An echo in the bone

“Yes?” Rogers said, seeing him. “All present, then. Let’s go.” And they moved off, a silent pack coursing down the road, intent upon the track of their unknowing prey.

THEY SAW THE FLAMES from the water. The city was burning, mostly the district near the East River, but the wind was up, and the fire was spreading. There was much excited speculation among Rogers’s men; had rebel sympathizers fired the city?

“Just as likely drunken soldiers,” Rogers said, his voice grimly dispassionate. William felt queasy, seeing the red glow in the sky. The prisoner was silent.

They found General Howe—eventually—in his headquarters at Beekman House outside the city, red-eyed from smoke, lack of sleep, and a rage that was buried bone-deep. It stayed buried, though, for the moment. He summoned Rogers and the prisoner into the library where he had his office, and—after one brief, astonished look at William’s attire—sent him to his bed.

Fortnum was in the attic, watching the city burn from the window. There was nothing to be done about it. William came to stand beside him. He felt strangely empty, somehow unreal. Chilled, though the floor was warm under his bare feet.

An occasional fountain of sparks shot up now and then, as the flames struck something particularly flammable, but from such a distance there was really little to be seen but the bloody glow against the sky.

“They’ll blame us, you know,” Fortnum said after a bit.

THE AIR WAS STILL THICK with smoke at noon the next day.

He couldn’t take his eyes off Hale’s hands. They had clenched involuntarily as a private soldier tied them, though he had put them behind his back with no protest. Now his fingers were clasped tight together, so hard that the knuckles had gone white.

Surely the flesh protested, William thought, even if the mind had resigned itself. His own flesh was protesting simply being here, his skin twitching like a horse plagued by flies, his bowels cramping and loosening in horrid sympathy—they said a hanged man’s bowels gave way; would Hale’s? Blood washed through his face at the thought, and he looked at the ground.

Voices made him look up again. Captain Moore had just asked Hale whether he wished to make any remarks. Hale nodded; evidently he had been prepared for this.

William felt that he should himself have been prepared by now; Hale had spent the last two hours in Captain Moore’s tent, writing notes to be delivered to his family, while the men assembled for the hasty execution shifted their weight from foot to foot, waiting. He wasn’t prepared at all.

Why was it different? He’d seen men die, some horribly. But this preliminary courtesy, this formality, this … obscene civility, all conducted with the certain knowledge of imminent and shameful death. Deliberation. The awful deliberation, that was it.

“At last!” Clarewell muttered in his ear. “Bloody get on with it; I’m starving.”

A young black man named Billy Richmond, a private soldier whom William knew casually, was sent up the ladder to tie the rope to the tree. He came down now, nodding to the officer.

Now Hale was mounting the ladder, the sergeant major steadying him. The noose was round his neck, a thick rope, new-looking. Didn’t they say new ropes stretched? But it was a high ladder …

William was sweating like a pig, though the day was mild. He mustn’t close his eyes or look away. Not with Clarewell watching.

He tightened the muscles of his throat and concentrated again on Hale’s hands. The fingers were twisting, helplessly, though the man’s face was calm. They were leaving faint damp marks on the skirt of his coat.

A grunt of effort and a grating noise; the ladder was pulled away, and there was a startled whoof! from Hale as he dropped. Whether it was the newness of the rope or something else, his neck did not break cleanly.

He’d refused the hood, and so the spectators were obliged to watch his face for the quarter of an hour it took him to die. William stifled a horrific urge to laugh from pure nerves, seeing the pale blue eyes bulge to bursting point, the tongue thrust out. So surprised. He looked so surprised.

There was only a small group of men assembled for the execution. He saw Richardson a little way away, watching with a look of remote abstraction. As though aware of his glance, Richardson looked sharply up at him. William looked away.

THE MINISTER’S CAT

Lallybroch

October 1980

SHE WAS UP EARLY, before the children, though she knew this was foolish—whatever Roger had gone to Oxford for, it would take him a good four or five hours to drive there, and the same back. Even if he had left at dawn—and he might not be able to, if he hadn’t arrived in time to do whatever it was the day before—he couldn’t be home before midday at the earliest. But she’d slept restlessly, dreaming one of those monotonous and inescapably unpleasant dreams, this one featuring the sight and sound of the tide coming in, lapping wave by lapping wave by lapping … and wakened at first light feeling dizzy and unwell.

It had occurred to her for one nightmare instant that she might be pregnant—but she’d sat up abruptly in bed, and the world had settled at once into place around her. None of that sense of having shoved one foot through the looking glass that early pregnancy entails. She set one foot cautiously out of bed, and the world—and her stomach—stayed steady. Good, then.

Still, the feeling of unease—whether from the dream, Roger’s absence, or the specter of pregnancy—stayed with her, and she went about the daily business of the household with a distracted mind.

She was sorting socks toward midday when she became aware that things were quiet. Quiet in a way that made the hair rise on the back of her neck.

“Jem?” she called. “Mandy?”

Total silence. She stepped out of the laundry, listening for the usual thumps, bangings, and screeches from above, but there was not the slightest sound of trampling feet, toppling blocks, or the high-pitched voices of sibling warfare.

“Jem!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

No reply. The last time this had happened, two days before, she’d discovered her alarm clock in the bottom of the bathtub, neatly disassembled into its component parts, and both children at the far end of the garden, glowing with u

“I didn’t do it!” Jem had declared virtuously, hauled into the house and faced with the evidence. “And Mandy’s too little.”

“Too widdle,” Mandy had agreed, nodding her mop of black curls so ferociously as to obscure her face.

“Well, I don’t think Daddy did it,” Bree said, raising a stern brow. “And I’m sure it wasn’t A

“Shussspects, shussspects,” Mandy said happily, enchanted by the new word.

Jem shook his head in resigned fashion, viewing the scattered gears and dismembered hands.

“We must have got piskies, Mama.”

“Pishkies, pishkies,” Mandy chirped, pulling her skirt up over her head and yanking at her frilly underpants. “Needa go pishkie, Mama!”

In the midst of the urgency occasioned by this statement, Jem had faded artfully, not to be seen again until di

“Jem doesn’t usually lie,” Roger had said thoughtfully, having been shown the small pottery bowl now containing the clock’s remains.

Bree, brushing out her hair for bed, gave him a jaundiced look.

“Oh, you think we have pixies, too?”

“Piskies,” he said absently, stirring the small pile of gears in the bowl with a finger.

“What? You mean they really are called ‘piskies’ here? I thought Jem was just mispronouncing it.”