An echo in the bone

The artillerymen loaded the last of the ca

I’ve lost, he thought, but her head was still bent in thought. Is she maybe praying? Or only trying to think how to send me away?

Whichever it was, she lifted her head and stood up, away from the tree. She pointed at Rollo, who was lying couchant now, motionless but alert, yellow eyes following every movement of a fat robin foraging in the grass.

“That dog is a wolf, is he not?”

“Aye, well, mostly.”

A small flash of hazel told him not to quibble.

“And yet he is thy boon companion, a creature of rare courage and affection, and altogether a worthy being?”

“Oh, aye,” he said with more confidence. “He is.”

She gave him an even look.

“Thee is a wolf, too, and I know it. But thee is my wolf, and best thee know that.”

He’d started to burn when she spoke, an ignition swift and fierce as the lighting of one of his cousin’s matches. He put out his hand, palm forward, to her, still cautious lest she, too, burst into flame.

“What I said to ye, before … that I kent ye loved me—”

She stepped forward and pressed her palm to his, her small, cool fingers linking tight.

“What I say to thee now is that I do love thee. And if thee hunts at night, thee will come home.”

Under the sycamore, the dog yawned and laid his muzzle on his paws.

“And sleep at thy feet,” Ian whispered, and gathered her in with his one good arm, both of them blazing bright as day.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Brigadier General Simon Fraser

There are, as anyone who’s read my books will already realize, a lot of Simon Frasers ru

My reason for mentioning the Brigadier particularly, though, is the interesting matter of his grave. Most accounts of Saratoga that mention Simon Fraser of Balnain report that he was buried in the evening of the day he died, within the boundaries of the Great Redoubt (not Breyma

Now, it isn’t always possible to go in person to a place you’re writing about, nor is it always necessary. It is usually desirable, though, and luckily, Saratoga is pretty accessible, and the battlefield there is well preserved and curated. I’ve walked the field there three times over the course of several years since I first decided that I wanted to use this particular battle as a centerpiece of a book, if not the book I happened to be writing at the time. On one of these occasions, I was there alone, there were no other tourists, and I got into conversation with one of the park employees (dressed in period costume and posted at the rebuilt site of the Bemis farm). After he patiently answered a lot of intrusive questions (“Are you wearing underwear?” being one of them, and “No,” being the answer. “Long shirttails,” being the further explanation for how one avoids chafing while wearing homespun breeches), allowed me to handle his Brown Bess musket and explained the loading and firing of it, we got into a discussion of the battle and its personalities—since I did, at this point, know quite a lot about it.

General Fraser’s grave was at that point noted on the Park Service map—but it wasn’t in the Great Redoubt; it was located near the river. I’d been down there but found no marker for it, and so inquired where it was—and why wasn’t it in the Great Redoubt? I was informed that the Park Service had at one point—I don’t know when, but fairly recently—done an archaeological excavation of the Great Redoubt, including the supposed gravesite. To everyone’s surprise, General Fraser was not buried there, nor was anyone else. There were signs that a grave had once been dug, and a uniform button was found there, but no signs whatever of a body. (And while the body itself would be long since decomposed, you would expect still to see some signs.) There was (the employee told me) an account that said that General Fraser’s grave had been moved to a site near the river, and that that was why the map was so marked—but no one knew where the specific place was, or, in fact, whether the General was in that one, either, which was why there was no marker there.

Well, novelists are a conscienceless lot. Those of us who deal with history tend to be fairly respectful of such facts as are recorded (always bearing in mind the proviso that just because it’s in print, it isn’t necessarily true). But give us a hole to slide through, an omission in the historic record, one of those mysterious lacunae that occur in even the best-documented life … so all in all, I rather thought that perhaps General Fraser had been sent home to Scotland. (Yes, they did send bodies to and fro in the eighteenth century, on occasion. Someone exhumed poor old Tom Paine from his grave in France, intending to ship him back to America so he could be interred there with honor as a prophet of the Revolution. His body was lost in transit, and no one’s ever found it. Speaking of interesting lacunae …)

Anyway, as it happened, I went to Scotland last year, and while wandering round the countryside in search of a logical place near Balnain in which to plant General Fraser, stumbled over (literally) the large chambered cairn at Corrimony. Such sites are always evocative, and when I read on the sign posted there that there had once been a body in the central chamber, but it had evidently decayed into the soil (there were traces of bones left in the earth, even after a thousand years or more), and that the tomb had been broken into sometime in the nineteenth century (thus explaining why you won’t find anything in the cairn if you happen to go there now) … well, hey. (People always ask novelists where they get their ideas. Everywhere!)

Quaker Plain Speech

The Religious Society of Friends was founded around 1647 by George Fox. As part of the Society’s belief in the equality of all men before God, they did not use honorific titles (such as “Mr./Mrs.,” “General/Colonel,” etc.), and used “plain speech” in addressing everyone.

Now, as any of you who know a second language with Latin roots (Spanish, French, etc.) realize, these languages have both a familiar and a formal version of “you.” So did English, once upon a time. The “thee” and “thou” forms that most of us recognize as Elizabethan or biblical are in fact the English familiar forms of “you”—with “you” used as both the plural familiar form (“all y’all”), and the formal pronoun (both singular and plural). As English evolved, the familiar forms were dropped, leaving us with the utilitarian “you” to cover all contingencies.

Quakers retained the familiar forms, though, as part of their “plain speech,” until the twentieth century. Over the years, though, plain speech also evolved, and while “thee/thy” remained, “thou/thine” largely disappeared, and the verb forms associated with “thee/thy” changed. From about the mid-eighteenth century onward, plain speech used “thee” as the singular form of “you” (the plural form remained “you,” even in plain speech), with the same verb forms normally used for third-person singular. For example, “He knows that/Thee knows that.” The older verb endings—“knowest,” “doth,” etc.—were no longer used.