The public houses, taverns, ordinaries, and pothouses in Charlotte were doing a roaring business, as delegates, spectators, and hangers-on seethed through them, men of Loyalist sentiments collecting in the King’s Arms, those of rabidly opposing views in the Blue Boar, with shifting currents of the unallied and undecided eddying to and fro, purling through the Goose and Oyster, Thomas’s ordinary, the Groats, Simon’s, Buchanan’s, Mueller’s, and two or three nameless places that barely qualified as shebeens.

Jamie visited all of them. And drank in all of them, sharing beer, ale, rum punch, shandy, cordial, porter, stout, cider, brandywine, persimmon beer, rhubarb wine, blackberry wine, cherry bounce, perry, merry brew, and scrumpy. Not all of them were alcoholic, but the great majority were.

Roger confined himself largely to beer, and found himself glad of his restraint, when he happened to meet with Davy Caldwell in the street, turning from a fruiterer’s stall with a handful of early apricots.

“Mr. MacKenzie!” Caldwell cried, his face lighting with welcome. “I had nay thought to meet you here, but what blessing that I have!”

“Blessing indeed,” Roger said, shaking the minister’s hand with cordial fervor. Caldwell had married him and Brianna, and had examined him at the Presbyterian Academy regarding his own calling, some months before. “How d’ye do, Mr. Caldwell?”

“Och, for myself, well enough—but my heart misgives me for the fate of my poor brethren!” Caldwell shook his head in dismay, gesturing at a group of men crowding into Simon’s ordinary, laughing and talking. “What is to come of this, I ask ye, Mr. MacKenzie—what’s to come?”

Roger was, for an unbalanced instant, tempted to tell him what was to come of it, exactly. As it was, though, he gestured to Jamie—who had been stopped by an acquaintance in the street—to go along without him, and turned away to walk a bit with Caldwell.

“Have ye come for the conference, then, Mr. Caldwell?” he asked.

“I have that, Mr. MacKenzie, I have that. Little hope have I that my words will make the slightest difference, but it is my duty to speak as I find, and so I shall.”

What Davy Caldwell found was a shocking condition of human slothfulness, for which he blamed the entire current situation, convinced that unreflective apathy and “a stupid concern with personal comfort” on the part of the colonists both tempted and provoked the exercise of tyrannical powers on the part of Crown and Parliament.

“It’s a point, sure,” Roger said, aware that Caldwell’s impassioned gestures were attracting a certain amount of notice, even amongst the crowds in the street, most of them reasonably argumentative themselves.

“A point!” Caldwell cried. “Aye, it is, and the point entirely. The ignorance, disregard of moral obligation, and the supreme love of ease of the groveling sluggard corresponds exactly—exactly!—with a tyrant’s appetite and cynicism.”

He glowered at one gentleman who had subsided against the side of a house, taking a brief respite from the noonday heat with his hat over his face.

“The spirit of God must redeem the slothful, fill the human frame with activity, poise, and libertarian consciousness!”

Roger wondered, rather, whether Caldwell would view the escalating war as the result of God’s intervention—but upon reflection, thought that he likely would. Caldwell was a thinker, but a staunch Presbyterian, and thus a believer in predestination.

“The slothful encourage and facilitate oppression,” Caldwell explained, with a scornful gesture toward a family of tinkers enjoying an alfresco luncheon in the yard of a house. “Their own shame and sinking spirits, their own pitiful compliance and submission—these become self-made chains of slavery!”

“Oh, aye,” Roger said, and coughed. Caldwell was a famous preacher, and rather inclined to want to keep in practice. “Will ye take a whet, Mr. Caldwell?” It was a warm day, and Caldwell’s rather round, cherubic face was becoming very red.

They went into Thomas’s ordinary, a fairly respectable house, and sat down with tankards of the house beer—for Caldwell, like most, did not regard beer as being in any way “drink,” like rum or whisky. What else, after all, would one drink? Milk?

Out of the sun, and with a cooling draught to hand, Davy Caldwell became less heated in his expressions, as well as his countenance.

“Praise God for the fortune of meeting ye here, Mr. MacKenzie,” he said, breathing deep after lowering his tankard. “I had sent a letter, but doubtless ye will have left home before it could come. I wished to inform ye of the gladsome news—there is to be a Presbytery.”

Roger felt a sudden leap of the heart.

“When? And where?”

“Edenton, early next month. The Reverend Doctor McCorkle is coming from Philadelphia. He’ll remain for a time, before departing on his further journey—he is going to the Indies, to encourage the efforts of the church there. I am, of course, presuming to know your mind—I apologize for the forwardness of my address, Mr. MacKenzie—but is it still your desire to seek ordination?”

“With all my heart.”

Caldwell beamed, and grasped him strongly by the hand.

“Give ye joy of it, dear man—great joy.”

He then plunged into a close description of McCorkle, whom he had met in Scotland, and speculations regarding the state of religion in the colony—he spoke of Methodism with some respect, but considered the New Light Baptists “somewhat unregulated” in their effusions of worship, though doubtless well-meaning—and surely sincere belief was an improvement over unbelief, whatever the form it might take. In due course, though, he came back round to their present circumstances.

“Ye’ve come with your father-in-law, have ye?” he asked. “I thought I saw him, in the road.”

“I have, and ye did,” Roger assured him, fumbling in his pocket for a coin. The pocket itself was full of coiled horsehair; with his academic experience as guide, he had made provision against possible boredom by bringing the makings of a new fishing line.

“Ah.” Caldwell looked at him keenly. “I’ve heard things of late—is it true, he’s turned Whig?”

“He is a firm friend to liberty,” Roger said, cautious, and took a breath. “As am I.” He’d not had occasion to say it out loud before; it gave him a small, breathless feeling, just under the breastbone.

“Aha, aha, very good! I had heard of it, as I say—and yet there are a great many who say otherwise: that he is a Tory, a Loyalist like his relations, and that this protestation of support for the independency movement is but a ruse.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, but Caldwell’s bushy eyebrow, cocked like a swell’s hat, made it clear that it was.

“Jamie Fraser is an honest man,” Roger said, and drained his tankard. “And an honorable one,” he added, setting it down. “And speaking of the same, I think I must go and find him.”

Caldwell glanced around; there was an air of restlessness around them, of men calling their accounts and settling up. The official meeting of the convention was to begin at two o’clock, at MacIntyre’s farmhouse. It was past noon now, delegates, speakers, and spectators would be slowly gathering, girding themselves for an afternoon of conflict and decision. The breathless feeling came back.

“Aye, then. Give him my regards, if ye will—though perhaps I may see him myself. And may the Holy Spirit penetrate the encrustations of habit and lethargy, and convert the souls and rouse the consciences of those who gather here today!”

“Amen,” said Roger, smiling in spite of the glances from the men—and not a few women—around them.

He found Jamie in the Blue Boar, in the company of a number of men in whom the Holy Spirit had already been hard at work on the encrustations, judging from the volume. The chatter near the door died away, though, as he made his way through the room—not in cause of his own presence, but because there was something more interesting going on near the center.