An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (читать книги TXT) 📗
“It’s okay,” he said, turning to kiss her cheek. “It’s your mum, and she’s in an especially parenthetical mood. She doesn’t normally do that unless she’s feeling happy.”
“Well, yes,” Bree murmured, frowning at the page, “but… Fort Ticonderoga?”Dear Bree, et al—
As you’ve doubtless gathered from the heading of this letter, we are not (yet) in Scotland. We had a certain amount of difficulty on our voyage, involving a) the Royal navy, in the person of one Captain Stebbings, who attempted to press your father and your cousin Ian (it didn’t work); b) an American privateer (though her captain, one—and one of him is more than enough—Asa Hickman insists upon the more dignified “letter of marque” as the designation of his ship’s mission, which is essentially piracy but executed under the authority of the Continental Congress); c) Rollo; and d) the gentleman I mentioned to you earlier, named (I thought) John Smith, but who turns out to be a deserter from the Royal navy named Bill (aka “Jonah,” and I begin to think they are right) Marsden.Without going into the details of the whole blood-soaked farce, I will merely report that Jamie, Ian, the damned dog, and I are all fine. So far. I’m hoping this state of affairs continues for the next forty-two days, that being when your father’s short-term militia contract expires. (Don’t ask. Essentially, he was saving Mr. Marsden’s neck, as well as providing for the welfare of a couple of dozen seamen inadvertently forced into piracy.) Once it does, we propose to leave promptly on whatever transport might be headed in the general direction of Europe, provided only that said transport is not captained by Asa Hickman. We may have to travel overland to Boston in order to do this, but so be it. (I suppose it would be interesting to see what Boston looks like these days. The Back Bay still being water and all, I mean. At least the Common will still be there, if sporting rather more cows than we were used to.)The fort is under the command of one General Anthony Wayne, and I have the uncomfortable feeling that I have heard Roger mention this man, using the nickname “Mad Anthony.” I’m hoping this designationeither does or will refer to his conduct in battle, rather than in administration. So far he seems rational, if harried.Being harried is rational, as he is expecting the more or less imminent arrival of the British army. Meanwhile, his chief engineer, a Mr. Jeduthan Baldwin (you’d like him, I think. Very energetic fellow!), is building a Great Bridge, to connect the fort with the hill they call Mount Independence. Your father is commanding a crew of laborers at work on this bridge; I can see him just now, from my perch on one of the fort’s demilune batteries. He stands out, rather, being not only twice the size of most of the men but one of the few wearing a shirt. Most of them in fact work naked, or wearing only a clout, because of the heat and wet. Given the mosquitoes, I think this is a mistake, but no one asked me.No one asked my opinion of the hygienic protocols involved in maintaining a proper sick bay and prisoner accommodations, either (we brought several British prisoners with us, including the aforementioned Captain Stebbings who should by all rights be dead, but somehow isn’t), but I told them anyway. I am thus persona non grata with Lieutenant Stactoe, who thinks he is a surgeon but isn’t, and therefore am prevented from treating the men under his care, most of whom will be dead within a month. Fortunately, no one cares if I treat the women, children, or prisoners, and so I am usefully occupied, there being a lot of them.I have a distinct notion that Ticonderoga changed hands at some point, probably more than once, but have no idea who took it from whom, or when. This last point rather weighs upon my mind.General Wayne has almost no regular troops. Jamie says the fort is seriously undermanned—and even I can see this; half the barracks are vacant—and while the occasional militia company comes in from New Hampshire or Connecticut, these normally enroll for only two or three months, as we did. Even so, the men often don’t stay their full term; there is a constant melting away, and General Wayne complains—publicly—that he is reduced to (and I quote) “Negroes, Indians, and women.” I told him that he could do worse.Jamie says also that the fort lacks half its guns, these having been abstracted by a fat bookseller named Henry Fox, who took them two years ago and managed by some feat of persistence and engineering to get them all the way to Boston (Mr. Fox himself having to be conveyed in a cart along with them, he weighing in excess of three hundred pounds. One of the officers here, who accompanied that expedition, described it, to general hilarity), where they proved very useful indeed in getting rid of the British.What’s somewhat more worrying than these points is the existence of a small hill, directly across the water from us, and no great distance away. The Americans named it Mount Defiance when they took Ticonderoga away from the British in ’75 (you remember Ethan Allen? “Surrender in the name of the Great Jehovah and the ContinentalCongress!” I hear that poor Mr. Allen is presently in England, being tried for treason, he having rather overreached himself by trying to take Montreal on the same terms), and that’s rather apt—or would be, if the fort was capable of putting men and artillery on top of it. They aren’t, and I think the fact that Mount Defiance commands the fort and is within cannon-shot of it probably will not be lost on the British army, if and when they get here.On the good side, it is almost summer. The fish are jumping, and if there was any cotton, it would probably reach my waist. It rains frequently, and I’ve never seen so much vegetation in one place. (The air is so rich with oxygen, I occasionally think I will pass out, and am obliged to nip into the barracks for a restorative whiff of dirty laundry and chamber pots (though the local usage is “thunder-mug,” and for good reason). Your cousin Ian takes foraging parties out every few days, Jamie and a number of the other men are accomplished fishermen, and we eat extremely well in consequence.I won’t go on at great length here, as I’m not sure when or where I’ll be able to dispatch this letter via one or more of Jamie’s several routes (we copy each letter, if there’s time, and send multiple copies, since even normal correspondence is chancy these days). With luck, it will go with us to Edinburgh. In the meantime, we send you all our love. Jamie dreams now and then of the children; I wish I did.Mama
Roger sat in silence for a moment, to be sure Bree had had time to finish reading the letter—though in fact she read much faster than he did; he thought she must be reading it twice. After a moment, she sighed through her nose in a troubled fashion and straightened up. He put up a hand and rested it on her waist, and she covered it with her own. Not mechanically; she gripped his fingers tightly—but absently. She was looking across at the bookshelves.
“Those are new, aren’t they?” she asked quietly, lifting her chin toward the right-hand bay.
“Yeah. I sent to Boston for them. They came in a couple of days ago.” The spines were new and shiny. History texts, dealing with the American Revolution. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, by Mark M. Boatner III. A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier, by Joseph Plumb Martin.
“Do you want to know?” he asked. He nodded at the open box on the table before them, where a thick sheaf of letters still remained unopened, on top of the books. He hadn’t yet brought himself to admit to Bree that he’d looked at the books. “I mean—we know they probably made it out of Ticonderoga all right. There are a lot more letters.”
“We know one of them probably did,” Bree said, eyeing the letters. “Unless… Ian knows, I mean. He could have…”
Roger pulled his hand back and reached with determination into the box. Bree drew in her breath, but he ignored it, taking a handful of letters from the box and flipping through them.
