She stared at him for a moment, and then her eyes swiveled to me, in search of support. I set the butter aside and beckoned her to come put the letter down on the table. She did, very gently, as though it might break.
It was no more than a single piece of rough paper, folded in thirds and sealed with a grayish-yellow blob of what looked like candle wax—grease from it had spread through the paper, and a few words showed black through the transparent spot. I picked it up, as delicately as I could, and turned it over.
“Yes, it’s definitely your letter,” I assured her. “Miss Frances Pocock, in care of James Fraser, Fraser’s Ridge, Royal Colony of North Carolina.”
“Open it, Grannie!” Mandy said, hopping up and down in an effort to see.
“No, it’s Fanny’s letter,” I told her. “She gets to open it. And she doesn’t have to show it to anybody unless she wants to.”
Fanny turned to John Quincy and, looking up at him with great seriousness, said, “Who gave you the letter to bring to me, sir? Did it come from Philadelphia?”
Her face seemed to grow a shade paler as she said this, but Myers shook his head and raised a shoulder.
“It ain’t likely from Philadelphia, but I cain’t say for sure where it is from, darlin’. It was give into my hand in New Bern, when I happened to be there last month, but wasn’t the man who wrote it what give it to me. He were just passin’ it on, like, as folk do.”
“Oh.” The tension had left her shoulders, and she breathed more easily. “I see. Thank you, sir, for bringing it.”
She’d at least seen letters before, I thought; she slid her thumb under the fold without hesitation, though she loosened the seal, rather than breaking it, and set it down beside the unfolded letter. She stood close, looking down at it, but I could easily see it over her shoulder. She read it out loud, slowly but clearly, following the words with her finger.
“To Miss Frances Pocock
From Mr. William Ransom
Dear Frances,
I write to enquire after your health and well-being. I hope you are happy in your present situation and beginning to feel settled.
Please give my earnest thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Fraser for their generosity.
I am all right, though very much occupied at the moment. I will write again when the opportunity of a messenger offers.
Your most humble and obedient servant,
William Ransom”
“Wil-yum,” she murmured to herself, her finger touching the letters of his name. Her face had changed in an instant; it glowed with a sort of awed happiness.
Jamie moved slightly, beside me, and I glanced up at him. His eyes were warm with firelight, reflecting Fanny’s glow.
FANNY FLED WITH her letter, and, puzzled, I leaned toward John Quincy.
“Didn’t you say that you’d brought a letter for Germain, too?” I asked under the rising hum of talk.
John Quincy nodded. “Oh, I did, ma’am. I give it to him already, though—met him coming back from the privy.” He glanced round the room, then shrugged. “Reckon he might have wanted to read it in private—was from his mother, I think.”
I exchanged wary looks with Jamie. Fergus had written in the early spring, with assurances that all was well with his family. Marsali felt as well as a woman eight months’ pregnant could reasonably be expected to feel; and he also listed the various objects he was sending north to Cross Creek for us. On both occasions, he’d sent brief but fond wishes to Germain. I had read one letter to Germain, Jamie the other—and on both occasions, Germain had just nodded, stone-faced, and said nothing.
Germain didn’t appear for dessert—slices of Amy’s bread with apple butter made by Sarah Chisholm as payment for my attending her younger daughter’s childbed—and I began to be seriously worried. He might have chosen to eat or stay the night with a friend; he often did, with or without Jemmy, but he was supposed to tell someone when he went visiting, and usually did.
Beyond that … I couldn’t think of any reason why he would choose to be absent when there was a visitor. Any visitor, let alone a colorful one like John Quincy Myers, whose very appearance promised entertaining stories as well as news. People would be coming by to visit for the next few evenings to hear him; I knew he’d be staying for a bit—but for tonight, he was ours alone.
Mandy was curled up on Myers’s lap at the moment, gazing up at him in wonder—though in her case, I thought it was his massive gray-streaked beard that was interesting her, rather than the story he was telling, which had to do with a case of adultery in Cross Creek last month that had resulted in a duel with pistols in the middle of Hay Street, in which the participants had both missed their opponents but had hit, respectively, a public water butt and a horse hitched to a gig, which had—the wound being minor but startling—caused the horse to run away with Mrs. Judge Alderdyce, who was sitting in the gig while her groom fetched a parcel for her.
“Was the poor lady hurt?” Bree asked, struggling to keep a straight face.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” John Quincy assured her. “Madder ’n a wet hornet, though, and that’s pretty mad. When they stopped the gig and helped her out of it, she stomped right down the street to Lawyer Forbes’s rooms and made him write up a lawsuit ’gainst the man that winged her horse, right that very minute.”
The humor in Bree’s face changed in an instant at the mention of Neil Forbes, who had kidnapped her and sold her to Stephen Bonnet, but I saw Roger lay his hand over hers and squeeze. She sucked in one cheek for a moment, but then turned to him briefly and nodded, relaxing.
“Didn’t she take care of the horse first?” Jemmy asked, openly disapproving.
“Jim-Bob Hooper did,” Myers assured him. “That’s Mrs. Judge’s groom, what had been driving. Bit o’ salve and a nose bag—had the poor beast fixed up peart in no more than a minute.”
Jamie and Jemmy nodded as one, satisfied.
Talk turned back to the cause of the duel, but I didn’t stay to hear it. Fanny had come quietly back and was sitting on the end of a kitchen bench, smiling to herself as she listened to John Quincy talk. I bent to whisper in her ear as I passed.
“Do you know where Germain is?”
She blinked, pulled away from John Quincy’s spell, but answered readily.
“Yes’m. I think he’s on the roof. He said he didn’t want company.”
GERMAIN WAS ON the roof. Huddled up on the floor in our second-floor bedroom lean-to, his knees raised, arms crossed over them, and head buried in his forearms, a dark lump against the paleness of the bedclothes behind him.
The picture of woe—and the picture of someone desperate to be asked what the matter was, in hopes of reassurance. Well, I reflected, as Jenny says—what’s a grannie for, then?
I picked my way carefully round the edge of the floor, clinging to the timber studs for balance and thanking God that it was neither raining nor blowing up a hurricane. In fact, the night was calm and starlit, full of the half-heard susurrus of pine trees and night-going insects.
I eased myself carefully down beside him, hands sweating just a little.
“So,” I said. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”