“Did she?” he said dryly. “Did she tell ye the first time I killed a bear, I did it alone, with my dirk? And she hit me in the heid wi’ a fish whilst I was doin’ it?”
She opened her eyes and gave him a look.
“She didna say a fool canna be lucky,” she pointed out. “And if you didna have the luck o’ the devil himself, ye’d have been dead six times over by now.”
“Six?” He frowned, disturbed, and her brow lifted in surprise.
“I wasna really counting,” she said. “It was only a guess. What is it, a ghràidh?”
That casual “Oh, love,” caught him unexpectedly in a tender place, and he coughed to hide it.
“Nothing,” he said, shrugging. “Only, when I was young in Paris, a fortune-teller told me I’d die nine times before my death. D’ye think I should count the fever after Laoghaire shot me?”
She shook her head definitely.
“Nay, ye wouldna have died even had Claire not come back wi’ her wee needle. Ye would have got up and gone after her within a day or two.”
He smiled.
“I might’ve.”
His sister made a small noise in her throat that might have been laughter or derision.
They were silent for a moment, both with heads lifted, listening to the wood. The dripping had ceased now, and you could hear a treepie close by, with a call exactly like a rusty hinge opening. Then there was a loud quah-quah as a bird called from somewhere behind him, and he saw Jenny look up over his shoulder wide-eyed.
“Is that a magpie?” she said. In the Highlands, you always listened for magpies, because they were omen birds—and if you heard one, you hoped to hear another. One for sorrow … two for mirth …
“No,” he said, reassuring. “I dinna think there are proper magpies in these mountains. That’s no but a kind of yaffle. Aye—see him there?” He nodded, and she looked over her shoulder to the grayish bird with a scarlet slash at its throat, clinging to a swaying pine branch, a beady eye fixed on the ground.
Jenny relaxed and drew breath, and, taking up the conversation where she’d left it, asked, “D’ye hold it against me, that I made ye marry Laoghaire?”
He gave her a look.
“What makes ye think ye could make me do anything I didna want to, ye wee fussbudget?”
“What the devil is a fussbudget?” she demanded, frowning up at him.
“A bag of nuisance, so far as I can tell,” he admitted. “Jemmy calls Mandy that.”
A sudden dimple appeared near Jenny’s mouth, but she didn’t actually laugh. “Aye,” she said. “Ye ken what I mean.”
“I do,” he said. “And I don’t. Hold it against ye, I mean. She didna actually kill me, after all.”
One of the goats squatted, a few feet away, and let fall a dainty shower of neat black pellets. They steamed briefly, and he caught the oddly pleasant warm scent for an instant before it vanished in the chill.
“I wonder how it is goats are so neat about it,” Jenny said, watching, too. “Compared with coos, I mean.”
“Och, ye’d want to be asking Claire about that,” he told her. “If it’s a matter of innards, she kens nearly as much as God about it.”
Jenny laughed, and he realized belatedly that he’d seen no goat droppings at all in his survey of the meadow. She hadn’t been bringing her nannies up here regularly, then. And therefore … she’d come after him a-purpose. She had a thing to tell him, maybe, in private.
He cleared his throat and touched his chest, where the wooden rosary hung beneath his shirt.
“Pray, ye said. D’ye want to tell the beads together, then? Like we used to?”
She looked surprised, and for a moment dubious. But then made up her mind and nodded, reaching into her pocket.
“Aye, I would. And since ye mention … there was a thing I meant to ask ye, Jamie.”
“Aye, what?”
To his surprise, she drew out a string of gleaming pearls, the gold crucifix and medal bright in the rising sun.
“Ye brought your good rosary?” he asked. “I didna ken that—thought ye’d have left it for one of your lasses.” “Good” was putting it lightly. That rosary had been made in France and likely cost as much as a good saddle horse—if not more. It was their mother’s rosary—Brian had given it to Jenny when he’d given Ellen’s pearl necklace to Jamie.
His sister grimaced and looked halfway apologetic. “If I gave it to any one o’ them, the others would take it amiss. I dinna want them to be fighting over such a thing.”
“Aye, you’re right about that.” He squatted down by her, reached out a finger, and gently touched the softly bumpy little beads; it was made of Scotch pearls, like the necklace he’d given Claire. “Where did Mam get it, d’ye know? I never thought to ask, when I was wee.”
“Well, ye wouldn’t, would ye? When ye’re wee, Mam and Da are just Mam and Da, and everything’s just what it’s always been.” She gathered the beads up into the palm of her hand, shoogling them into a little pile. “I do ken where this came from, though; Da told me when he gave it to me. D’ye think that doe’s comin’ in heat?” She squinted suddenly at one of the nanny goats, who had raised her head and let out a long, piercing bleat. Jamie gave the animal an eye.
“Aye, maybe. She’s waggling her tail. But it’s maybe just she smells the buck deer in yonder grove.” He lifted his chin at the grove of sugar maples, gone half scarlet already, though none of the leaves had fallen. “It’s early for rut, but if I can smell him, so can she.”
His sister lifted her face to the light breeze and breathed in deep. “Aye? I dinna smell anything, but I’ll take your word. Da always said ye had a nose like a truffle pig.”
He snorted.
“Aye, right. So what did Da say to you, then? About Mam’s rosary.”
“Aye, well. He was jealous, he said. She wouldna ever say who’d sent her the necklace, ken.”
“Oh, aye—do you know?”
She shook her head, looking interested. “You do?”
“I do. A man named Marcus MacRannoch—one of her suitors from Leoch, and a gallant man; he’d bought them for her, hoping to wed her, but she saw Da and was awa’ with him before MacRannoch could speak to her. He said—well, Claire said he said,” he corrected, “that he’d thought of them so often round her bonnie neck, he couldna think of them anywhere else, and so sent them to her for a wedding present.”
Jenny rounded her lips in interest.
“Oo, so that’s the way of it. Well, Da kent it was another man, and as I say, he said he was jealous—they hadna been marrit long, and he maybe wasna quite sure she thought she’d made a good bargain, takin’ up wi’ him. So he sold a good field—to Geordie MacCallum, aye?—and gave the money to Murtagh, to go and buy a wee bawbee for Mam. He meant to give it her when the babe was born—Willie, aye?” She lifted the crucifix and kissed it gently, in blessing of their brother.
“God only kens where Murtagh got this—” She poured the rosary from one hand to the other, with a slithering sound. “But the words on the medal are French.”