Roger stared at the money, then at Fergus. “You made book on my passing the interview? What were the odds?”
“Five to three. Pas mal. Will you be ordained here, then?” He frowned slightly. “It should be all right if it’s soon.”
“I think it will be in North Carolina, maybe at Davy Caldwell’s church—or maybe here, if we can get enough elders to come. But what do you think is about to happen?”
“I am a journaliste,” Fergus said, with a slight shrug. His eyes were fixed on the masts of a distant ship, anchored out in the harbor beyond the river. “People talk to me. I know a few things that I would not put into the newspaper.”
“Such as?” Roger’s heart, still happy, had given an extra thump.
Fergus turned his back on the shimmering water and gave the quay a quick, casual—but very thorough—glance.
“I managed at last to get Monsieur Faucette more or less to himself, and while he was somewhat elevated in spirit, he was still making sense. Have you heard of the island of Saint Eustatius?”
“Vaguely. It’s out there somewhere.” He waved an arm in the general direction of what he thought was the West Indies.
“Oui,” Fergus said patiently. “It belongs to the Dutch. And the Dutch make and sell arms—on Saint Eustatius. Monsieur Faucette was born on the island and calls there regularly. His mother is a Dutchwoman and he has family there still.”
“So you knew Monsieur Faucette, and he—”
“Non.” Fergus shook his head. “I knew a shark fisherman from Martinique. He was caught up in a bad storm and his boat damaged; one of the merchantmen picked him up and they brought him here.”
Roger’s elation of spirit didn’t disappear, but it receded quickly from the front of his mind. He and Brianna had discussed both the necessity of telling Fergus and Marsali what the future held—might hold, he corrected himself uneasily—and when might be the best time to do that. In the joyous flurry of reunion and the heart-stopping imminence of his interview with the presbytery (the memory made his heart bounce high, in spite of the impending conversation), neither of them had wanted to venture onto the perilous ground of prediction … but clearly, it was time.
“When?” Roger asked warily. He was trying to recall the exact sequence of events that Frank Randall had described. The Siege of Savannah was going to happen soon—in early October—but was going to fail, remaining in British hands. But then came the Siege of Charles Town, and that one was going to succeed—leaving that city also in British hands.
“I spoke with him a week ago,” Fergus said, and smiled. “I bought the story of his adventures for sixpence, and we became friends. I bought him rum and we became frères de coeur. He spoke only French, you see, and while that is not uncommon here, real French people are. He hadn’t talked freely with anyone for six months.”
“And what did he freely tell you?” Roger’s fizz had died down again, pushed into the background by curiosity—and a small sense of dread.
“That he spoke a ship somewhere in the Windward Islands—a sloop, he said, a private boat. They had hauled to—are you impressed at my knowledge of nautical terms?”
“Very,” Roger said, smiling.
“Well, it was a lot of rum we drank.” Fergus glanced wistfully at the Half-Moon, but he also had priorities and turned back to Roger.
“Anyway, they had stopped to catch fish; there were schools of … tunny fish, I believe he said. The owner of the sloop drank rum with him, too, and told him that the French were sending a fleet in support of the Americans; he had seen the fleet and heard about them in a bar on Barbados—” He waved his hook, seeing Roger’s expression. “Don’t ask me how word came to be there; you know how gossip works.
“And,” he went on, “that their plan was to go to New York but that they were aware of the British’s machinations, to sever Philadelphia and Boston and New York from their food, so to speak.” He gestured with his hook from the nearby warehouses to a stretch of ripening fields across the river.
“So if it should happen that the British were already coming south, D’Estaing—he’s the French admiral,” he explained, “D’Estaing will sail at once to the south. And if what he told me is correct, the French ships will come here.”
Roger swallowed and wished he’d listened to his baser urges and had that drink first. “Actually,” he said, “they’re going to Savannah. The Americans are going to attack Savannah. Quite soon.”
Both of Fergus’s dark brows quirked up at that. Roger coughed.
“So that’s where the French are going,” Roger said. “To support General Lincoln’s troops at—”
“But General Lincoln is here!”
Roger waved a hand, still coughing.
“For the moment,” he agreed. “And he’ll leave a garrison here, of course. But he’s taking a lot of men to Savannah. They won’t succeed, though,” he finished, feeling apologetic. “But then they’ll come back here. And then General Cornwallis—I think it’s Cornwallis—will be coming down from New York. Clinton and Cornwallis will besiege the city and take it. And … erm … I’m thinking that perhaps you and Marsali might think of not being here when that happens?”
Fergus’s eyes were as close to round as they could possibly get.
“I mean,” Roger said. “It’s not like you can easily hide.”
That made Fergus smile, just a little.
“I have not forgotten how to become invisible,” he assured Roger. “But it’s much more difficult to make a wife and five children disappear. And I cannot leave Marsali to run the newspaper alone, not with two infants to feed and the town alive with soldiers.” He wiped a sleeve across his sweat-shiny face, blew out his cheeks, and sat down on a stack of white-dusted crates crudely labeled Guano with a slapdash brush.
“So.” He gave Roger a sidelong glance. “You are telling me that the British will possess both Savannah and Charles Town?”
“For a while. Not permanently—I mean, you, er, we will in fact win the war. But not for another two years.”
He saw Fergus’s throat move as he swallowed and the hairs rise on his lean forearms, bared by turned-back sleeves.
“You … um … Bree said she thought you … er … knew,” he said carefully. “About—Claire, I mean. And, um, us.” He sat down beside Fergus on the crate, careful to lift the skirts of his black coat away from the white dust.
Fergus shook his head—not in negation, but as one trying to shake its contents into some pattern resembling sense.
“As I said,” he replied, the smile returning briefly to his eyes, “I know a lot of things I don’t publish in the newspaper.” He straightened up, hand—and hook—on his knees.
“I was with milord and milady during the Rising, and you know”—he raised a brow in question—“that milord hired me in Paris, to steal letters for him? I read them—and I heard milord and milady talk. In private.” A brief smile twitched his mouth and disappeared.
“I didn’t truly believe it, of course. Not until the morning before the battle, when milord gave me the Deed of Sasine to Lallybroch and bade me take it to his sister. And then, of course … milady vanished.” His voice was soft, and Roger could see what he hadn’t realized before—the depth of Fergus’s feeling for Claire, the first mother he remembered. “But milord would never say that she was dead. He didn’t talk about her—but when someone pushed him—”