He pressed his thumb firmly over Frank Randall’s nose, then lifted it. He tilted the book from side to side, letting light from the fire play over the plastic covering. He’d made a very faint smudge, not visible if you were looking straight at it.
Suddenly ashamed of this childishness, he erased the mark with his shirtsleeve and set the book on his knee. The photograph looked calmly up at him through dark-rimmed spectacles.
It wasn’t only the writer that disturbed him. Hearing bits of what was to come from Claire and Bree and Roger Mac frequently alarmed him, but their physical presence was reassuring; whatever horrible events were to happen, many folk had survived them. Still, he kent well enough that while none of his family would ever lie to him, they did often temper what they said to him. Frank Randall was another thing: an historian, whose account of what was going to happen in the next few years would be …
Well, he didn’t ken exactly what it might be. Frightening, perhaps. Upsetting, maybe. Maybe reassuring … in spots.
Frank Randall wasn’t smiling, but he looked pleasant enough. Lines in his face that cut deep. Well, the man had been through a war.
“To say nothing of bein’ married to Claire,” he said aloud, and was surprised at the sound of his voice. He picked up his wineglass and took a mouthful, holding it for a moment, but then swallowed and turned the book over.
“Well, I dinna ken if I forgive ye or not, Englishman,” he murmured, opening the cover and taking a cleansing breath of cedar. “Or you me, but let’s see what ye have to say to me, then.”
HE WOKE THE next morning to an empty bed, sighed, stretched, and rolled out of it. He’d thought he’d dream about the events described in Randall’s book, but he hadn’t. He’d dreamed, rather pleasantly, about Achilles’s ships, and would have liked to tell Claire about it. He shook off the remnants of sleep and went to wash, making a mental note of some of the things he’d dreamed so as not to forget them. With luck, she’d be home before supper.
“Mr. Fraser?” A delicate rap on the door, Frances’s voice. “Your daughter says breakfast is ready.”
“Aye?” He wasn’t smelling anything of a savory nature, but “ready” was a relative term. “I’m coming, lass. Taing.”
“Tang?” she said, sounding startled. He smiled, pulled a clean shirt over his head, and opened the door. She was standing there like a field daisy, delicate but upright on her stem, and he bowed to her.
“Taing,” he said, pronouncing it as carefully as he could. “It means ‘thanks’ in the Gaelic.”
“Are you sure?” she said, frowning slightly.
“I am,” he assured her. “Moran taing means ‘thank you very much,’ should ye want something stronger.”
A faint flush rose in her cheeks.
“I’m sorry—I didn’t really mean are you th—sure. Of course you are. It’s only that Germain told me ‘thank you’ is ‘tabag leet.’ Is that wrong? He might have been practicing on me, but I didn’t think so.”
“Tapadh leat,” he said, restraining the urge to laugh. “No, that’s right; it’s only that moran taing is … casual, ye might say. The other’s when ye want to be formal. If someone’s saved your life or paid your debts, say, ye’d say, ‘Tapadh leat,’ where if they passed ye the bread at table, ye’d say, ‘Taing,’ aye?”
“Aye,” she said automatically, and flushed deeper when he smiled. She smiled back, though, and he followed her down the stairs, thinking how oddly engaging she was; she was reticent, but not shy at all. He supposed one couldn’t be shy, if raised with the expectation of becoming a whore.
Now he could smell parritch—slightly scorched parritch. He wrinkled his nose, adjusted his expression to one of stoic pleasantry, and went along to the kitchen, casting an eye at the unfinished walls of his study and the barely framed front room. He might get an hour at the study this afternoon, if he was back in time from …
“Madainn mhath,” he said, pausing in the open space where the door would be—next week, maybe—to greet the assembled members of his family.
“Grandda!” Mandy scrambled off her bench, knocking her parritch bowl into the milk jug. Brianna, barely sitting down, lunged forward and grabbed it, just in time.
He caught Mandy and swung her up into his arms, smiling at Jem, Fanny, Germain, and Brianna.
“Mam burnt the parritch,” Jem informed him. “But there’s honey, so you don’t notice so much.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said, sitting down and setting Mandy on his knee. “The honey’s no from Claire’s bees, is it? They’ll need still to settle a bit, aye?”
“Yes,” Brianna said, and pushed a bowl toward him, followed by milk jug and honey pot. She was flushed herself, doubtless from the heat of the fire. “This is part of Mama’s wages from setting Hector MacDonald’s broken leg. Sorry about the porridge; I thought I could make it to the smoke shed and back before it needed to be stirred again.” She nodded toward the hearth, where slices of bacon were just beginning to sputter in the big spider.
“Where’s your man, lass?” he asked, tactfully ignoring her apology and helping himself to a modest drizzle of honey.
“One of the MacKinnon kids came to fetch him, just after daybreak. You were tired,” she added, seeing him frown at the thought that he hadn’t heard the visitor. “And no wonder. Don’t worry,” she said quickly, “it wasn’t really an emergency; old Grannie MacKinnon woke up dying again—that’s the third time this month—and wanted a minister. Oh, the bacon!” She leapt up, but Fanny had already moved to turn the sizzling slices and Jamie’s wame contracted pleasantly at the savory smoke.
“Thank you, Fanny.” Bree sat back down and took up her spoon again.
“Mr. Fraser?” Fanny said, waving the smoke away from her eyes.
“Aye, lass?”
“How do you say ‘You’re welcome’ in Gaelic?”
18
Distant Thunder
I FOUND A SHALLOW, gravelly spot in the creek and hastily wriggled out of my apron and dress, trying not to breathe. Bar gangrenous limbs and long-dead corpses, nothing smells worse than pig shit. Nothing.
Still holding my breath, I wadded the smeared garments into a loose ball and dropped it into the shallows. I kicked off my shoes and waded in after it, holding a couple of large rocks I had snatched up. The dress had already begun to unwrap itself, spreading faded indigo swaths out over the gravel like the shadow of a passing manta ray. I dropped a rock on it, and, spreading out the canvas apron with my bare foot, weighted that down as well.
Crisis managed for the moment, I waded out a little farther and stood calf-deep in the cold, rushing water, breathing gratefully.
Animal husbandry was not really my specialty—unless you wanted to count Jamie and the children—but necessity makes veterinarians of us all. I had been visiting young Elmo Cairns’s cabin to check on the progress of his broken arm when his also-young and immensely pregnant pig began to show signs of difficulty with her first farrowing. This was noticeable, as the pig had been sprawled, her enormous sides heaving sporadically, on the floor at Elmo’s feet, she being—as he explained—“summat of a pet.”