“His sister?” Thought of Jenny made Roger smile. So did Fergus.
“Yes. He would never say that she was dead. Only … that she was gone.”
“And then she came back,” Roger said quietly.
“Oui.” Fergus looked at him, thoughtfully examining his face, as though to make sure of the man he was talking to. “And plainly, Brianna and you are … what milady is.” A thought struck him, and his eyes widened. “Les enfants. Are they …?”
“Yes. Both of them.”
Fergus said something in French that was well beyond Roger’s ability to translate, and then fell silent, thinking. He reached absently between the buttons of his shirt, and Roger realized that he was touching the small medal of St. Dismas that he always wore. The patron saint of thieves.
Roger turned away, to give him some privacy, and looked out across the river, then farther, to the harbor itself and the invisible sea beyond. Oddly enough, the sense of peace with which he’d left the Reverend Selverson’s house was still with him, immanent in the drifting clouds of a mackerel sky, just going pink round the edges, and the quiet lapping of the water against the pilings beneath them.
Immanent, too, in the still figure of Fergus, hook gleaming on his knee and his shadow growing long across the quay. My brother. Thank you for him, Roger thought toward God. Thank you for all the souls you’ve put in my hand. Help me take care of them.
“Well, then.” Fergus sat up straight and reached into his bosom for a large ink-stained handkerchief, with which he wiped his face. “Wilmington, do you think? Or New Bern?”
“I’m not sure.” Roger sat down beside him on the crate and took out his own handkerchief, freshly washed this morning, now grubby with the day’s efforts. “There weren’t a lot of Scots there …” He broke off and cleared his throat. It was harsh with so much talking today, and explaining Frank—let alone his book—was well beyond his powers at the moment. “I think perhaps the British had a go at New Bern—some officer named Craig, he was Scottish—but if so, it’ll be quite late in the war.”
“Scots?” Fergus raised one brow at that, then brushed it away. “C’est bien faite. Perhaps Wilmington, then. Do you know when the British will arrive here?”
Roger shook his head.
“In the spring sometime, May, maybe. I don’t remember exactly when.”
Fergus sucked his lower lip for a moment, then nodded, decision made. He took his hand away from the medal.
“Perhaps Wilmington, then. But not yet.” He stood up and stretched himself, lean body arched toward the sky.
The air was still like treacle, but Roger’s spirit was refreshed.
“Then let’s have a pint of something and you can tell me where the guns are.”
“You’re sitting on them. But by all means, let’s have a drink.”
73
Stand by Me
ROGER’S ARRIVAL AT THE printshop with Fergus, Roger looking slightly dazed but enormously happy, caused so much commotion that it was some time before people could stop asking questions long enough for him to answer some of them.
“Yes,” he said at last, his white neckcloth taken off and carefully hung from one of the drying lines in the printshop, to avoid loss or the possibility of dirty fingerprints. “Yes,” he said again, and accepted a glass of cooking sherry—that being the most festive beverage available at the moment. “It’s official. All three of them agreed. I’ll be formally ordained in a church, and that may need to wait ’til spring—but I’ve been accepted as suitable to be a Minister of the Word and Sacrament.”
“Is that as good as being the Pope?” Joanie asked, staring at her uncle in newfound awe.
“Well, I don’t get a fancy hat or a shepherd’s crook,” Roger said, still grinning, “but otherwise … aye. Just as good. Slàinte!” He toasted Joanie and then the rest of them, and downed the sherry.
“Mind,” he said, his voice hoarse and eyes watering slightly, “it was a near thing for a bit.” He coughed and waved away the proffered sherry bottle. “Thanks, no, that’s enough. Everything went down well, all through the Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, knowledge of Scripture, and evidence of good character—even having a Catholic wife didn’t give them more than a moment’s pause.” He grinned at Brianna. “As long as I could swear in good conscience that I should never allow ye to persuade me into Romish practices.”
Brianna laughed. She was still trembling inwardly from the experience on the riverbank, but that seemed trivial, drowned by her joy in Roger’s happiness. Firelight gleamed in his black hair and gave his eyes a green spark. He glowed, she thought, he really did. Like a firefly dancing under the trees.
“What Romish practices did they have in mind?” she asked. She’d been sipping brandy, and now handed him her glass. “Slaughtering infants on the altar and drinking their blood?”
“No, just conspiring with the Pope, mostly.”
“To do what?”
“Ye’d have to ask the Pope,” he said, and laughed. “No, really,” he said, “the only thing that was a serious problem to them was the singing.”
“The singing?” she asked, puzzled. “Granted, Catholics sing—but so do you.”
“Aye, that was the problem.” His amusement came down a notch, but it was still there. “I dinna ken how they found out, but they’d heard that I sang hymns during services in church on the Ridge.”
“And they thought ye shouldna?” Marsali said, frowning. “Presbyterians dinna sing?”
“Not in kirk, they don’t. Not now.”
There was the briefest disturbance in the air at the words “not now.” Brianna saw Fergus and Marsali look at each other and neither one changed their expressions of tolerant amusement, but she’d felt it, like the prick of a thorn.
They know. She and Roger had never discussed it, but of course they did. Fergus had lived with her parents before the Rising and at Lallybroch after Culloden—when her mother had gone. And of course Young Ian and Jenny knew. Did Rachel? she wondered.
Roger didn’t act as though anything had happened; he was going on to tell what the various ministers had said about the sinful practice of singing on a Sunday, let alone in kirk! With imitations of each of the ministers’ pronouncements.
“So how did you answer these remarks?” Fergus asked. His face was flushed with laughter, and his hair had lost its ribbon and come mostly out of its plait, streaming over his shoulder in dark waves streaked with silver. Sharp-featured, and with deep-set eyes, he looked to Brianna like a wizard of some sort—maybe a young Gandalf, prior to turning gray.
“Well, I said that given the condition of my voice—and I told them how that happened …” He touched the white rope scar, still visible across his throat. “… I admitted to error, but said I didna think anything I’d done in church could possibly qualify as song. And I admitted to doing lined singing, the call and response—but that’s a legitimate thing to do in a Presbyterian kirk. And in the end, it was really only the Reverend Selverson who was truly concerned about it, and the others overbore him. Oddly enough,” he added, holding out his glass for whatever was being poured at the moment, “it was your da who made the difference.”