“I was struck in the heid wi’ an ax, many years gone. I lived, but I never heard music again. The pipes, fiddles, singin’ … I ken it’s music, but to me, it’s nay more than noise. But that song … I dinna recall the song itself, but I know how I felt when I heard it.”

She’d never before seen a look on his face as she did when he called back that song for her, but now, watching his back, straight and square as he rode before them, quite suddenly she felt what he had felt in the depth of that distant night, and understood why he found peace in silent spaces.

61

’Gin a Body Meet a Body …

“I’M OLDER THAN THIS place,” Jenny said, looking about with a disparaging eye as the wagon pulled up outside an ordinary. “This town looks as though ’twas thrown up yesterday.”

“It’s been here for the last twenty-five years,” Jamie said, wrapping his horse’s reins around the hitching post. “It’s older than Rachel, aye?” He smiled at his niece, but his sister snorted, edging backward out of her nest in the wagon.

“No age at all for a city,” she said dismissively.

“Crawling wi’ Loyalists, too,” said Young Ian, seizing his mother round the middle and swinging her down. “Or so I hear.”

“I hear that, too,” Jamie said, and gave the main street an eye, as though Loyalists might come darting out of the taverns like mice. “But I hear they havena got guns, nor yet a proper militia.”

Despite its relative youth, Salisbury was the largest town in Rowan County. It was also the seat of Rowan County, the closest town between Fraser’s Ridge and the Great Wagon Road—and the military fiefdom of one Francis Locke, a patriot. And one with guns and militia. That being so, Jamie settled Jenny, Rachel, and Oggy temporarily at a decent-looking ordinary with an expensive pot of strong coffee and a plate of stuffed rolls, sent Ian to buy provisions for the journey north, then went himself in search of Colonel Locke.

Once met, Jamie found himself disposed to like Francis Locke. A stocky, red-faced Irishman of about his own age, the man had a direct manner that appealed to him. He was a landowner, a businessman—and the commander of the Rowan County Regiment of Militia.

“One hundred and sixty-seven companies of militia we have on our rolls,” Locke said, with a certain grim satisfaction. “At present. From all over Rowan County—though none from the far backcountry as yet. I’d be glad to welcome you and your company, Mr. Fraser, should ye care to join us.”

Jamie gave him a cordial nod but refrained from committing himself, just yet.

“I’ll not yet have my company fully equipped, sir—though I expect to accomplish that before the snow flies and be ready for the spring.”

The British army surely would be.