Nor could he leave Jem unprotected.

He must tell Duncan, though; Duncan could be trusted to take steps for the protection of River Run, to send word to the authorities in Cross Creek, to make inquiries.

And Roger would make sure that Jem was safe away, too, come morning, held before him on his saddle, kept in his sight every inch of the way to the sanctuary of the mountains.

“Who’s your daddy?” he muttered, and a fresh surge of rage pulsed through his veins. “God damn it, I am, you bastard!”

PART THREE

 To Every Thing

There Is a Season

16



LE MOT JUSTE

August 1773

YE’RE SMILING TO yourself,” Jamie said in my ear. “Nice, was it?”

I turned my head and opened my eyes, finding them on a level with his mouth—which was smiling, too.

“Nice,” I said thoughtfully, tracing the line of his wide lower lip with the tip of one finger. “Are you being deliberately modest, or are you hoping to inspire me to raptures of praise by means of classic understatement?”

The mouth widened further, and his teeth closed gently on my questing finger for a moment before releasing it.

“Oh, modesty, to be sure,” he said. “If I’d hopes of inspiring ye to raptures, it wouldna be with my words, now, would it?”

One hand ran lightly down my back in illustration.

“Well, the words help,” I said.

“They do?”

“Yes. Just now, I was actually trying to rank ‘I love you, I like you, I worship you, I have to have my cock inside you,’ in terms of their relative sincerity.”

“Did I say that?” he said, sounding slightly startled.

“Yes. Weren’t you listening?”

“No,” he admitted. “I meant every word of it, though.” His hand cupped one buttock, weighing it appreciatively. “Still do, come to that.”

“What, even the last one?” I laughed and rubbed my forehead gently against his chest, feeling his jaw rest snugly on top of my head.

“Oh, aye,” he said, gathering me firmly against him with a sigh. “I will say the flesh requires a bit of supper and a wee rest before I think of doin’ it again, but the spirit is always willing. God, ye have the sweetest fat wee bum. Only seeing it makes me want to give it ye again directly. It’s lucky ye’re wed to a decrepit auld man, Sassenach, or ye’d be on your knees with your arse in the air this minute.”

He smelled delectably of road dust and dried sweat and the deep musk of a man who has just enjoyed himself thoroughly.

“Nice to be missed,” I said contentedly into the small space beneath his arm. “I missed you, too.”

My breath tickled him and his skin shivered suddenly, like a horse shedding flies. He shifted a bit, turning me so that my head fit into the hollow of his shoulder, and sighed in matching content.

“Well, so. I see the place is still standing.”

It was. It was late afternoon, the windows open, and the sun came low through the trees to make shifting patterns on the walls and linen sheets, so that we floated in a bower of murmuring shadow leaves.

“The house is standing, the barley is mostly in, and nothing’s died,” I said, settling myself comfortably to report. Now that we’d taken care of the most important thing, he’d want to know how the Ridge had fared in his absence.

“Mostly?” he said, neatly catching the dicey bit. “What happened? It rained, aye, but the barley should all have been in a week before.”

“Not rain. Grasshoppers.” I shuddered in memory. A cloud of the nasty goggle-eyed things had come whirring through, just at the end of the barley harvest. I’d gone up to my garden to pick greens, only to discover said greens seething with wedge-shaped bodies and shuffling, clawed feet, my lettuces and cabbages gnawed to ragged nubbins and the morning-glory vine on the palisade hanging in shreds.

“I ran and got Mrs. Bug and Lizzie, and we drove them off with brooms—but then they all rose up in a big cloud and headed up through the wood to the field beyond the Green Spring. They settled in the barley; you could hear the chewing for miles. It sounded like giants walking through rice.” Goosebumps of revulsion rose on my shoulders, and Jamie rubbed my skin absently, his hand large and warm.

“Mmphm. Was it only the one field they got, then?”

“Oh, yes.” I took a deep breath, still smelling the smoke. “We torched the field, and burnt them alive.”

His body jerked in surprise, and he looked down at me.

“What? Who thought of that?”

“I did,” I said, not without pride. In cold-blooded retrospect, it was a sensible thing to have done; there were other fields at risk, not only of barley, but of ripening corn, wheat, potatoes, and hay—to say nothing of the garden patches most families depended on.

In actual fact, it had been a decision made in boiling rage—sheer, bloody-minded revenge for the destruction of my garden. I would happily have ripped the wings off each insect and stamped on the remains—burning them had been nearly as good, though.

It was Murdo Lindsay’s field; slow in both thought and action, Murdo hadn’t had time to react properly to my announcement that I meant to fire the barley, and was still standing on the stoop of his cabin, mouth hanging open, as Brianna, Lizzie, Marsali, Mrs. Bug, and I ran round the field with armsful of faggots, lighting them from torches and hurling the blazing sticks as far as we could out into the sea of ripe, dry grain.

The dry grass went up with a crackle, and then a roar, as the fire took hold. Confused by the heat and smoke of a dozen fires, the grasshoppers flew up like sparks, igniting as their wings caught fire and vanishing into the rising column of smoke and whirling ash.

“Of course, it would be just then that Roger chose to arrive with the new tenants,” I said, repressing an urge to laugh inappropriately at the memory. “Poor things. It was getting dark, and here they all were, standing in the woods with their bundles and children, watching this—this bally conflagration going on, and all of us dancing round barefoot with our shifts kirtled up, hooting like gibbons and covered with soot.”

Jamie covered his eyes with one hand, plainly visualizing the scene. His chest shook briefly, and a wide grin spread beneath the hand.

“Oh, God. They must ha’ thought Roger Mac had brought them to hell. Or to a coven meeting, at least.”

A bubble of guilty laughter was forcing itself up from under my ribs.

“They did. Oh, Jamie—the looks on their faces!” I lost my grip and buried my own face in his chest. We shook together for a moment, laughing almost soundlessly.

“I did try to make them welcome,” I said, snorting a little. “We gave them supper, and found them all places to sleep—as many as we could fit in the house, the rest spread between Brianna’s cabin, the stable, and the barn. I came down quite late at night, though—I couldn’t sleep, for all the excitement—and found a dozen of them praying in the kitchen.”

They had been standing in a circle near the hearth, hands linked and heads bowed reverently. All the heads had snapped up at my appearance, eyes showing white in thin, haggard faces. They’d stared at me in total silence, and one of the women had let go the hand of the man beside her to hide her own hand under her apron. In another time and place, I should have thought she was reaching for some weapon—and perhaps she was, at that; I was fairly sure she was making the sign of the horns beneath the shelter of the ragged cloth.

I’d already discovered that only a few of them spoke English. I asked in my halting Gaelic whether they needed anything? They stared at me as though I had two heads, then after a moment, one of the men, a wizened creature with a thin mouth, had shaken his head the barest inch.

“Then they went right back to their praying, leaving me to skulk off back to bed.”