“What?” I said, incredulous. “Charles-Claire?”
“… for your Grandda and Grannie,” Germain read, and looked up, grinning hugely at me.
“Go on,” I said, nudging him. He nodded and looked back at the page, running his finger along the words to find his place.
“So,” he read, and his voice choked suddenly, then steadied. “So,” he repeated, “please, mon cher fils, come home. I love you and I need you to be here, so the new house will be home again.
“With my love always …”
He pressed his lips tight together, and I saw tears well in his eyes, still fixed on the paper.
“Maman,” he whispered, and pressed the letter to his chest.
IT WAS ANOTHER hour before the children were put to bed—Germain among them—and I found myself once more in our airy bedroom, this time with Jamie. He stood at the end of the open floor, clad in his shirt, looking out over the night below, while I wriggled out of my stays, sighing in relief as the cool night breeze passed through my shift.
“Are your ears ringing, Sassenach?” he said, turning and smiling at me. “It’s been some time since I heard so much talk in such a small space.”
“Mm-hmm.” I came and put my arms round his waist, feeling the weight of the day and the evening slip away. “It’s so quiet up here. I can hear the crickets in the honeysuckle round the privy.”
He groaned and rested his chin on top of my head, letting me hold a little of his weight.
“Dinna mention privies. I’m nay more than half done wi’ the one for your surgery. And if we’ve much more company like tonight, I’m going to have to dig another for the house within a month.”
“I know you know that Roger would do it if you asked,” I remarked. “You just won’t let him.”
“Mmphm. He wouldna do it right.”
“Is there an art to digging privies?” I asked this, teasing, because if Jamie was a perfectionist about anything—and in all truth, he was a perfectionist about quite a number of things, nearly all having to do with tools or weapons—it was digging a proper privy. “Wasn’t it Voltaire who said that the perfect is the enemy of the good?”
“Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien,” he said. “The best is the mortal enemy of the good. And I’m sure Voltaire never dug a privy in his life. What would he ken about it?” He straightened up and stretched, slowly and luxuriously. “God, I want to lie down.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“I mean to enjoy the anticipation as much as the lyin’ down. Besides, I’m hungry. Have we any food to hand?”
“If none of the children have found it, yes.” I bent and rummaged under the bed, pulling out the basket I’d secreted during the afternoon against just such a contingency. “Cheese and a wedge of apple pie do you?”
He made a Scottish noise indicating thanks and deep contentment and sat down to wade in.
“Germain’s had a letter from Marsali,” I said. The corn husks in the mattress rustled as I sat down beside him. “Did John Quincy tell you?”
“Germain told me,” he said, smiling. “When I went out to tell the bairns to come in, he was out by the well tellin’ Jem and Fanny about his new wee brothers, and his hair standin’ on end with excitement. He said he couldna sleep for wanting to see his folk, so I gave him paper and ink to write his mam a letter.
“Fanny’s helping him wi’ the spelling,” he added, brushing crumbs off his shirt. “Who d’ye think taught her to write? It’s no a skill likely to be of value in a brothel, surely.”
“Someone has to keep the books and write occasional genteel blackmail letters, but perhaps that’s the madam’s job. As for Fanny, she’s never said, but I think it must have been her sister.”
My heart contracted a little at this reminder of Fanny’s recent past. She never spoke of it, or of her sister.
“Aye,” Jamie said, and a shadow crossed his face at the mention of Jane Pocock. Arrested and sentenced to death for killing a sadistic client who had bought her little sister’s maidenhead, she had killed herself the night before she would have been hanged—only hours before William and Jamie reached her.
He pressed his lips together briefly and then shook his head. “Aye, well. We must send Germain home as soon as we can, of course. I’m afraid Frances will miss him, though.”
I’d bent to scoop up our discarded outer garments, but straightened up at this.
“Do you think we should send Fanny with him? To stay with Fergus and Marsali for a while? She’d be a help with the children.”
He paused, a slice of cheese in hand, then shook his head.
“No. Seven is more than enough mouths for Fergus to feed, and the lass is happy enough here, I think. She’s accustomed to us; I wouldna like her to think we dinna want her—or to feel uprooted, aye? And”—he hesitated, then added in an offhand way—“William gave her to me. He meant me to keep her safe.”
“And you think he might come here to see her,” I added gently.
“Aye,” he said, a little gruffly. “I wouldna want him to come and not find her here, I mean.” He took a bite of cheese and chewed it slowly, looking away.
I patted his arm, then rose and started straightening our discarded clothes, doing the best I could to lay them out in some way that would both prevent them being blown off the roof in case of a high wind but not end up impossibly crumpled. As I laid Jamie’s sporran on top of the pile with my shoes to help weigh things down, I saw the edge of a folded paper peeking out.
“Oh—Myers said he’d brought you a letter, too,” I said. “Is this it?”
“It is.” He sounded wary, as though not wanting me to touch it, and I drew back my hand. He set down the piece of cheese he’d been eating, though, and nodded at it. “Ye can read it, Sassenach. If ye like.”
“Is it disturbing news?” I asked, hesitating. After the emotional upheavals of Marsali’s letter, I didn’t want to ruin the peace of the summer night with something that could wait ’til morning.
“Nay, not really. It’s from Joshua Greenhow—ye recall him, from Monmouth?”
“I do,” I said, feeling momentarily dizzy.
I had been stitching a wound in Corporal Greenhow’s forehead when I’d been shot during the battle, and his appalled face, my needle and ligature dangling absurdly from his bloody forehead, was the last thing I saw as I fell. It wouldn’t be stretching things to say that what happened next was the worst physical experience of my life, as I lay on the ground in a spinning world of leaves and sky and overwhelming pain, bleeding to death and listening to a courier from General Lee trying to get Jamie to abandon me in the mud.
I glanced at the letter, but the light was too poor for me to read it, even if I’d had my spectacles to hand.
“What does he say?”
“Ach, mostly just where he is and what he’s doing—which is none sae much at the moment; just sitting about in Philadelphia. Though there is a bit about General Arnold in there.” He nodded at the letter. “Joshua says he’s married Peggy Shippen—ye’ll remember her, I expect—and he’s bein’ court-martialed for speculating. Arnold, I mean, not Mr. Greenhow.”