anything to me or to Jamie directly; she murmured her needs to Brianna, who conveyed them to me.
“Yes, dear?”
“I—I couldna help hearing what yon cooper said—about how Mr. Fraser’s asked word of Miss Brianna’s man. I did wonder—” Her words trailed off in a spasm of shyness, and a faint rose-pink blush showed in her transparent cheeks.