A Breath of Snow and Ashes

  “I see.” She glanced at Roger, who met her eye, his annoyance obviously waning into amusement, as well. “The Pirate Gow,” she explained. “Defoe.”

  “Oh, aye.” Roger sheathed his dirk. “And why, exactly, did ye think there might be brigands coming?”

  Kezzie, with the quirks of his erratic hearing, picked that up and answered, as earnestly as his brother, though his voice was louder and slightly flat, the result of his early deafness.

  “We come across Mr. Lindsay, sir, on his way home, and he did tell us what passed, up by Dutchman’s Creek. It’s true, so, what he said? They was all burned to cinders?”

  “They were all dead.” Roger’s voice had lost any tinge of amusement. “What’s that to do with you lot lurking in the woods with clubs?”

  “Well, you see, sir, McGillivrays’ is a fine, big place, what with the cooper’s shop and the new house and all, and being on a road, like—well, if I was a brigand, sir, ’tis just the sort of place I might choose,” replied Jo.

  “And Miss Lizzie’s there, with her Pap. And your son, Mr. Mac,” Kezzie added pointedly. “Shouldn’t want no harm to come to ’em.”

  “I see.” Roger smiled a little crookedly. “Well, thanks to ye, then, for the kind thought. I doubt the brigands will be anywhere near, though; Dutchman’s Creek is a long way away.”

  “Aye, sir,” Jo agreed. “But brigands might be anywhere, mightn’t they?”

  This was undeniable, and sufficiently true as to give Brianna a renewed feeling of chill in the pit of the stomach.

  “They might be, but they aren’t,” Roger assured them. “Come along to the house with us, aye? We’re just going to collect wee Jem. I’m sure Frau Ute would give ye a bed by the fire.”

  The Beardsleys exchanged inscrutable looks. They were nearly identical—small and lithe, with thick dark hair, distinguished only by Kezzie’s deafness and the round scar on Jo’s thumb—and to see the two fine-boned faces wearing precisely the same expression was a little unnerving.

  Whatever information had been exchanged by that look, it had evidently included as much consultation as was required, for Kezzie nodded slightly, deferring to his brother.

  “Ah, no, sir,” Josiah said politely. “We’ll bide, I think.” And with no further talk, the two of them turned and crunched off into the dark, scuffling leaves and rocks as they went.

  “Jo! Wait!” Brianna called after them, her hand having found something else in the bottom of her pocket.

  “Aye, ma’am?” Josiah was back, appearing by her elbow with unsettling abruptness. His twin was no stalker, but Jo was.

  “Oh! I mean, oh, there you are.” She took a deep breath to slow her heart, and handed him the carved whistle she’d made for Germain. “Here. If you’re going to stand guard, this might be helpful. To call for help, if someone should come.”

  Jo Beardsley had plainly never seen a whistle before, but didn’t care to admit it. He turned the little object over in his hand, trying not to stare at it.

  Roger reached out, took it from him, and blew a healthy blast that shattered the night. Several birds, startled from their rest, shot out of the nearby trees, shrieking, followed closely by Kezzie Beardsley, eyes huge with amazement.

  “Blow in that end,” Roger said, tapping the appropriate end of the whistle before handing it back. “Squeeze your lips a bit.”

  “Much obliged, sir,” Jo murmured. His normal stoic facade had shattered with the silence, and he took the whistle with the wide-eyed look of a boy on Christmas morning, turning at once to show the prize to his twin. It struck her quite suddenly that neither boy likely ever had had a Christmas morning—or any other sort of gift.

  “I’ll make another one for you,” she told Kezzie. “Then the two of you can signal back and forth. If you see any brigands,” she added, smiling.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. We’ll do that, we surely will!” he assured her, scarcely glancing at her in his eagerness to examine the whistle his brother had put in his hands.

  “Blow it three times, if ye want help,” Roger called after them, taking her arm.

  “Aye, sir!” came back from the darkness, followed by a belated faint “Thank you, ma’am!”—this in turn followed at once by a fusillade of puffs, gasps, and breathless rattles, punctuated by briefly successful shrill toots.

  “Lizzie’s been teaching them manners, I see,” Roger said. “As well as their letters. D’ye think they’ll ever be truly civilized, though?”

  “No,” she said, with a trace of regret.

  “Really?” She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but heard the surprise in his voice. “I was only joking. Ye really think not?”

  “I do—and no wonder, after the way they grew up. Did you see the way they were with that whistle? No one’s ever given them a present, or a toy.”

  “I suppose not. D’ye think that’s what makes boys civilized? If so, I imagine wee Jem will be a philosopher or an artist or something. Mrs. Bug spoils him rotten.”

  “Oh, as if you don’t,” she said tolerantly. “And Da, and Lizzie, and Mama, and everyone else in sight.”

  “Oh, well,” Roger said, unembarrassed at the accusation. “Wait ’til he has a bit of competition. Germain’s in no danger of spoiling, is he?” Germain, Fergus and Marsali’s eldest son, was harried by two small sisters, known to one and all as the hell-kittens, who followed their brother constantly, teasing and pestering.

  She laughed, but felt a slight sense of uneasiness. The thought of another baby always made her feel as though she were perched at the top of a roller coaster, short of breath and stomach clenched, poised somewhere between excitement and terror. Particularly now, with the memory of their lovemaking still softly heavy, shifting like mercury in her belly.

  Roger seemed to sense her ambivalence, for he didn’t pursue the subject, but reached for her hand and held it, his own large and warm. The air was cold, the last vestiges of a winter chill lingering in the hollows.

  “What about Fergus, then?” he asked, taking up an earlier thread of the conversation. “From what I hear, he hadn’t much of a childhood, either, but he seems fairly civilized.”

  “My aunt Jenny had the raising of him from the time he was ten,” she objected. “You haven’t met my aunt Jenny, but believe me, she could have civilized Adolf Hitler, if she put her mind to it. Besides, Fergus grew up in Paris, not the backwoods—even if it was in a brothel. And it sounds like it was a pretty high-class brothel, too, from what Marsali tells me.”

  “Oh, aye? What does she tell you?”

  “Oh, just stories that he’s told her, now and then. About the clients, and the wh—the girls.”

  “Can ye not say ‘whore,’ then?” he asked, amused. She felt the blood rise in her cheeks, and was pleased that it was dark; he teased her more when she blushed.

  “I can’t help it that I went to a Catholic school,” she said, defensive. “Early conditioning.” It was true; she couldn’t say certain words, save when in the grip of fury or when mentally prepared. “Why can you, though? You’d think a preacher’s lad would have the same problem.”

  He laughed, a little wryly.

  “Not precisely the same problem. It was more a matter of feeling obliged to curse and carry on in front of my friends, to prove I could.”

  “What kind of carrying on?” she asked, scenting a story. He didn’t often talk about his early life in Inverness, adopted by his great-uncle, a Presbyterian minister, but she loved hearing the small tidbits he sometimes let fall.

  “Och. Smoking, drinking beer, and writing filthy words on the walls in the boys’ toilet,” he said, the smile evident in his voice. “Tipping over dustbins. Letting air out of automobile tires. Stealing sweeties from the Post Office. Quite the wee criminal I was, for a time.”

  “The terror of Inverness, huh? Did you have a gang?” she teased.

  “I did,” he said, and laughed. “Gerry MacMillan, Bobby Cawdor, and Dougie Buchanan. I was odd man out, not only for being th
e preacher’s lad, but for having an English father and an English name. So I was always out to show them I was a hard man. Meaning I was usually the one in most trouble.”

  “I had no idea you were a juvenile delinquent,” she said, charmed at the thought.

  “Well, not for long,” he assured her wryly. “Come the summer I was fifteen, the Reverend signed me up on a fishing boat, and sent me to sea with the herring fleet. Couldna just say whether he did it to improve my character, keep me out of jail, or only because he couldn’t stand me round the house any longer, but it did work. Ye want to meet hard men sometime, go to sea with a bunch of Gaelic fishermen.”

  “I’ll remember that,” she said, trying not to giggle and producing a series of small, wet snorts instead. “Did your friends end up in jail, then, or did they go straight, without you to mislead them?”

  “Dougie joined the army,” he said, a tinge of wistfulness in his voice. “Gerry took over his dad’s shop—his dad was a tobacconist. Bobby . . . aye, well, Bobby’s dead. Drowned, that same summer, out lobstering with his cousin off Oban.”

  She leaned closer to him and squeezed his hand, her shoulder brushing his in sympathy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, then paused. “Only . . . he isn’t dead, is he? Not yet. Not now.”

  Roger shook his head, and made a small sound of mingled humor and dismay.

  “Is that a comfort?” she asked. “Or is it horrible to think about?”

  She wanted to keep him talking; he hadn’t talked so much in one go since the hanging that had taken his singing voice. Being forced to speak in public made him self-conscious, and his throat tightened. His voice was still rasping, but relaxed as he was now, he wasn’t choking or coughing.

  “Both,” he said, and made the sound again. “I’ll never see him again, either way.” He shrugged slightly, pushing the thought away. “D’ye think of your old friends much?”

  “No, not much,” she said softly. The trail narrowed here, and she linked her arm in his, drawing close as they approached the last turn, which would bring them in sight of the McGillivrays’. “There’s too much here.” But she didn’t want to talk about what wasn’t here.

  “Do you think Jo and Kezzie are just playing?” she asked. “Or are they up to something?”

  “What should they be up to?” he asked, accepting her change of subject without comment. “I canna think they’re lying in wait to commit highway robbery—not at this time of night.”

  “Oh, I believe them about standing guard,” she said. “They’d do anything to protect Lizzie. Only—” She paused. They had come out of the forest onto the wagon road; the far verge fell away in a steep bank, looking at night like a bottomless pool of black velvet—by daylight, it would be a tangled mass of fallen snags, clumps of rhododendron, redbud, and dogwood, overgrown with the snarls of ancient grapevines and creepers. The road made a switchback further on and curved back on itself, arriving gently at the McGillivrays’ place, a hundred feet below.

  “The lights are still on,” she said with some surprise. The small group of buildings—the Old Place, the New Place, Ronnie Sinclair’s cooper’s shop, Dai Jones’s blacksmith’s forge and cabin—were mostly dark, but the lower windows of the McGillivrays’ New Place were striped with light, leaking through the cracks of the shutters, and a bonfire in front of the house made a brilliant blot of light against the dark.

  “Kenny Lindsay,” Roger said matter-of-factly. “The Beardsleys said they’d met him. He’ll have stopped to share the news.”

  “Mm. We’d better be careful, then; if they’re looking out for brigands, too, they might shoot at anything that moves.”

  “Not tonight; it’s a party, remember? What were ye saying, though, about the Beardsley boys protecting Lizzie?”

  “Oh.” Her toe stubbed against some hidden obstacle, and she clutched his arm to keep from falling. “Oof! Only that I wasn’t sure who they thought they were protecting her from.”

  Roger tightened his grip on her arm in reflex.

  “Whatever d’ye mean by that?”

  “Just that if I were Manfred McGillivray, I’d take good care to be nice to Lizzie. Mama says the Beardsleys follow her around like dogs, but they don’t. They follow her like tame wolves.”

  “I thought Ian said it wasn’t possible to tame wolves.”

  “It isn’t,” she said tersely. “Come on, let’s hurry, before they smoor the fire.”

  THE BIG LOG HOUSE was literally overflowing with people. Light spilled from the open door and glowed in the row of tiny arrow-slit windows that marched across the front of the house, and dark forms wove in and out of the bonfire’s light. The sounds of a fiddle came to them, thin and sweet through the dark, borne on the wind with the scent of roasting meat.

  “I suppose Senga’s truly made her choice, then,” Roger said, taking her arm for the final steep descent to the crossroad. “Who d’ye bet it is? Ronnie Sinclair or the German lad?”

  “Oh, a bet? What are the stakes? Woops!” She stumbled, tripping on a half-buried rock in the path, but Roger tightened his grip, keeping her upright.

  “Loser sets the pantry to rights,” he suggested.

  “Deal,” she said promptly. “I think she chose Heinrich.”

  “Aye? Well, ye may be right,” he said, sounding amused. “But I have to tell you, it was five to three in favor of Ronnie, last I heard. Frau Ute’s a force to be reckoned with.”

  “She is,” Brianna admitted. “And if it was Hilda or Inga, I’d say it was no contest. But Senga’s got her mother’s personality; nobody’s telling her what to do—not even Frau Ute.

  “Where did they get ‘Senga,’ anyway?” she added. “There are lots of Ingas and Hildas over toward Salem, but I’ve never heard of another Senga.”

  “Ah, well, ye wouldn’t—not in Salem. It’s not a German name, ken—it’s Scots.”

  “Scots?” she said in astonishment.

  “Oh, aye,” he said, the grin evident in his voice. “It’s Agnes, spelt backward. A girl named that is bound to be contrary, don’t ye think?”

  “You’re kidding! Agnes, spelled backward?”

  “I wouldna say it’s common, exactly, but I’ve certainly met one or two Sengas in Scotland.”

  She laughed.

  “Do the Scots do that with any other names?”

  “Back-spelling?” He considered. “Well, I did go to school with a lass named Adnil, and there was a grocer’s lad who got in the messages for old ladies in the neighborhood—his name’s pronounced ‘Kirry,’ but it’s spelt ‘C-i-r-e.’”

  She looked sharply at him, in case he was teasing, but he wasn’t. She shook her head.

  “I think Mama’s right about Scots. So yours spelled backward would be—”

  “Regor,” he confirmed. “Sounds like something from a Godzilla film, doesn’t it? A giant eel, maybe, or a beetle with death-ray eyes.” He sounded pleased at the notion.

  “You thought about it, didn’t you?” she said, laughing. “Which would you rather be?”

  “Well, when I was a kid, I thought the beetle with the death-ray eyes would be best,” he admitted. “Then I went to sea and started hauling up the occasional Moray eel in my net. Those are not the kind of thing ye’d want to meet in a dark alley, believe me.”

  “More agile than Godzilla, at least,” she said, shuddering slightly at the recollection of the one Moray eel she’d met personally. A four-foot length of spring steel and rubber, fast as lightning and equipped with a mouthful of razors, it had come up from the hold of a fishing boat she’d watched being unloaded in a little port town called MacDuff.

  She and Roger had been leaning on a low rock wall, idly watching the gulls hover in the wind, when a shout of alarm from the fishing boat just below had made them look down in time to see fishermen scrambling back from something on deck.

  A dark sine wave had flashed through the silver wash of fish on deck, shot under the rail, and landed on the wet stones of the quay, where
it had caused similar panic among the fishermen hosing down their gear, writhing and lashing about like a crazed high-tension cable until one rubber-booted man, gathering his self-possession, had rushed up and kicked it back into the water.

  “Well, they’re no really bad sorts, eels,” Roger said judiciously, evidently recalling the same memory. “Ye canna blame them, after all; being dragged up from the bottom of the sea without warning—anyone would thrash about a bit.”

  “So they would,” she said, thinking of themselves. She took his hand, threading her fingers between his, and found his firm, cold grip a comfort.

  They were close enough now to catch snatches of laughter and talk, billowing up into the cold night with the smoke of the fire. There were children running loose; she saw two small forms dart through the legs of the crowd around the fire, black and thin-limbed as Halloween goblins.

  That wasn’t Jem, surely? No, he was smaller, and surely Lizzie wouldn’t—

  “Mej,” Roger said.

  “What?”

  “Jem, backward,” he explained. “I was just thinking it would be a lot of fun to see Godzilla films with him. Maybe he’d like to be the beetle with death-ray eyes. Be fun, aye?”

  He sounded so wistful that a lump came to her throat, and she squeezed his hand hard, then swallowed.

  “Tell him Godzilla stories,” she said firmly. “It’s make-believe anyway. I’ll draw him pictures.”

  He laughed at that.

  “Christ, you do, and they’ll be stoning ye for trafficking with the devil, Bree. Godzilla looks like something straight out of the Book of Revelation—or so I was told.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Eigger.”

  “Who . . . oh,” she said, going into mental reverse. “Reggie? Who’s Reggie?”

  “The Reverend.” His great-uncle, his adoptive father. There was still a smile in his voice, but one tinged with nostalgia. “When we went to the monster films together of a Saturday. Eigger and Regor—and ye should have seen the looks on the faces of the Ladies’ Altar and Tea Society, when Mrs. Graham let them in without announcing them, and they came into the Reverend’s study to find us stamping round and roaring, kicking hell out of a Tokyo built of blocks and soup tins.”

  She laughed, but felt tears prick at the backs of her eyes.

  “I wish I’d known the Reverend,” she said, squeezing his hand.

  “I wish ye had, too,” he said softly. “He would have liked ye so much, Bree.”

  For the space of a few moments, while he talked, the dark forest and the flaming fire below had faded away; they were in Inverness, cozy in the Reverend’s study, with rain on the windows and the sound of traffic going by in the street. It happened so often when they talked like this, between themselves. Then some small thing would fracture the moment—now, it was a shout from the fire as people began to clap and sing—and the world of their own time vanished in an instant.

  What if he were gone, she thought suddenly. Could I bring it back, all by myself?

  A spasm of elemental panic gripped her, just for a moment, at the thought. Without Roger as her touchstone, with nothing but her own memories to serve as anchor to the future, that time would be lost. Would fade into hazy dreams, and be lost, leaving her no firm ground of reality to stand upon.

  She took a deep breath of the cold night air, crisp with woodsmoke, and dug the balls of her feet hard into the ground as they walked, trying to feel solid.

  “MamaMamaMAMA!” A small blob detached itself from the confusion round the fire and rocketed toward her, crashing into her knees with enough force to make her grab hold of Roger’s arm.

  “Jem! There you are!” She scooped him up and buried her face in his hair, which smelled pleasantly of goats, hay, and spicy sausage. He was heavy, and more than solid.

  Then Ute McGillivray turned and saw them. Her broad face was creased in a frown, but broke into a beam of delight at seeing them. People turned at her call of greeting, and they were engulfed at once by the crowd, everyone asking questions, expressing gratified surprise at their coming.

  A few questions were asked about the Dutch family, but Kenny Lindsay had brought the news of the burning earlier; Brianna was glad of that. People clucked and shook their heads, but by now they had exhausted most of their horrified speculations, and were turning to other matters. The cold of the graves beneath the fir trees still lingered as a faint chill on her heart; she had no wish to make that experience real again by talking about it.

  The newly engaged couple were seated together on a pair of upturned buckets, holding hands, faces blissful in the glow of the bonfire.

  “I win,” Brianna said, smiling at sight of them. “Don’t they look happy?”

  “They do,” Roger agreed. “I doubt Ronnie Sinclair is. Is he here?” He glanced round, and so did she, but the cooper was nowhere in sight.

  “Wait—he’s in his shop,” she said, putting a hand on Roger’s wrist and nodding toward the small building on the opposite side of the road. There were no windows on this side of the cooper’s shop, but a faint glow showed round the edge of the closed door.

  Roger glanced from the darkened shop to the convivial crowd round the fire; a good many of Ute’s relations had ridden over with the lucky bridegroom and his friends from Salem, bringing with them an immense barrel of black beer, which was adding to the festivities. The air was yeasty with the tang of hops.

  By contrast, the cooper’s shop had a desolate, glowering sort of air about