Drums of Autumn (24 page)

River Run took in quite a large territory, including not only its prime riverfront acreage but a substantial chunk of the longleaf pine forest that covered a third of the colony. In addition, Hector Cameron had cannily acquired land containing a wide creek, one of many that flowed into Cape Fear.

Thus provided not only with the valuable commodities of timber, pitch, and turpentine but with a convenient means of getting them to market, it was little wonder that River Run had prospered, even though it produced only modest quantities of tobacco and indigo—though the fragrant fields of green tobacco through which we rode looked more than modest to me.

“There’s a wee mill,” Jocasta was explaining, as we rode. “Just above the joining of the creek and the river. The sawing and shaping are done there, and then the boards and barrels are sent downriver by barge to Wilmington. It’s no great distance from the house to the mill by water, if ye choose to row upstream, but I thought to show ye a bit of the country instead.” She breathed the pine-scented air with pleasure. “It’s been a time since I was out, myself.”

It
was
pleasant country. Once in the pine forest, it was much cooler, the sun blocked out by the clustered needles overhead. Far overhead the trunks of the trees soared upward for twenty or thirty feet before branching out—no great surprise to hear that the largest part of the mill’s output was masts and spars, made for the Royal Navy.

River Run did a great deal of business with the navy, it seemed, judging from Jocasta’s conversation; masts, spars, laths, timbers, pitch, turpentine, and tar. Jamie rode close by her side, listening intently as she explained everything in detail, leaving me and Ian to trail behind. Evidently, she had worked closely with her husband in building River Run; I wondered how she managed the place by herself, now that he was gone.

“Look!” Ian said, pointing. “What’s that?”

I pulled up and walked my horse, along with his, to the tree he had pointed out. A great slab of bark had been taken off, exposing the inner wood for a stretch of four feet or more on one side. Within this area, the yellow-white wood was crosshatched in a sort of herringbone pattern, as though it had been slashed back and forth with a knife.

“We’re near,” Jocasta said. Jamie had seen us stop, and they had ridden back to join us. “That will be a turpentine tree you’re seeing; I smell it.”

We all could; the scent of cut wood and pungent resin was so strong that even
I
could have found the tree blindfolded. Now that we had stopped, I could hear noises in the distance; the rumblings and thumps of men at work, the chunk of an ax and voices calling back and forth. Breathing in, I also caught a whiff of something burning.

Jocasta edged Corinna close to the cut tree.

“Here,” she said, touching the bottom of the cut, where a rough hollow had been chiseled out of the wood. “We call it the box; that’s where the sap and the raw turpentine drip down and collect. This one is nearly full; there’ll be a slave along soon to dip it out.”

No sooner had she spoken than a man appeared through the trees; a slave dressed in no more than a loincloth, leading a large white mule with a broad strap slung across its back, a barrel suspended on either side. The mule stopped dead when he saw us, flung back his head, and brayed hysterically.

“That will be Clarence,” Jocasta said, loudly enough to be heard above the noise. “He likes to see folk. And who is that with him? Is it you, Pompey?”

“Yah’m. S’me.” The slave gripped the mule by the upper lip and gave it a vicious twist. “Lea’f, vassar!” As I made the mental translation of this expression into “Leave off, you bastard!” the man turned toward us, and I saw that his slurred speech was caused by the fact that the lower left half of his jaw was gone; his face below the cheekbone simply fell away into a deep depression filled with white scar tissue.

Jocasta must have heard my gasp of shock—or only have expected such a response—for she turned her blindfold toward me.

“It was a pitch explosion—fortunate he was not killed. Come, we’re near the works.” Without waiting for her groom, she turned her horse’s head expertly, and made off through the trees, toward the scent of burning.

The contrast of the turpentine works with the quiet of the forest was amazing; a large clearing full of people, all in a hum of activity. Most were slaves, dressed in the minimum of clothing, limbs and bodies smudged with charcoal.

“Is anyone at the sheds?” Jocasta turned her head toward me.

I rose in my stirrups to look; at the far side of the clearing, near a row of ramshackle sheds, I caught a flash of color; three men in the uniform of the British Navy, and another in a bottle-green coat.

“That will be my particular friend,” Jocasta said, smiling in satisfaction at my description. “Mr. Farquard Campbell. Come, Nephew; I should like ye to meet him.”

Seen up close, Campbell proved to be a man of sixty or so, no more than middle height, but with that particular brand of leathery toughness that some Scotsmen exhibit as they age—not so much a weathering as a tanning process that results in a surface like a leather targe, capable of turning the sharpest blade.

Campbell greeted Jocasta with pleasure, bowed courteously to me, acknowledged Ian with the flick of a brow, then turned the full force of his shrewd gray eyes on Jamie.

“It’s verra pleased I am that you’re here, Mr. Fraser,” he said, extending his hand. “Verra pleased, indeed. I’ve heard a deal about ye, ever since your aunt learned of your intentions to visit River Run.”

He appeared sincerely delighted to meet Jamie, which struck me as odd. Not that most people weren’t happy to meet Jamie—he was quite a prepossessing man, if I did say so—but there was an air almost of relief in Campbell’s effusive greeting, which seemed unusual for someone whose outward appearance was entirely one of reserve and taciturnity.

If Jamie noticed anything odd, he hid his puzzlement behind a facade of courtesy.

“I’m flattered that ye should have spared a moment’s thought to me, Mr. Campbell.” Jamie smiled pleasantly, and bowed toward the naval officers. “Gentlemen? I am pleased to make your acquaintance, as well.”

Thus given an opening, a chubby, frowning little person named Lieutenant Wolff and his two ensigns made their introductions, and after perfunctory bows, dismissed me and Jocasta from mind and conversation, turning their attention at once to a discussion of board feet and gallons.

Jamie lifted one eyebrow at me, with a slight nod toward Jocasta, suggesting in marital shorthand that I take his aunt and bugger off while business was conducted.

Jocasta, however, showed not the slightest inclination to remove herself.

“Do go on, my dear,” she urged me. “Josh will show ye everything. I’ll just wait in the shade whilst the gentlemen conduct their business; the heat’s a bit much for me, I’m afraid.”

The men had sat down to discuss business inside an open-fronted shed that boasted a crude table with a number of stools; presumably this was where the slaves took their meals, suffering the blackflies for the sake of air. Another shed served for storage; the third, which was enclosed, I deduced must be the sleeping quarters.

Beyond the sheds, toward the center of the clearing, were two or three large fires, over which huge kettles steamed in the sunshine, suspended from tripods.

“They’ll be cookin’ doon the turpentine, a-boilin’ it intae pitch,” Josh explained, taking me within eyeshot of one of the kettles. “Some is put intae the barrels as is”—he nodded toward the sheds, where a wagon was parked, piled high with barrels—“but the rest is made intae pitch. The naval gentlemen will be sayin’ how much they’ll be needin’, so as we’ll know.”

A small boy of seven or eight was perched on a high, rickety stool, stirring the pot with a long stick; a taller youth stood by with an enormous ladle, with which he removed the lighter layer of purified turpentine at the top of the kettle, depositing this in a barrel to one side.

As I watched them, a slave came out of the forest, leading a mule, and headed for the kettle. Another man came to help, and together they unloaded the barrels—plainly heavy—from the mule, and upended them into the kettle, one at a time, with a great whoosh of pungent yellowish pinesap.

“Och, ye’ll want to stand back a bit, mum,” Josh said, taking my arm to draw me away from the fire. “The stuff does splash a bit, and happen it should take fire, ye wouldna want to be burnt.”

Having seen the man in the forest, I most certainly didn’t want to be burned. I drew away, and glanced back at the sheds. Jamie, Mr. Campbell, and the naval men were sitting on stools around a table inside one hut, sharing something from a bottle and poking at a sheaf of papers on the table.

Standing pressed against the shed wall, out of sight of the men within, was Jocasta Cameron. Having abandoned her pretense of exhaustion, she was plainly listening for all she was worth.

Josh caught the expression of surprise on my face, and turned to see what I was looking at.

“Miss Jo does hate not to have the charge o’ things,” he murmured regretfully. “I havena haird her myself, but yon lass Phaedre did say as how Mistress takes on when she canna manage something—a’rantin’ dreadful, she says, and stampin’ something fierce.”

“That must be quite a remarkable spectacle,” I murmured. “What is she not able to manage, though?” From all appearances, Jocasta Cameron had her house, fields, and people well in hand, blind or not.

Now it was his turn to look surprised.

“Och, it’s the bluidy Navy. Did she not say why we came today?”

Before I could go into the fascinating question of why Jocasta Cameron should wish to manage the British Navy, today or any other day, we were interrupted by a cry of alarm from the far side of the clearing. I turned to look, and was nearly trampled by several half-naked men running in panic toward the sheds.

At the far side of the clearing a peculiar sort of mound rose up out of the ground; I had noticed it earlier but had had no chance to ask about it yet. While the floor of the clearing was mostly dirt, the mound was covered with grass—but grass of a peculiar, patchy sort; part was green, part gone yellow, and here and there was an oblong of grass that was stark, dead brown.

Just as I realized that this effect was the result of the mound’s being covered in cut turves, the whole thing blew up. There was no sound of explosion, just a sort of muffled noise like a huge sneeze, and a faint wave of concussion in the air that brushed my cheek.

If it didn’t sound like an explosion, it certainly looked like one; pieces of turf and bits of burnt wood began to rain down all over the clearing. There was a lot of shouting, and Jamie and his companions came rocketing out of the shed like a flock of startled pheasants.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” He grasped my arm, looking anxious.

“Yes, fine,” I said, rather confused. “What on earth just happened?”

“Damned if I ken,” he said briefly, already looking round the clearing. “Where’s Ian?”

“I don’t know. You don’t think he had anything to do with this, do you?” I brushed at several floating specks of charcoal that had landed on my bosom. With black streaks ornamenting my décolletage, I followed Jamie into the small knot of slaves, all babbling in a confusing mixture of Gaelic, English, and bits of various African tongues.

We found Ian with one of the young naval ensigns. They were peering interestedly into the blackened pit that now occupied the spot where the mound had stood.

“It happens often, I understand,” the ensign was saying as we arrived. “I hadn’t seen it before, though—amazing powerful blast, wasn’t it?”

“
What
happens often?” I asked, peering around Ian. The pit was filled with a crisscross jumble of blackened pine logs, all tossed higgledy-piggledy by the force of the explosion. The base of the mound was still there, rising up around the pit like the rim of a pie shell.

“A pitch explosion,” the ensign explained, turning to me. He was small and ruddy-cheeked, about Ian’s age. “They lay a charcoal fire, d’ye see, ma’am, below a great pot of pitch, and cover it all over with earth and cut turves, to keep in the heat, but allow enough air through the cracks to keep the fire burning. The pitch boils down, and flows out through a hollowed log into the tar barrel—see?” He pointed. A split log dangled over the remains of a shattered barrel oozing sticky black. The reek of burnt wood and thick tar filled the air, and I tried to breathe only through my mouth.

“The difficulty lies in regulating the flow of air,” the little ensign went on, preening himself a bit on his knowledge. “Too little air, and the fire goes out; too much, and it burns with such energy that it cannot be contained, and is like to ignite the fumes from the pitch and burst its bonds. As you see, ma’am.” He gestured importantly toward a nearby tree, where one of the turves had been thrown with such force as to wrap itself around the trunk like some shaggy yellow fungus.

“It is a matter of the nicest adjustment,” he said, and stood on tiptoe, looking around with interest. “Where is the slave whose task it is to manage the fire? I do hope the poor fellow has not been killed.”

He hadn’t. I had been checking carefully through the crowd as we talked, looking for any injuries, but everyone seemed to have escaped intact—this time.

“Aunt!” Jamie exclaimed, suddenly recalling Jocasta. He whirled toward the sheds, but then stopped, relaxing. She was there, clearly visible in her green dress, standing rigid by the shed.

Rigid with fury, as we discovered when we reached her. Forgotten by everyone in the flurry of the explosion, she had been unable to move, sightless as she was, and was thus left to stand helpless, hearing the turmoil but unable to do anything.

I recalled what Josh had said about Jocasta’s temper, but she was too much the lady to stamp and rant in public, however angry she might be. Josh himself apologized in profuse Aberdonian for not having been by her side to aid her, but she dismissed this with kind, if brusque, impatience.

“Clapper your tongue, lad; ye did as I bade ye.” She turned her head restlessly from side to side, as though trying to see through her blindfold.