“Ye all right?” Roger said, and rested his hand on Brianna’s head, her hair cool and damp in the morning fog off the harbor.
“Nobody died,” she said, and managed a small, shaky laugh. “Do you know what happened?”
“Sort of. Tell ye later, though.”
Other people were coming, some in their nightclothes, others on their way from or to work: bakers, tavern keepers, laborers, fishermen. Two whores hung about under a tree, whispering to each other and glancing from the printshop to the family.
Rather to Roger’s surprise, Fergus made no attempt at secrecy. He told everyone in turn exactly what had happened—and what he intended to do to the maudit chiens who had attacked his family and livelihood.
Roger, catching on, searched the faces as the light began to seep slowly through the fog, looking for anyone who seemed maliciously pleased, or too knowing. Everyone seemed honestly shocked, though, and one tall, handsome middle-aged woman who by her dress could be nothing other than the landlady of a prosperous tavern came up to Marsali and urged her to bring the babes along and come and have a bite of breakfast.
“On the house,” she added, looking at the children and quite obviously reckoning up the cost of their appetites.
“Well, I thank ye kindly, Mistress Kenney,” Marsali said. She glanced at Fergus and coughed a little. “If ye’ll give us a moment to go and put some clothes on?”
The remark caused Roger to realize that he was standing in the street barefoot, wearing nothing but a shirt. He helped collect the children, and as they started to trickle back across the street toward their threatened home, he saw that Marsali was carrying several slugs of type, evidently snatched from the type-case, under one arm. They looked heavy, and she let him take them from her, sighing with relief as he did.
“Ye do wonder what ye’d take, if the house was afire,” he said, trying to be humorous.
“Aye, well,” Marsali said, tucking in the blanket wrapped around the twin she was holding. “It smells that wee bit better than sauerkraut, aye?”
Four days later …
BRIANNA TOOK A handful of the dress she meant to wear and lifted it cautiously to her nose. She’d hung it on a peg in the airing cupboard, along with Marsali’s working dress and apron, hoping for the best. The cupboard itself was no more than a large box like a coffin stood on end, built against the bedroom wall and pierced with dozens of holes through the outside wall, to let the night air dispel as much of the scent of lampblack, varnish, ink, cooking grease, and infant spit-up as possible before the garments were resumed the next morning.
“All right?” Marsali inquired, tousled blond head emerging from her night-freshened shift.
“Well, it doesn’t smell very much like sauerkraut,” Bree said, inhaling strongly, and Marsali gave the breath of a laugh and reached into the cupboard, snagging her work gown, a butternut-gray homespun in a severe cut that made Brianna think privately of a Civil War uniform.
“Ye’ll be aired out fine by the time ye reach Savannah,” Marsali assured her. “And the soldiers willna care.” She handed Brianna a couple of petticoats and went on with her own dressing, fingers rapid with tapes, laces, and buttons. It was just before dawn and they were talking in whispers, not to wake the children before they had to. Downstairs, shuffling and muffled thumps and sniggers signaled Roger’s and Fergus’s preparations for the day.
The soldiers Lord John had sent were already outside; Brianna had seen them from the loft where the MacKenzies had been sleeping, a small group of men who stood together in the alley behind the shop. They’d taken up station a little distance from the house, smoking pipes that glowed briefly in the dark as they moved, and were murmuring to one another, shadowy figures noticeable as soldiers only by the long black shapes of their muskets, stacked together against a wall that had just begun to emerge from the night.
She couldn’t see them from the bedroom—window taxes being what they were, the only windows in the house were the large front windows of the printshop—but a faint scent of tobacco reached her through the holes of the airing cupboard and she exhaled sharply. It would be a long time before she quit smelling sauerkraut, but at least the reeking barrels wouldn’t be accompanying her and the kids to Savannah. Both whisky and the remaining gold, neatly repackaged as a crate of salt fish, had been discreetly spirited away to a warehouse whose owner was a Son of Liberty, and while she still had a few of the thin gold slips sewn into her clothes, it wasn’t enough gold to be really suspicious, even if someone discovered one of the slips.
Nowhere near enough to buy guns, she thought, and shivered, though Marsali had just poked up the bedroom fire. A muffled squawk from the next room made Marsali put down the poker and hurry off, loosening her freshly donned stays as the milk surged into her breasts—Bree saw the wet patches spring out on Marsali’s shift; she could feel it in sympathetic memory, her own nipples swelling against her stays.
“Mam?” said Jemmy, sticking his head into the room. The new fire caught the gleam of his hair and shadowed his bones, and quite suddenly she saw what he would look like, grown. Quick humor and a latent fierceness showed in his face, and the sight of it struck her to the heart.
Warrior. Oh, God …
She closed her eyes and sent a quick passionate plea to the Virgin Mother. Please! Keep him out of it!
A calming thought came, perhaps in response. Two years. Almost exactly two years to the Battle of Yorktown and the end of the war. Only two years. Jem was nine, and eleven would still be much too young to fight. She pushed away the sudden vision of a drummer boy …
“Yes, honey?” she said, tucking in the ends of her fichu. “Are you and Mandy ready?”
He shrugged. How was he supposed to know?
“Dad says will you need one of the pistols?” He spoke casually; it was no big deal. She’d been armed all the way from the Ridge and thought little of it—but now there were soldiers outside, enemy soldiers, waiting to take her and her children away.
“Tell him yes,” she said. “I think I’d better have one.”
76
A Thief in the Night
Fraser’s Ridge
JAMIE WOKE UP HARD, his heart pounding and his mind full of shredded dreams. There was a faint memory of fury; he’d been fighting, wanting to fight someone … but it wasn’t anger pulsing through him, or not entirely … It was still black dark, the shutters closed and the air warm and bitter with the smell of ash from the smoldering hearth.
“Mmmf …” Claire stirred briefly beside him, then relaxed back into sleep with a sigh.
“Sassenach,” he whispered, and put a hand on the warm round of her hip. He felt guilt at rousing her, but his need of her was overwhelming.
“Ng?”
“I need to—” he whispered, already sliding down behind her, fumbling through the bedclothes, her night rail, his shirt—he rose up and yanked the shirt off, threw it on the floor, and then lay down again, pulled up her shift and put an arm over her, clutching her to him, urgent.
She gave a sleepy huff of surprise, but then made a small, accommodating movement of her naked backside and relaxed again, opening to him.
She was surprisingly slippery, as though she’d shared his lustful dream, and perhaps she had … He came into her as slowly as he could, but he couldn’t wait.