Диана Гэблдон - A Breath of Snow and Ashes 6

“Oh, aye? What does she tell you?”

“Oh, just stories that he’s told her, now and then. About the clients, and the wh—the girls.”

“Can ye not say ‘whore,’ then?” he asked, amused. She felt the blood rise in her cheeks, and was pleased that it was dark; he teased her more when she blushed.

“I can’t help it that I went to a Catholic school,” she said, defensive. “Early conditioning.” It was true; she couldn’t say certain words, save when in the grip of fury or when mentally prepared. “Why can you, though? You’d think a preacher’s lad would have the same problem.”

He laughed, a little wryly.

“Not precisely the same problem. It was more a matter of feeling obliged to curse and carry on in front of my friends, to prove I could.”

“What kind of carrying on?” she asked, scenting a story. He didn’t often talk about his early life in Inverness, adopted by his great-uncle, a Presbyterian minister, but she loved hearing the small tidbits he sometimes let fall.

“Och. Smoking, drinking beer, and writing filthy words on the walls in the boys’ toilet,” he said, the smile evident in his voice. “Tipping over dustbins. Letting air out of automobile tires. Stealing sweeties from the Post Office. Quite the wee criminal I was, for a time.”

“The terror of Inverness, huh? Did you have a gang?” she teased.

“I did,” he said, and laughed. “Gerry MacMillan, Bobby Cawdor, and Dougie Buchanan. I was odd man out, not only for being the preacher’s lad, but for having an English father and an English name. So I was always out to show them I was a hard man. Meaning I was usually the one in most trouble.”

“I had no idea you were a juvenile delinquent,” she said, charmed at the thought.

“Well, not for long,” he assured her wryly. “Come the summer I was fifteen, the Reverend signed me up on a fishing boat, and sent me to sea with the herring fleet. Couldna just say whether he did it to improve my character, keep me out of jail, or only because he couldn’t stand me round the house any longer, but it did work. Ye want to meet hard men sometime, go to sea with a bunch of Gaelic fishermen.”

“I’ll remember that,” she said, trying not to giggle and producing a series of small, wet snorts instead. “Did your friends end up in jail, then, or did they go straight, without you to mislead them?”

“Dougie joined the army,” he said, a tinge of wistfulness in his voice. “Gerry took over his dad’s shop—his dad was a tobacconist. Bobby . . . aye, well, Bobby’s dead. Drowned, that same summer, out lobstering with his cousin off Oban.”

She leaned closer to him and squeezed his hand, her shoulder brushing his in sympathy.

“I’m sorry,” she said, then paused. “Only . . . he isn’t dead, is he? Not yet. Not now.”

Roger shook his head, and made a small sound of mingled humor and dismay.

“Is that a comfort?” she asked. “Or is it horrible to think about?”

She wanted to keep him talking; he hadn’t talked so much in one go since the hanging that had taken his singing voice. Being forced to speak in public made him self-conscious, and his throat tightened. His voice was still rasping, but relaxed as he was now, he wasn’t choking or coughing.

“Both,” he said, and made the sound again. “I’ll never see him again, either way.” He shrugged slightly, pushing the thought away. “D’ye think of your old friends much?”

“No, not much,” she said softly. The trail narrowed here, and she linked her arm in his, drawing close as they approached the last turn, which would bring them in sight of the McGillivrays’. “There’s too much here.” But she didn’t want to talk about what wasn’t here.

“Do you think Jo and Kezzie are just playing?” she asked. “Or are they up to something?”

“What should they be up to?” he asked, accepting her change of subject without comment. “I canna think they’re lying in wait to commit highway robbery—not at this time of night.”

“Oh, I believe them about standing guard,” she said. “They’d do anything to protect Lizzie. Only—” She paused. They had come out of the forest onto the wagon road; the far verge fell away in a steep bank, looking at night like a bottomless pool of black velvet—by daylight, it would be a tangled mass of fallen snags, clumps of rhododendron, redbud, and dogwood, overgrown with the snarls of ancient grapevines and creepers. The road made a switchback further on and curved back on itself, arriving gently at the McGillivrays’ place, a hundred feet below.

“The lights are still on,” she said with some surprise. The small group of buildings—the Old Place, the New Place, Ronnie Sinclair’s cooper’s shop, Dai Jones’s blacksmith’s forge and cabin—were mostly dark, but the lower windows of the McGillivrays’ New Place were striped with light, leaking through the cracks of the shutters, and a bonfire in front of the house made a brilliant blot of light against the dark.

“Kenny Lindsay,” Roger said matter-of-factly. “The Beardsleys said they’d met him. He’ll have stopped to share the news.”

“Mm. We’d better be careful, then; if they’re looking out for brigands, too, they might shoot at anything that moves.”

“Not tonight; it’s a party, remember? What were ye saying, though, about the Beardsley boys protecting Lizzie?”

“Oh.” Her toe stubbed against some hidden obstacle, and she clutched his arm to keep from falling. “Oof! Only that I wasn’t sure who they thought they were protecting her from.”

Roger tightened his grip on her arm in reflex.

“Whatever d’ye mean by that?”

“Just that if I were Manfred McGillivray, I’d take good care to be nice to Lizzie. Mama says the Beardsleys follow her around like dogs, but they don’t. They follow her like tame wolves.”

“I thought Ian said it wasn’t possible to tame wolves.”

“It isn’t,” she said tersely. “Come on, let’s hurry, before they smoor the fire.”

THE BIG LOG HOUSE was literally overflowing with people. Light spilled from the open door and glowed in the row of tiny arrow-slit windows that marched across the front of the house, and dark forms wove in and out of the bonfire’s light. The sounds of a fiddle came to them, thin and sweet through the dark, borne on the wind with the scent of roasting meat.

“I suppose Senga’s truly made her choice, then,” Roger said, taking her arm for the final steep descent to the crossroad. “Who d’ye bet it is? Ronnie Sinclair or the German lad?”

“Oh, a bet? What are the stakes? Woops!” She stumbled, tripping on a half-buried rock in the path, but Roger tightened his grip, keeping her upright.

“Loser sets the pantry to rights,” he suggested.

“Deal,” she said promptly. “I think she chose Heinrich.”

“Aye? Well, ye may be right,” he said, sounding amused. “But I have to tell you, it was five to three in favor of Ronnie, last I heard. Frau Ute’s a force to be reckoned with.”

“She is,” Brianna admitted. “And if it was Hilda or Inga, I’d say it was no contest. But Senga’s got her mother’s personality; nobody’s telling her what to do—not even Frau Ute.

“Where did they get ‘Senga,’ anyway?” she added. “There are lots of Ingas and Hildas over toward Salem, but I’ve never heard of another Senga.”

“Ah, well, ye wouldn’t—not in Salem. It’s not a German name, ken—it’s Scots.”

“Scots?” she said in astonishment.

“Oh, aye,” he said, the grin evident in his voice. “It’s Agnes, spelt backward. A girl named that is bound to be contrary, don’t ye think?”