Grandpère undoubtedly meant it, I reflected. Germain couldn’t manage a musket, being somewhat shorter than the gun itself—but a pistol would do. In my present state of mind, the fact that Germain was only six didn’t seem particularly important.
“Have you had breakfast, Fergus?” I pushed the pot toward him.
“Non. Merci.” He helped himself to cold biscuit, ham, and coffee, though I noticed that he ate without much appetite.
We all sat quietly, sipping coffee and listening to the birds. Carolina wrens had built a late nest under the eaves of the house and the parent birds swooped in and out, just above our heads. I could hear the high-pitched cheeping of the nestlings begging, and saw a scatter of twigs and a bit of empty eggshell on the floorboards of the porch. They were nearly ready to fledge; just in time, before the real cold weather came.
The sight of the brown-speckled eggshell reminded me of Monsieur le Oeuf. Yes, that’s what I would do, I decided, with a small sense of relief at having something firm in mind. I would go and see Marsali later. And perhaps Mrs. Bug, as well.
“Did you see Mrs. Bug this morning?” I asked, turning to Ian. His cabin—little more than a brush-roofed lean-to—lay just beyond the Bugs’; he would have passed them on his way to the house.
“Oh, aye,” he said, looking a little surprised. “She was sweeping out as I went by. Offered me breakfast, but I said I’d eat here. I kent Uncle Jamie had a ham, aye?” He grinned, lifting his fourth ham biscuit in illustration.
“So she’s all right? I thought she might be ill; she usually comes quite early.”
Ian nodded, and took an enormous bite of the biscuit.
“Aye, I expect she’s busy, minding the ciomach.”
My fragile sense of well-being cracked like the wrens’ eggs. A ciomach was a captive. In my soggy-minded euphoria, I had somehow managed to forget Lionel Brown’s existence.
Ian’s remark that Jamie meant to ask questions this morning dropped suddenly into context—as did Fergus’s presence. And the knife Ian had been sharpening.
“Where is Jamie?” I asked, rather faintly. “Have you seen him?”
“Oh, aye,” Ian said, looking surprised. He swallowed, and gestured toward the door with his chin. “He’s just out in the woodshed, makin’ new shingles. He says the roof’s sprung a leak.”
No sooner had he said this than the sound of hammering came from the roof, far above. Of course, I thought. First things first. But then, I supposed Lionel Brown wasn’t going anywhere, after all.
“Perhaps . . . I should go and see Mr. Brown,” I said, swallowing.
Ian and Fergus exchanged glances.
“No, Auntie, ye shouldn’t,” Ian said quite calmly, but with an air of authority I wasn’t accustomed to seeing in him.
“Whatever do you mean?” I stared at him, but he merely went on eating, though a trifle more slowly.
“Milord says you should not,” Fergus amplified, drizzling a spoonful of honey into his coffee.
“He says what?” I asked incredulously.
Neither of them would look at me, but they seemed to draw together, emanating a reluctant sort of stubborn resistance. Either one would do anything I asked, I knew—except defy Jamie. If Jamie thought I ought not to see Mr. Brown, I wasn’t going to do it with the assistance of either Ian or Fergus.
I dropped the spoon back into my bowl of porridge, uneaten lumps still adhering to it.
“Did he happen to mention why he thinks I ought not to visit Mr. Brown?” I asked calmly, under the circumstances.
Both men looked surprised, then exchanged another look, this one longer.
“No, milady,” Fergus said, his voice carefully neutral.
There was a brief silence, during which both of them seemed to be considering. Then Fergus glanced at Ian, deferring to him with a shrug.
“Well, d’ye see, Auntie,” Ian said carefully, “we do mean to question the fellow.”
“And we will have answers,” Fergus said, eyes on the spoon with which he was stirring his coffee.
“And when Uncle Jamie is satisfied that he has told us what he can . . .”
Ian had laid his newly sharpened knife on the table beside his plate. He picked it up, and thoughtfully drew it down the length of a cold sausage, which promptly split open, with an aromatic burst of sage and garlic. He looked up then, and met my eyes directly. And I realized that while I might still be me—Ian was no longer the boy he used to be. Not at all.
“You’ll kill him, then?” I said, my lips feeling numb in spite of the hot coffee.
“Oh, yes,” Fergus said very softly. “I expect that we shall.” He met my eyes now, too. There was a bleak, grim look about him, and his deep-set eyes were hard as stone.
“He—it—I mean . . . it wasn’t him,” I said. “It couldn’t have been. He’d already broken his leg when—” I didn’t seem to have enough air to finish my sentences. “And Marsali. It wasn’t—I don’t think he . . .”
Something behind Ian’s eyes changed, as he grasped my meaning. His lips pressed tight for a moment, and he nodded.
“As well for him, then,” he said shortly.
“As well,” Fergus echoed, “but I think it will not matter in the end. We killed the others—why should he live?” He pushed back from the table, leaving his coffee undrunk. “I think I will go, cousin.”
“Aye? I’ll come too, then.” Ian shoved his plate away, nodding to me. “Will ye tell Uncle Jamie we’ve gone ahead, Auntie?”
I nodded numbly, and watched them go, vanishing one after the other under the big chestnut tree that overhung the trail leading to the Bugs’ cabin. Mechanically, I got up and began slowly to clear away the remains of the makeshift breakfast.
I really wasn’t sure whether I minded a lot about Mr. Brown or not. On the one hand, I did disapprove on principle of torture and cold-blooded murder. On the other . . . while it was true enough that Brown had not personally violated or injured me, and he had tried to make Hodgepile release me—he’d been all in favor of killing me, later. And I hadn’t the slightest doubt that he would have drowned me in the gorge, had Tebbe not intervened.
No, I thought, carefully rinsing my cup and drying it on my apron, perhaps I didn’t really mind terribly about Mr. Brown.
Still, I felt uneasy and upset. What I did mind about, I realized, were Ian and Fergus. And Jamie. The fact was, killing someone in the heat of battle is a quite different thing from executing a man, and I knew that. Did they?
Well, Jamie did.
“And may your vow redeem me.” He had whispered that to me, the night before. It was just about the last thing I recalled him saying, in fact. Well, all right; but I would greatly prefer that he didn’t feel in need of redemption to start with. And as for Ian and Fergus . . .
Fergus had fought in the Battle of Prestonpans, at the age of ten. I still remembered the face of the small French orphan, soot-smeared and dazed with shock and exhaustion, looking down at me from his perch atop a captured cannon. “I killed an English soldier, madame,” he’d said to me. “He fell down and I stuck him with my knife.”
And Ian, a fifteen-year-old, weeping in remorse because he thought he had accidentally killed an intruder to Jamie’s Edinburgh print shop. God knew what he had done, since; he wasn’t talking. I had a sudden vision of Fergus’s hook, dark with blood, and Ian, silhouetted in the dark. “And I,” he’d said, echoing Jamie. “It is myself who kills for her.”
It was 1773. And on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five . . . the shot heard round the world was already being loaded. The room was warm, but I shuddered convulsively. What in the name of God did I think I could shield them from? Any of them.
A sudden roar from the roof above startled me out of my thoughts.
I walked out into the dooryard and looked up, shading my eyes against the morning sun. Jamie was sitting astride the rooftree, rocking to and fro over one hand, which he held curled into his belly.
“What’s going on up there?” I called.
“I’ve got a splinter,” came the terse answer, obviously spoken through clenched teeth.
I wanted to laugh, if only as small escape from tension, but didn’t.
“Well, come down, then. I’ll pull it out.”
“I’m no finished!”
“I don’t care!” I said, suddenly impatient with him. “Come down this minute. I want to talk to you.”
A bag of nails hit the grass with a sudden clank, followed instantly by the hammer.
First things first, then.
TECHNICALLY, I SUPPOSED, it was a splinter. It was a two-inch sliver of cedarwood, and he’d driven it completely under the nail of his middle finger, nearly to the first joint.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!”
“Aye,” he agreed, looking a little pale. “Ye might say that.”
The protruding stub was too short to grip with my fingers. I hauled him into the surgery and jerked the sliver out with forceps, before one could say Jack Robinson. Jamie was saying a good deal more than Jack Robinson—mostly in French, which is an excellent language for swearing.
“You’re going to lose that nail,” I observed, submerging the offended digit in a small bowl of alcohol and water. Blood bloomed from it like ink from a squid.
“To hell wi’ the nail,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Cut the whole bloody finger off and ha’ done with it! Merde d’chevre!”
“The Chinese used to—well, no, I suppose they still do, come to think of it—shove splinters of bamboo under people’s fingernails to make them talk.”
“Christ! Tu me casses les couilles!”
“Obviously a very effective technique,” I said, lifting his hand out of the bowl and wrapping the finger tightly in a strip of linen. “Were you trying it out, before using it on Lionel Brown?” I tried to speak lightly, keeping my eyes on his hand. I felt his own gaze fix on me, and he snorted.
“What in the name of saints and archangels was wee Ian telling ye, Sassenach?”
“That you meant to question the man—and get answers.”
“I do, and I shall,” he said shortly. “So?”
“Fergus and Ian seemed to think that—you might be moved to use any means necessary,” I said with some delicacy. “They’re more than willing to help.”
“I imagine they are.” The first agony had abated somewhat. He breathed more deeply, and color was beginning to come back into his face. “Fergus has a right. It was his wife attacked.”
“Ian seemed . . .” I hesitated, searching for the right word. Ian had seemed so calm as to be terrifying. “You didn’t call Roger to help with the—the questioning?”
“No. Not yet.” One corner of his mouth tucked in. “Roger Mac’s a good fighter, but no the sort to scare a man, save he’s truly roused. He’s no deceit in him at all.”
“Whereas you, Ian, and Fergus . . .”