“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 the 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.