Диана Гэблдон - A Breath of Snow and Ashes 6

Warmth spread slowly over him beneath the quilt, and he slept.

THE MOON WAS beginning to rise when they set out, and a good thing, too, Brianna thought. Even with the big, lopsided gold orb sailing up out of a cradle of stars and shedding its borrowed radiance over the sky, the trail beneath their feet was invisible. So were their feet, drowned in the absolute black of the forest at night.

Black, but not quiet. The giant trees rustled overhead, small things squealed and snuffled in the dark, and now and then the silent flutter of a bat passed close enough to startle her, as though part of the night had suddenly come loose and taken wing under her nose.

“The Minister’s Cat is an apprehensive cat?” Roger suggested, as she gasped and clutched at him in the wake of one such leather-winged visitation.

“The Minister’s Cat is an . . . appreciative cat,” she replied, squeezing his hand. “Thank you.” They’d likely end up sleeping on their cloaks in front of the McGillivrays’ fire, instead of cozily tucked up in their own bed—but at least they’d have Jemmy.

He squeezed back, his hand bigger and stronger than hers, very reassuring in the dark.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I want him, too. It’s a night to have your family all together, safe in one place.”

She made a small sound in her throat, acknowledgment and appreciation, but wanted to keep up the conversation, as much to keep the sense of connection with him as because it would keep the dark at bay.

“The Minister’s Cat was a very eloquent cat,” she said delicately. “At the—the funeral, I mean. For those poor people.”

Roger snorted; she saw the brief curl of his breath, white on the air.

“The Minister’s Cat was a highly embarrassed cat,” he said. “Your father!”

She smiled, since he couldn’t see her.

“You did really well,” she said mildly.

“Mmphm,” he said, with another brief snort. “As for eloquence . . . if there was any, it was none of mine. All I did was quote bits of some psalm—I couldna even tell ye which it was.”

“It didn’t matter. Why did you pick—what you said, though?” she asked, curious. “I sort of thought you’d say the Lord’s Prayer, or maybe the Twenty-Third Psalm—everybody knows that one.”

“I thought I would, too,” he admitted. “I meant to. But when I came to it . . .” He hesitated, and she saw in memory those raw, cold mounds, and shivered, smelling soot. He tightened his grasp on her hand, and drew her closer, tucking the hand into the crook of his elbow.

“I don’t know,” he said gruffly. “It just seemed—more suitable, somehow.”

“It was,” she said quietly, but didn’t pursue the subject, choosing instead to steer the conversation into a discussion of her latest engineering project, a hand pump to raise water from the well.

“If I had something to use for pipe, I could get water into the house, easy as anything! I’ve already got most of the wood I need for a nice cistern, if I can get Ronnie to cooper it for me—so we can shower with rainwater, at least. But hollowing out tree limbs”—the method employed for the small amount of piping used for the pump—“it would take me months to manage enough just to get from the well to the house, let alone the stream. And there’s not a chance of getting any rolled copper. Even if we could afford any, which we can’t, bringing it up from Wilmington would be—” She threw her free hand up in frustration at the monumental nature of the undertaking.

He considered that for a bit, the chuff of their shoes on the rocky trail a comforting rhythm.

“Well, the ancient Romans did it with concrete; the recipe’s in Pliny.”

“I know. But it takes a particular kind of sand, which we don’t happen to have. Likewise, quicklime, which we likewise don’t have. And—”

“Aye, but what about clay?” he interrupted. “Did ye see that plate at Hilda’s wedding? The big brown and red one, with the beautiful patterns?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why?”

“Ute McGillivray said someone from Salem brought it. I dinna recall the name, but she said he was quite the big noise in potting—or whatever ye call making dishes.”

“I’ll bet you any amount of money she didn’t say that!”

“Well, words to that effect.” He went on, undeterred. “The point being that he made it here; it wasn’t something he’d brought from Germany. So there’s clay about that’s suitable for firing, eh?”

“Oh, I see. Hmm. Well, now, that’s an idea, isn’t it?”

It was, and an attractive one whose discussion occupied them for most of the rest of the journey.

They had come down off the Ridge and were within a quarter-mile of the McGillivrays’ place when she began to have an uneasy feeling down the back of her neck. It could be only imagination; after the sights they had seen in that deserted hollow, the dark air of the wood seemed thick with threat, and she had been imagining ambush at every blind bend, tensing with the anticipation of attack.

Then she heard something crack in the trees to her right—a small dry branch breaking, in a way that neither wind nor animal would break it. Real danger had its own taste, vivid as lemon juice, by contrast with the weak lemonade of imagination.

Her hand tightened on Roger’s arm in warning, and he stopped at once.

“What?” he whispered, hand on his knife. “Where?” He hadn’t heard it.

Damn, why hadn’t she brought her gun, or at least her own dirk? All she had was her Swiss Army knife, carried always in her pocket—and what weapons the landscape offered.

She leaned into Roger, pointing, her hand close to his body to be sure he followed the direction of her gesture. Then she stooped, feeling about in the darkness for a rock, or a stick to use as a club.

“Keep talking,” she whispered.

“The Minister’s Cat is a fraidy cat, is she?” he said, his tone one of fairly convincing teasing.

“The Minister’s Cat is a ferocious cat,” she replied, trying to match his bantering tone, meanwhile fumbling one-handed in her pocket. Her other hand closed on a stone, and she pulled it free of the clinging dirt, cold and heavy in her palm. She rose, all her senses focused on the darkness to their right. “She’ll freaking disembowel anything that—”

“Oh, it’s you,” said a voice in the woods behind her.

She shrieked, and Roger jerked in reflex, spun on his heel to face the threat, grabbed her and thrust her behind him, all in the same motion.

The push sent her staggering backward. She caught a heel in a hidden root in the dark, and fell, landing hard on her backside, from which position she had an excellent view of Roger in the moonlight, knife in hand, charging into the trees with an incoherent roar.

Belatedly, she registered what the voice had said, as well as the unmistakable tone of disappointment in it. A very similar voice, loud with alarm, spoke from the wood on the right.

“Jo?” it said. “What? Jo, what?”

There was a lot of thrashing and yelling going on in the woods to the left. Roger’d got his hands on someone.

“Roger!” she shouted. “Roger, stop! It’s the Beardsleys!”

She’d dropped the rock when she fell, and now got to her feet, rubbing the dirt from her hand on the side of her skirt. Her heart was still pounding, her left buttock was bruised, and her urge to laugh was tinged with a strong desire to strangle one or both of the Beardsley twins.

“Kezzie Beardsley, come out of there!” she bellowed, then repeated it, even louder. Kezzie’s hearing had improved after her mother had removed his chronically infected tonsils and adenoids, but he was still rather deaf.