Snow came silently, and mounded on the roof, then, beginning to melt from the warmth of the shingles underneath, would drip down the slope of the roof, to leave a gleaming portcullis of icicles along the eaves. Now and then, though, the roaming water found a split in a shingle, or a join where the overlapping edges had warped, and drips poked their icy fingers through the roof.
Jamie regarded all such intrusions as a personal affront, and brooked no delay in dealing with them.
“Look!” he exclaimed. “There it is. See it?”
I shifted my glassy gaze from the hairy ankles in front of my nose, to the roof overhead. Sure enough, the torchlight revealed the black line of a split in one shingle, with a spreading dark patch of dampness on the underside. As I watched, a clear drop formed, glistening red in the torchlight, and fell with a plop onto the pillow beside me.
“We could shift the bed a bit,” I suggested, though with no particular hope. I had been through this before. All suggestions that repair work could wait till daylight were met with astonished refusal; no proper man, I was given to understand, would countenance such a thing.
Jamie stepped down off the bedstead and prodded Ian in the ribs with his foot.
“Get up and knock at the spot where the split is, Ian. I’ll deal with it on the outside.” Seizing a fresh shingle, a hammer, a hatchet, and a bag of nails, he headed for the door.
“Don’t you go up on the roof in that!” I exclaimed, sitting up abruptly. “That’s your good woolen shirt!”
He halted by the door, glared briefly at me, then, with the rebuking expression of an early Christian martyr, laid down his tools, stripped off the shirt, dropped it on the floor, picked up the tools, and strode majestically out to deal with the leak, buttocks clenched with determined zeal.
I rubbed a hand over my sleep-puffed face and moaned softly to myself.
“He’ll be all right, Auntie,” Ian assured me. He yawned widely, not bothering to cover his mouth, and reluctantly rolled out of his own warm bed.
Thumps on the roof that were definitely not the feet of eight tiny reindeer announced that Jamie was in place. I rolled out of the way and got up, resigned, as Ian mounted the bedstead and jabbed a stick of firewood upward into the damp patch, jarring the shingles enough for Jamie to locate the leak on the outside.
A short period of rending and banging followed, as the defective shingle was yanked loose and replaced, and the leak was summarily extinguished, leaving no more evidence of its existence than the small heap of snow that had fallen in through the hole left by the removed shingle.
Back in bed, Jamie curled his freezing body around me, clasped me to his icy bosom, and fell promptly asleep, full of the righteous satisfaction of a man who has defended hearth and home against all threat.
* * *
It was a fragile and tenuous foothold that we had upon the mountain—but a foothold, for all that. We had not much meat—there had been little time for hunting, beyond squirrel and rabbit, and those useful rodents had gone to their winter rest by now—but a fair amount of dried vegetables, from yams to squash to wild onions and garlic, plus a bushel or two of nuts, and the small stock of herbs I had managed to gather and dry. It made for a sparse diet, but with careful management, we could survive till spring.
With few chores to do outside, there was time to talk, to tell stories, and to dream. Between the useful objects like spoons and bowls, Jamie took time to carve the pieces of a wooden chess set, and spent a good deal of his time trying to inveigle me or Ian into playing with him.
Ian and Rollo, who both suffered badly from cabin fever, took to visiting Anna Ooka frequently, sometimes going on extended hunting trips with young men from the village, who were pleased to have the benefit of his and Rollo’s company.
“The lad speaks the Indian tongue a great deal better than he does Greek or Latin,” Jamie observed with some dourness, watching Ian exchanging cordial insults with an Indian companion as they left on one such excursion.
“Well, if Marcus Aurelius had written about tracking porcupines, I expect he’d have found a more eager audience,” I replied soothingly.
Dearly as I loved Ian, I was myself not displeased by his frequent absence. There were definitely times when three was a crowd.
There is nothing more delightful in life than a feather bed and an open fire—except a feather bed with a warm and tender lover in it. When Ian was gone, we would not trouble with rushlights but would go to bed with the dark, and lie curled together in shared warmth, talking late into the night, laughing and telling stories, sharing our pasts, planning our future, and somewhere in the midst of the talking, pausing to enjoy the wordless pleasures of the present.
“Tell me about Brianna.” These were Jamie’s favorite stories; the tales of Brianna as a child. What she had said and worn and done; how she had looked, all her accomplishments and her tastes.
“Did I tell you about the time I was invited to her school, to talk about being a doctor?”
“No.” He shifted to make himself more comfortable, rolling onto his side and fitting himself to my shape behind. “Why should you do that?”
“It was what they called Career Day; the schoolteachers invited a lot of people with different jobs to come and explain what they did, so the children would have some idea of what a lawyer does, for instance, or a firefighter—”
“I should think that one would be fairly obvious.”
“Hush. Or a veterinarian—that’s a doctor who treats animals—or a dentist, that’s a special doctor who deals only with teeth—”
“With teeth? What can ye do to a tooth, besides pull it?”
“You’d be surprised.” I brushed the hair out of my face and up off my neck. “Anyway, they’d always ask me to come, because it wasn’t at all common for a woman to be a doctor then.”
“Ye think it’s common now?” He laughed, and I kicked him lightly in the shin.
“Well, it got more common rather soon after that. But at the time, it wasn’t. And when I’d got done speaking and asked if there were any questions, an obnoxious little boy piped up and said that his mother said women who worked were no better than prostitutes, and they ought to be home minding their families, instead of taking jobs away from men.”
“I shouldna think his mother can have met many prostitutes.”
“No, I don’t imagine. Nor all that many women with jobs, either. But when he said that, Brianna stood up and said in a very loud voice, ‘Well, you’d better be glad my mama’s a doctor, because you’re going to need one!’ Then she hit him on the head with her arithmetic book, and when he lost his balance and fell down, she jumped on his stomach and punched him in the mouth.”
I could feel his chest and stomach quivering against my back.
“Oh, braw lassie! Did the schoolmaster not tawse her for it, though?”
“They don’t beat children in school. She had to write a letter of apology to the little beast, but then, he had to write one to mem, and she thought that was a fair exchange. The more embarrassing part was that it turned out his father was a doctor too; one of my colleagues at the hospital.”
“I wouldna suppose you’d taken a job he’d wanted?”
“How did you guess?”