“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.