She was still hesitant, watching the house. Every muscle was straining, pulling toward it. Home. But it wasn’t her home, not now. Roger. “The strong, sweet, supple quality he has . . .”
Of course, she knew that he likely wasn’t here; he and Buck would be searching somewhere for Jerry MacKenzie. And what if they found him? she thought, with a little thump of something between excitement and fear.
The fear was what was stopping her racing down the hill to hammer on the door and meet whatever of her family happened to be home today. She’d spent the last few days on the road, and the hours on the final walk from where the carter had dropped them, trying to decide—and her mind was still as divided as ever.
“Come on,” she said to the kids. She couldn’t keep them standing out here in the cold while she made up her mind. “Let’s visit the goats first.”
The smell of goats struck her the moment she opened the door—pungent, warm, and familiar. Warm, above all; all three humans sighed in relief and pleasure as the animal heat rolled over them, and they smiled at the eager rush and outcry of mehhs that greeted their presence.
From the noise that echoed off the stone walls, there might have been fifty goats inside the broch—though Brianna counted only half a dozen nannies, flop-eared and dainty, four or five half-grown, round-bellied kids, and a single robust billy goat who lowered his horns and glowered at them, suspicious and yellow-eyed. All of them shared a rough pen that fenced off half the ground floor of the broch. She glanced up—but instead of the exposed rafters high above that she half-expected to see, there was the intact underside of another floor above.
The kids—her kids, that is, and she smiled at the thought—were already sticking wisps of hay through the fence and playing with the young goats, who were standing on their back legs to peer at the visitors.
“Jemmy, Mandy!” she called. “Take off your hats and mufflers and mittens and put them over by the door, so the goats don’t chew on them!” She left Jem to distentangle Mandy from her fuzzy muffler and went up the stair to see what was on the second floor.
Pale winter light from the windows striped the haunches of burlap bags that filled most of the floor space. She breathed in and coughed a little; flour dust was floating in the air, but she smelled the sweetness of dried corn—maize, they called it—and the deeper, nutty smell of ripe barley, as well, and when she nudged her foot against a particularly lumpy sack, she heard the shift and clack of hazelnuts. Lallybroch wouldn’t starve this winter.
Curious, she went up one more flight and on the top floor found a good number of small wooden casks arrayed against the wall. It was much colder up here, but the heady aroma of good whisky filled the air with the illusion of warmth. She stood breathing it in for a moment, wanting very badly to be drunk on the fumes, to obliviate her mind, be able not to bloody think, if only for a few minutes.
But that was the last thing she could do. In minutes, she’d have to act.
She stepped back onto the narrow stair that wound up between the inner and outer walls of the broch and looked out toward the house, with vivid memories of the last time she had been here, crouched on the stair in the dark with a shotgun in her hands, watching the light of strangers in her house.
There were strangers here now, too, although her own blood. What if . . . She swallowed. If Roger had found Jerry MacKenzie, his father would be only in his early twenties—much younger than Roger himself. And if her own da was here now—
“He can’t be,” she whispered to herself, and wasn’t sure if that was reassurance or regret. She’d met him for the first time in North Carolina, pissing against a tree. He’d been in his forties, she twenty-two.
You couldn’t enter your own lifeline, couldn’t exist in the same time twice. They thought they knew that for sure. But what if you entered someone else’s life twice, at different times?
That was what was turning her blood to ice and making her curled fists tremble. What happened? Did one or the other of your appearances change things, perhaps cancel out the other? Would it not happen that way, would she not meet Jamie Fraser in North Carolina if she met him now?
But she had to find Roger. No matter what else happened. And Lallybroch was the only place she knew for sure he’d been. She took a deep, deep breath and closed her eyes.
Please, she prayed. Please help me. Thy will be done, but please show me what to do . . .
“Mam!” Jemmy came running up the stair, his footsteps loud in the confined stone corridor. “Mam!” He popped into sight, blue eyes round and hair standing half on end with excitement. “Mam, come down! A man’s coming!”
“What does he look like?” she asked, urgent, grabbing him by the sleeve. “What color is his hair?”
He blinked, surprised.
“Black, I think. He’s at the bottom of the hill—I couldn’t see his face.”
Roger.
“All right. I’m coming.” She felt half choked but no longer frozen. It was happening now, whatever it was, and energy fizzed through her veins.
Even as she hurtled down the stairs behind Jemmy, rationality told her that it wasn’t Roger—distance or not, Jemmy would know his father. But she had to see.
“Stay here,” she said to the children, with so much command in her voice that they blinked but didn’t argue. She threw open the door, saw the man coming up the path, and stepped out to meet him, closing the door firmly behind her.
From the first glance, she saw that it wasn’t Roger, but the disappointment was subsumed at once in relief that it wasn’t Jamie. And intense curiosity, because it must surely be . . .