Текст книги "A Breath Of Snow And Ashes"

Автор книги: Diana Gabaldon

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 94 страниц)

“Oh,” I said, rather embarrassed. “No, just the cat.” Prompted by this introduction, Adso, who had followed me upstairs, leapt onto the bed and stood kneading the covers with his paws, big green eyes fixed on the plate of ham.

Christie turned a gaze of deep suspicion from the cat to me.

“No, he is not my familiar,” I said tartly, scooping up Adso and dumping him unceremoniously on the floor. “He’s a cat. Talking to him is slightly less ridiculous than talking to myself, that’s all.”

An expression of surprise flitted across Christie’s face—perhaps surprise that I had read his mind, or simple surprise at my idiocy—but the creases of suspicion round his eyes relaxed.

I cut up his food with brisk efficiency, but he insisted upon feeding himself. He ate clumsily with his left hand, eyes on his plate and brows knotted in concentration.

When he had finished, he drank off a cup of whisky as though it were water, set down the empty cup, and looked at me.

“Mistress Fraser,” he said, speaking very precisely, “I am an educated man. I do not think ye are a witch.”

“Oh, you don’t?” I said, rather amused. “So you don’t believe in witches? But there are witches mentioned in the Bible, you know.”

He stifled a belch with his fist and regarded me fishily.

“I did not say I do not believe in witches. I do. I said ye aren’t one. Aye?”

“I’m very much obliged to hear it,” I said, trying not to smile. He was quite drunk; though his speech was even more precise than usual, his accent had begun to slip. Normally, he suppressed the inflections of his native Edinburgh as much as possible, but it was growing broader by the moment.

“A bit more?” I didn’t wait for an answer, but poured a solid tot of whisky into his empty cup. The shutters were open and the room was cool, but sweat still gleamed in the creases of his neck. He was clearly in pain, and wasn’t likely to sleep again without help.

He sipped it this time, watching me over the rim of the cup as I tidied up the supper leavings. In spite of whisky and a full stomach, he was increasingly restive, shifting his legs beneath the quilt and twitching his shoulders. I thought he needed the chamber pot, and was debating whether I ought to offer to help him with it, or simply leave promptly so he could manage by himself. The latter, I thought.

I was mistaken, though. Before I could excuse myself, he set down his cup on the table and sat up straight in bed.

“Mistress Fraser,” he said, fixing me with a beady eye. “I wish to apologize to ye.”

“What for?” I said, startled.

His lips pressed tight.

“For … my behavior this morning.”

“Oh. Well … that’s quite all right. I can see how the idea of being put to sleep must seem … quite peculiar to you.”

“I dinna mean that.” He glanced up sharply, then down again. “I meant … that I … could not keep myself still.”

I saw the deepening flush rise up his cheeks again, and had a sudden pang of surprised sympathy. He was truly embarrassed.

I set down the tray and sat down slowly on the stool beside him, wondering what I could say that might assuage his feelings—and not make matters worse.

“But, Mr. Christie,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect anyone to hold still while having their hand taken apart. It’s—it’s simply not human nature!”

He shot me a quick, fierce glance.

“Not even your husband?”

I blinked, taken aback. Not so much by the words, as by the tone of bitterness. Roger had told me a bit of what Kenny Lindsay had said about Ardsmuir. It had been no secret that Christie had been envious of Jamie’s leadership then—but what had that to do with this?

“What makes you say that?” I asked quietly. I took his injured hand, ostensibly to check the bindings—in fact, merely to give me somewhere to look other than into his eyes.

“It’s true, aye? Your husband’s hand.” His beard jutted pugnaciously at me. “He said ye’d mended it for him. He didna wriggle and squirm when ye did it, now, did he?”

Well, no, he hadn’t. Jamie had prayed, cursed, sweated, cried—and screamed, once or twice. But he hadn’t moved.

Jamie’s hand wasn’t a matter I wanted to discuss with Thomas Christie, though.

“Everyone’s different,” I said, giving him as straight a look as I could. “I wouldn’t expect—”

“Ye wouldna expect any man to do as well as him. Aye, I ken that.” The dull red color was burning in his cheeks again, and he looked down at his bandaged hand. The fingers of his good hand were clenched in a fist.

“That’s not what I meant,” I protested. “Not at all! I’ve stitched wounds and set bones for a good many men—almost all the Highlanders were terribly brave about—” It occurred to me, that fraction of a second too late, that Christie was not a Highlander.

He made a deep growling noise in his throat.

“Highlanders,” he said, “hmp!” in a tone that made it clear he would have liked to spit on the floor, had he not been in the presence of a lady.

“Barbarians?” I said, responding to the tone. He glanced at me, and I saw his mouth twist, as he had his own moment of belated realization. He looked away, and took a deep breath—I smelled the gust of whisky as he let it out.

“Your husband … is … certainly a gentleman. He comes of a noble family, if one tainted by treason.” The “r”s of “treason” rolled like thunder—he really was quite drunk. “But he is also … also …” He frowned, groping for a better word, then gave it up. “One of them. Surely ye ken that, and you an Englishwoman?”

“One of them,” I repeated, mildly amused. “You mean a Highlander, or a barbarian?”

He gave me a look somewhere between triumph and puzzlement.

“The same thing, is it not?”

I rather thought he had a point. While I had met Highlanders of wealth and education, like Colum and Dougal MacKenzie—to say nothing of Jamie’s grandfather, the treasonous Lord Lovat to whom Christie was referring—the fact was that every single one of them had the instincts of a Viking freebooter. And to be perfectly honest, so did Jamie.

“Ah … well, they, um, do tend to be rather …” I began feebly. I rubbed a finger under my nose. “Well, they are raised to be fighting men, I suppose. Or is that what you mean?”

He sighed deeply, and shook his head a little, though I thought it was not in disagreement, but simply in dismay at the contemplation of Highland customs and manners.

Mr. Christie was himself well-educated, the son of a self-made Edinburgh merchant. As such, he had pretensions—painful ones—to being a gentleman—but would obviously never make a proper barbarian. I could see why Highlanders both puzzled and annoyed him. What must it have been like, I wondered, for him to find himself imprisoned alongside a horde of uncouth—by his standards—violent, flamboyant, Catholic barbarians, treated—or mistreated—as one of them?

He had leaned back a little on his pillow, eyes closed and mouth compressed. Without opening his eyes, he asked suddenly, “D’ye ken that your husband bears the stripes of flogging?”

I opened my mouth to reply tartly that I had been married to Jamie for nearly thirty years—when I realized that the question implied something about the nature of Mr. Christie’s own concept of marriage that I didn’t want to consider too closely.

“I know,” I said instead, briefly, with a quick glance toward the open door. “Why?”

Christie opened his eyes, which were a little unfocused. With some effort, he brought his gaze to bear on me.

“Ye know why?” he asked, slurring a little. “Wha’ he did?”

I felt heat rise in my cheeks, on Jamie’s behalf.

“At Ardsmuir,” Christie said before I could answer, leveling a finger at me. He poked it at the air, almost in accusation. “He claimed a bit of tartan, aye? Forbidden.”

“Aye?” I said, in baffled reflex. “I mean—did he?”

Christie shook his head slowly back and forth, looking like a large, intoxicated owl, eyes fixed now and glaring.

“Not his,” he said. “A young lad’s.”

He opened his mouth to speak further, but only a soft belch emerged from it, surprising him. He closed his mouth and blinked, then tried again.

“It was an act of extra … extraordinary … nobility and—and courage.” He looked at me, and shook his head slightly. “Im—incompre … hensible.”

“Incomprehensible? How he did it, you mean?” I knew how, all right; Jamie was so bloody-mindedly stubborn that he would see out any action he intended, no matter whether hell itself barred the way or what happened to him in the process. But surely Christie knew that about him.

“Not how.” Christie’s head lolled a little, and he pulled it upright with an effort. “Why?”

“Why?” I wanted to say, Because he’s an effing hero, that’s why; he can’t help it—but that wouldn’t really have been right. Besides, I didn’t know why Jamie had done it; he hadn’t told me, and I did wonder why not.

“He’d do anything to protect one of his men,” I said instead.

Christie’s gaze was rather glassy, but still intelligent; he looked at me for a long moment, unspeaking, thoughts passing slowly behind his eyes. A floorboard in the hall creaked, and I strained my ears for Jamie’s breathing. Yes, I could hear it, soft and regular; he was still asleep.

“Does he think that I am one of ‘his men’?” Christie asked at last. His voice was low, but full of both incredulity and outrage. “Because I am not, I ass—ashure you!”

I began to think that last glass of whisky had been a grave mistake.

“No,” I said with a sigh, repressing the urge to close my eyes and rub my forehead. “I’m sure he doesn’t. If you mean that”—I nodded at the little Bible—“I’m sure it was simple kindness. He’d do as much for any stranger—you would yourself, wouldn’t you?”

He breathed heavily for a bit, glaring, but then nodded once and lay back, as though exhausted—as well he might be. All the belligerence had gone out of him as suddenly as air from a balloon, and he looked somehow smaller, and rather forlorn.

“I am sorry,” he said softly. He lifted his bandaged hand a little, and let it fall.

I wasn’t sure whether he was apologizing for his remarks about Jamie, or for what he saw as his lack of bravery in the morning. I thought it wiser not to inquire, though, and stood up, smoothing down the linen night rail over my thighs.

I pulled the quilt up a bit and tugged it straight, then blew out the candle. He was no more than a dark shape against the pillows, his breathing slow and hoarse.

“You did very well,” I whispered, and patted his shoulder. “Good night, Mr. Christie.”



MY PERSONAL BARBARIAN was asleep, but woke, catlike, when I crawled into bed. He stretched out an arm and gathered me into himself with a sleepily interrogative “mmmm?”

I nestled against him, tight muscles beginning to relax automatically into his warmth.

“Mmmm.”

“Ah. And how’s our wee Tom, then?” He leaned back a little and his big hands came down on my trapezius, kneading the knots from my neck and shoulders.

“Oh. Oh. Obnoxious, prickly, censorious, and very drunk. Otherwise, fine. Oh, yes. More, please—up a bit, oh, yes. Oooh.”

“Aye, well, that sounds like Tom at his best—bar the drunkenness. If ye groan like that, Sassenach, he’ll think I’m rubbing something other than your neck.”

“I do not care,” I said, eyes closed, the better to appreciate the exquisite sensations vibrating through my spinal column. “I’ve had quite enough of Tom Christie for the moment. Besides, he’s likely passed out by now, with as much as he’s had to drink.”

Still, I tempered my vocal response, in the interests of my patient’s rest.

“Where did that Bible come from?” I asked, though the answer was obvious. Jenny must have sent it from Lallybroch; her last parcel had arrived a few days before, while I was visiting Salem.

Jamie answered the question I’d really asked, sighing so his breath stirred my hair.

“It gave me a queer turn to see it, when I came to it among the books my sister sent. I couldna quite decide what to do with it, aye?”

Little wonder if it had given him a turn.

“Why did she send it, did she say?” My shoulders were beginning to relax, the ache between them dulling. I felt him shrug behind me.

“She sent it with some other books; said she was turning out the attic and found a box of them, so decided to send them to me. But she did mention hearing that the village of Kildennie had decided to emigrate to North Carolina; they’re all MacGregors up near there, ken?”

“Oh, I see.” Jamie had once told me that his intention was one day to find the mother of Alex MacGregor, and give her his Bible, with the information that her son had been avenged. He had made inquiries after Culloden, but discovered that both of the MacGregor parents were dead. Only a sister remained alive, and she had married and left her home; no one knew quite where she was, or even whether she was still in Scotland.

“Do you think Jenny—or Ian, rather—found the sister at last? And she lived in that village?”

He shrugged again, and with a final squeeze of my shoulders, left off.

“It may be. Ye ken Jenny; she’d leave it to me whether to search for the woman.”

“And will you?” I rolled over to face him. Alex MacGregor had hanged himself, rather than live as prey to Black Jack Randall. Jack Randall was dead, had died at Culloden. But Jamie’s memories of Culloden were no more than fragments, driven from him by the trauma of the battle and the fever he had suffered afterward. He had waked, wounded, with Jack Randall’s body lying on top of him—but had no recollection of what had happened.

And yet, I supposed, Alex MacGregor had been avenged—whether or not by Jamie’s hand.

He thought about that for a moment, and I felt the small stirring as he tapped the two stiff fingers of his right hand against his thigh.

“I’ll ask,” he said finally. “Her name was Mairi.”

“I see,” I said. “Well, there can’t be more than, oh … three or four hundred women named Mairi in North Carolina.”

That made him laugh, and we drifted off to sleep, to the accompaniment of Tom Christie’s stertorous snores across the hall.



IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN minutes or hours later that I woke suddenly, listening. The room was dark, the fire cold on the hearth, and the shutters rattling faintly. I tensed a little, trying to wake enough to rise and go to my patient—but then heard him, a long wheezing inspiration, followed by a rumbling snore.

It wasn’t that that had wakened me, I realized. It was the sudden silence beside me. Jamie was lying stiff beside me, scarcely breathing.

I put out a hand slowly, so he would not be shocked at the touch, and rested it on his leg. He hadn’t had nightmares for some months, but I recognized the signs.

“What is it?” I whispered.

He drew breath a little deeper than usual, and his body seemed momentarily to draw in upon itself. I didn’t move, but left my hand on his leg, feeling the muscle flex microscopically beneath my fingers, a tiny intimation of flight.

He didn’t flee, though. He moved his shoulders in a brief, violent twitch, then let out his breath and settled into the mattress. He didn’t speak for a bit, but his weight drew me closer, like a moon pulled near to its planet. I lay quiet, my hand on him, my hip against his—flesh of his flesh.

He stared upward, into the shadows between the beams. I could see the line of his profile, and the shine of his eyes as he blinked now and then.

“In the dark …” he whispered at last, “there at Ardsmuir, we lay in the dark. Sometimes there was a moon, or starlight, but even then, ye couldna see anything on the floor where we lay. It was naught but black—but ye could hear.”

Hear the breathing of the forty men in the cell, and the shuffles and shifts of their movement. Snores, coughing, the sounds of restless sleep—and the small furtive sounds from those who lay awake.

“It would be weeks, and we wouldna think of it.” His voice was coming easier now. “We were always starved, cold. Worn to the bone. Ye dinna think much, then; only of how to put one foot in front of another, lift another stone… . Ye dinna really want to think, ken? And it’s easy enough not to. For a time.”

But every now and then, something would change. The fog of exhaustion would lift, suddenly, without warning.

“Sometimes ye kent what it was—a story someone told, maybe, or a letter that came from someone’s wife or sister. Sometimes it came out of nowhere; no one said a thing, but ye’d wake to it, in the night, like the smell of a woman lying next to ye.”

Memory, longing … need. They became men touched by fire—roused from dull acceptance by the sudden searing recollection of loss.

“Everyone would go a bit mad, for a time. There would be fights, all the time. And at night, in the dark …”

At night, you would hear the sounds of desperation, stifled sobs or stealthy rustlings. Some men would, in the end, reach out to another—sometimes to be rebuffed with shouts and blows. Sometimes not.

I wasn’t sure what he was trying to tell me, nor what it had to do with Thomas Christie. Or, perhaps, Lord John Grey.

“Did any of them ever … touch you?” I asked tentatively.

“No. None of them would ever think to touch me,” he said very softly. “I was their chief. They loved me—but they wouldna think, ever, to touch me.”

He took a deep, ragged breath.

“And did you want them to?” I whispered. I could feel my own pulse begin to throb in my fingertips, against his skin.

“I hungered for it,” he said so softly I could barely hear him, close as I was. “More than food. More than sleep—though I wished most desperately for sleep, and not only for the sake of tiredness. For when I slept, sometimes I saw ye.

“But it wasna the longing for a woman—though Christ knows, that was bad enough. It was only—I wanted the touch of a hand. Only that.”

His skin had ached with need, ’til he felt it must grow transparent, and the raw soreness of his heart be seen in his chest.

He made a small rueful sound, not quite a laugh.

“Ye ken those pictures of the Sacred Heart—the same as we saw in Paris?”

I knew them—Renaissance paintings, and the vividness of stained glass glowing in the aisles of Notre Dame. The Man of Sorrows, his heart exposed and pierced, radiant with love.

“I remembered that. And I thought to myself that whoever saw that vision of Our Lord was likely a verra lonely man himself, to have understood so well.”

I lifted my hand and laid it on the small hollow in the center of his chest, very lightly. The sheet was thrown back, and his skin was cool.

He closed his eyes, sighing, and clasped my hand, hard.

“The thought of that would come to me sometimes, and I would think I kent what Jesus must feel like there—so wanting, and no one to touch Him.”

25



ASHES TO ASHES

JAMIE CHECKED HIS SADDLEBAGS once more, though he had done it so often of late that the exercise was little more than custom. Each time he opened the left-hand one, he still smiled, though. Brianna had remade it for him, stitching in loops of leather that presented his pistols, hilt up, ready to be seized in an emergency, and a clever arrangement of compartments that held handy his shot pouch, powder horn, a spare knife, a coil of fishing line, a roll of twine for a snare, a hussif with pins, needles, and thread, a packet of food, a bottle of beer, and a neatly rolled clean shirt.

On the outside of the bag was a small pouch that held what Bree was pleased to call a “first-aid kit,” though he was unsure what it was meant to be in aid of. It contained several gauze packets of a bitter-smelling tea, a tin of salve, and several strips of her adhesive plaster, none of which seemed likely to be of use in any imaginable misadventure, but did no harm.

He removed a cake of soap she had added, along with a few more unnecessary fripperies, and carefully hid them under a bucket, lest she be offended.

Just in time, too; he heard her voice, exhorting wee Roger about the inclusion of sufficient clean stockings in his bags. By the time they came round the corner of the hay barn, he had everything securely buckled up.

“Ready, then, a charaid?”

“Oh, aye.” Roger nodded, and slung the saddlebags he was carrying on his shoulder off onto the ground. He turned to Bree, who was carrying Jemmy, and kissed her briefly.

“I go with you, Daddy!” Jem exclaimed hopefully.

“Not this time, sport.”

“Wanna see Indians!”

“Later, perhaps, when ye’re bigger.”

“I can talk Indian! Uncle Ian tellt me! Wanna go!”

“Not this time,” Bree told him firmly, but he wasn’t inclined to listen, and began struggling to get down. Jamie made a small rumble in his throat, and fixed him with a quelling eye.

“Ye’ve heard your parents,” he said. Jem glowered, and stuck out his lower lip like a shelf, but ceased his fuss.

“Someday ye must tell me how ye do that,” Roger said, eyeing his offspring.

Jamie laughed, and leaned down to Jemmy. “Kiss Grandda goodbye, eh?”

Disappointment generously abandoned, Jemmy reached up and seized him round the neck. He picked the little boy up out of Brianna’s arms, hugged him, and kissed him. Jem smelled of parritch, toast, and honey, a homely warm and heavy weight in his arms.

“Be good and mind your mother, aye? And when ye’re a wee bit bigger, ye’ll come, too. Come and say farewell to Clarence; ye can tell him the words Uncle Ian taught ye.” And God willing, they’d be words suitable for a three-year-old child. Ian had a most irresponsible sense of humor.

Or perhaps, he thought, grinning to himself, I’m only recalling some o’ the things I taught Jenny’s bairns—including Ian—to say in French.

He’d already saddled and bridled Roger’s horse, and Clarence the pack mule was fully loaded. Brianna was checking the girth and stirrup leathers while Roger slung his saddlebags—more to keep herself busy than because of any need. Her lower lip was caught in her teeth; she was being careful not to seem worried, but was fooling no one.

Jamie took Jem up to pat the mule’s nose, in order to give the lass and her man a moment’s privacy. Clarence was a good sort, and suffered Jem’s enthusiastic patting and mispronounced Cherokee phrases with long-suffering tolerance, but when Jem turned in his arms toward Gideon, Jamie leaned back sharply.

“Nay, lad, ye dinna want to touch yon wicked bugger. He’ll take your hand right off.”

Gideon twitched his ears and stamped once, impatient. The big stallion was dying to get under way and have another chance at killing him.

“Why do you keep that vicious thing?” Brianna asked, seeing Gideon’s long lip wrinkle back to show his yellow teeth in anticipation. She took Jemmy from him, stepping well away from Gideon.

“What, wee Gideon? Oh, we get on. Besides, he’s half my trade goods, lass.”

“Really?” She gave the big chestnut a suspicious glance. “Are you sure you won’t start a war, giving the Indians something like him?”

“Oh, I dinna mean to give him to them,” he assured her. “Not directly, at least.”

Gideon was a bad-tempered, thrawn-headed reester of a horse, with a mouth like iron and a will to match. However, these unsociable qualities seemed most appealing to the Indians, as did the stallion’s massive chest, long wind, and stoutly muscled frame. When Quiet Air, the sachem in one of the villages, had offered him three deerskins for the chance to breed his spotted mare to Gideon, Jamie had realized suddenly that he had something here.

“’Twas the greatest good fortune that I never found the time to castrate him,” he said, slapping Gideon familiarly on the withers and dodging by reflex as the stallion whipped his head round to snap. “He earns his keep, and more, standing at stud to the Indian ponies. It’s the only thing I’ve ever asked him to do that he’s not balked at.”

The lass was pink as a Christmas rose from the morning cold; she laughed at that, though, going an even deeper color.

“What’s castrate?” Jemmy inquired.

“Your mother will tell ye.” He grinned at her, ruffled Jemmy’s hair, and turned to Roger. “Ready, lad?”

Roger Mac nodded and stepped up into his stirrup, swinging aboard. He had a steady old bay gelding named Agrippa, who tended to grunt and wheeze, but was sound enough for all that, and good for a rider like Roger—competent enough, but with an abiding sense of inner reservation about horses.

Roger leaned down from the saddle for a last kiss from Brianna, and they were under way. Jamie’d taken a private—and thorough—leave of Claire earlier.

She was in the window of their bedroom, watching out to wave to them as they rode past, her hairbrush in her hand. Her hair was standing out in a great curly swash round her head, and the early-morning sun caught in it like flames in a thornbush. It gave him a sudden queer feeling to see her thus so disordered, half-naked in her shift. A sense of strong desire, despite what he’d done to her not an hour past. And something almost fear, as though he might never see her again.

Quite without thought, he glanced at his left hand, and saw the ghost of the scar at the base of his thumb, the “C” so faded that it was scarcely visible. He had not noticed it or thought of it in years, and felt suddenly as though there was not air enough to breathe.

He waved, though, and she threw him a mocking kiss, laughing. Christ, he’d marked her; he could see the dark patch of the love bite he’d left on her neck, and a hot flush of embarrassment rose in his face. He dug his heels into Gideon’s side, causing the stallion to give a squeal of displeasure and turn round to try to bite him in the leg.

With this distraction, they were safe away. He looked back only once, at the trailhead, to see her still there, framed by light. She lifted one hand, as though in benediction, and then the trees hid her from sight.



THE WEATHER WAS FAIR, though cold for as early in the autumn as it was; the horses’ breath steamed as they made their way down from the Ridge through the tiny settlement folk now called Cooperville, and along the Great Buffalo Trail to the north. He kept an eye on the sky; it was much too early for snow, but heavy rains were not uncommon. What clouds there were were mare’s tails, though; no cause for worry.

They didn’t speak much, each man alone with his thoughts. Roger Mac was easy company, for the most part. Jamie did miss Ian, though; he would have liked to talk over the situation as it stood now with Tsisqua. Ian understood the minds of Indians better than most white men, and while Jamie understood Bird’s gesture of sending the hermit’s bones well enough—it was meant as a proof of his continuing goodwill toward settlers, if the King should send them guns—he would have valued Ian’s opinion.

And while it was necessary that he introduce Roger Mac in the villages, for the sake of future relations … Well, he blushed at the thought of having to explain to the man about …

Damn Ian. The lad had simply gone in the night, a few days past, him and his dog. He’d done it before, and would doubtless be back as suddenly as he’d gone. Whatever darkness he’d brought back from the north would now and then become too much for him, and he would vanish into the wood, coming back silent and withdrawn, but somewhat more at peace with himself.

Jamie understood it well enough; solitude was in its own way a balm for loneliness. And whatever memory the lad was fleeing—or seeking—in the wood …

“Has he ever spoken to you about them?” Claire had asked him, troubled. “His wife? His child?”

He had not. Ian did not speak of anything about his time among the Mohawk, and the only token he had brought back from the north was an armlet, made of blue-and-white wampum shells. Jamie had caught a glimpse of it in Ian’s sporran once, but not enough to tell the pattern of it.

Blessed Michael defend you, lad, he thought silently toward Ian. And may the angels mend you.

With one thing and another, he had no real conversation with Roger Mac until they’d stopped for their noon meal. They ate the fresh stuff the women had sent, enjoying it. Enough for supper left; next day, it would be corn dodgers and anything that came across their path that could be easily caught and cooked. And one day more, and the Snowbird women would have them royally fed, as representatives of the King of England.

“Last time, it was ducks, stuffed wi’ yams and corn,” he told Roger. “It’s manners to eat as much as ye can, mind, no matter what’s served, and ye’re the guest.”

“Got it.” Roger smiled faintly, then looked down at the half-eaten sausage roll in his hand. “About that. Guests, I mean. There’s a wee problem, I think—with Hiram Crombie.”

“Hiram?” Jamie was surprised. “What’s to do wi’ Hiram?”

Roger’s mouth twitched, unsure whether to laugh or not.

“Well, it’s only—ye ken everybody’s calling the bones we buried Ephraim, aye? It’s all Bree’s fault, but there it is.”

Jamie nodded, curious.

“Well, so. Yesterday Hiram came along to me, and said he’d been studying upon the matter—praying and the like—and had come to the conclusion that if it were true that some of the Indians were his wife’s kin, then it stood to reason that some of them must be saved, as well.”

“Oh, aye?” Amusement began to kindle in his own breast.

“Yes. And so, he says, he feels called upon to bring these hapless savages the word of Christ. For how else are they to hear it?”

Jamie rubbed a knuckle over his upper lip, torn now between amusement and dismay at the thought of Hiram Crombie invading the Cherokee villages, psalmbook in hand.

“Mmphm. Well, but … do ye not believe—Presbyterians, I mean—that it’s all predestined? That some are saved, I mean, and some damned, and not a thing to be done about it? Which is why the Papists are all bound for hell in a handbasket?”

“Ah … well …” Roger hesitated, clearly not quite willing to put the matter so baldly himself. “Mmphm. There may be some difference of opinion among Presbyterians, I imagine. But yes, that’s more or less what Hiram and his cohorts think.”

“Aye. Well, then, if he thinks some o’ the Indians must be saved already, why must they be preached to?”

Roger rubbed a finger between his brows.

“Well, d’ye see, it’s the same reason Presbyterians pray and go to kirk and all. Even if they’re saved, they feel they want to praise God for it, and—and learn to do better, so as to live as God wishes them to. In gratitude for their salvation, see?”

“I rather think Hiram Crombie’s God might take a dim view of the Indian way of living,” Jamie said, with vivid memories of naked bodies in the dimness of ember glow, and the smell of furs.