He touched the beads, self-conscious. “Aye, well … I had, in a way of speaking. I … gave it to William. When he was a wee lad, and I had to leave him at Helwater. I gave him the beads for something to keep—to … remember me by.”
“Mmphm.” She looked at him with sympathy. “Aye. And I expect he gave them back to ye in Philadelphia, did he?”
“He did,” Jamie said, a bit terse, and a wry amusement touched Jenny’s face.
“Tell ye one thing, a bràthair—he’s no going to forget you.”
“Aye, maybe not,” he said, feeling an unexpected comfort in the thought. “Well, then …” He let the beads run through his fingers, taking hold of the crucifix. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty …”
They said the Creed together, then the Our Father, and the three Hail Marys, and the Glory Be.
“Joyful or Glorious?” he asked, fingers on the first bead of the decades. He didn’t want to do the Sorrowful Mysteries, the ones about suffering and crucifixion, and he didn’t think she did, either. A yaffle called from the maples, and he wondered briefly if it was one they’d already seen, or a third. Three for a wedding, four for a death …
“Joyful,” she said at once. “The Annunciation.” Then she paused, and nodded at him to take the first turn. He didn’t have to think.
“For Murtagh,” he said quietly, and his fingers tightened on the bead. “And Mam and Da. Hail Mary, full o’ grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” Jenny finished the prayer and they said the rest of the decade in their usual way, back and forth, the rhythm of their voices soft as the rustle of grass.
They reached the second decade, the Visitation, and he nodded at Jenny—her turn.
“For Ian Òg,” she said softly, eyes on her beads. “And Ian Mòr. Hail Mary …”
The third decade was William’s. Jenny glanced at him when he said so, but only nodded and bent her head.
He didn’t try to avoid thinking of William, but he didn’t deliberately call the lad to mind, either; there was nothing he could do to help, until or unless William asked for it, and it would do neither of them good to worry about what the lad was doing, or what might be happening to him.
But … he’d said “William,” and for the space of an Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be, William must perforce be in his mind.
Guide him, he thought, between the words of the prayer. Give him good judgment. Help him to be a good man. Show him his way … and Holy Mother … keep him safe, for your own Son’s sake … “World without end, Amen,” he said, reaching the final bead.
“For all those to hame in Scotland,” Jenny said without hesitation, then paused and looked up at him. “Laoghaire, too, d’ye think?”
“Aye, her, too,” he said, smiling despite himself. “So long as ye put in that poor bastard she’s married to, as well.”
For the last decade, they paused for a moment, eyeing each other.
“Well, the last was for the folk in Scotland,” he said. “Let’s do this one for the folk elsewhere—Michael and wee Joan and Jared, in France?”
Jenny’s face grew momentarily soft—she’d not seen Michael since Ian’s funeral, and the poor lad had been shattered, his young wife suddenly dead, a child gone with her—and then his father. Jenny’s mouth trembled for an instant, but her voice was clear and the sun lay soft on the white of her cap as she bent her head. “Our Father, who art in heaven …”
There was silence when they finished—the sort of silence a wood gives you, made of wind and the sounds of drying grass and of trees shedding leaves in a yellow rain. The goat’s bell clanked on the far side of the meadow, and a bird he didn’t know chattered to itself in the maple grove. The buck deer was gone; he’d heard it leave sometime while he was praying for William, and he’d wished his son good fortune in the hunt.
Jenny drew breath as though to speak, and he lifted a hand; there was something in his mind and he’d best say it now.
“What ye said about Lallybroch,” he began, a little awkwardly. “Dinna be worrit about it. If ye should die before me, I’ll see to it that ye get home safe, to lie wi’ Ian.”
She nodded thoughtfully, but her lips were pursed a little, as she held them when thinking.
“Aye, I ken ye would, Jamie. Ye dinna need to go to great lengths about it, though.”
“I don’t?”
She blew air out through her lips, then set them firmly.
“Well, see, I dinna ken where I might be, come the time. If it’s here, then o’ course—”
“Where the devil else might ye be?” he demanded, with the dawning realization that she couldn’t have come up here to tell him about Murtagh, because she hadn’t known he needed telling. So—
“I’m going wi’ Ian and Rachel to find his Mohawk wife,” she said, as casually as she might have said she was off to pull turnips.
Before he could find a single word, she held up the rosary in front of his face. “I’m leavin’ this with you, ken—it’s for Mandy, just in case I dinna come back. Ye ken well enough what sorts of things can happen when ye’re traveling,” she added, with a small moue of disapproval.
“Traveling,” he said. “Traveling? Ye mean to—to—” The thought of his sister, small, elderly, and stubborn as an alligator sunk in the mud, marching north through two armies, in dead of winter, beset by brigands, wild animals, and half a dozen other things he could think of if he’d time for it …
“I do.” She gave him a look, indicating that she didn’t mean to bandy words for long. “Where Young Ian goes, Rachel says she’s goin’, too, and that means so does the wee yin. Ye dinna think I mean to leave my youngest grandchild to the mercies of bears and wild Indians, do ye? That’s a rhetorical question,” she added, with a pleased air of having put a stop to him. “That means I dinna expect ye to answer it.”
“Ye wouldna ken a rhetorical question from a hole in the ground if I hadna told ye what one was!”
“Well, then, ye should recognize one when it bites ye on the nose,” she said, sticking her own lang neb up in the air.
“I’ll go and talk to Rachel,” he said, eyeing her. “Surely she’s better sense than to—”
“Ye think I didn’t? Or Young Ian?” Jenny shook her head, half admiringly. “It would be easier to move yon wee mountain there”—she nodded at the bulk of Roan Mountain, looming dark green in the distance—“than to get that Quaker lass to change her mind, once it’s made up.”
“But the bairn—!”
“Aye, aye,” she said, a little irritably. “Ye think I didna mention that? And she did squinch her eyes a bit. But then she said to me, reasonable as Sunday, would I let my husband go alone seven hundred miles to rescue his first wife, and her wi’ three pitiable bairns—one of whom might just possibly be Ian’s?—and that’s the first I heard of it, too,” she added, seeing his face. “I see her point.”