No, damn it. He couldn’t, not yet. He had to check.
He didn’t have to check; he knew he was right. But he had to have it in his hands, had to be able to show Bree.
Turning abruptly on his heel, he strode past a puzzled car-park attendant coming up behind him, took the stairs two at a time, and walked up Huntly Street as though he trod on red-hot coals. He stopped briefly at the Fox, digging in his pocket for coins, and rang through from the call box to Lallybroch. Annie answered the phone with her customary rudeness, saying “Yiss?” with such abruptness that it emerged as little more than an interrogatory hiss.
He didn’t bother rebuking her phone manners.
“It’s Roger. Tell the Missus I’m going down to Oxford to look something up. I’ll spend the night.”
“Mmphm,” she said, and hung up.
SHE WANTED TO HIT Roger over the head with a blunt object. Something like a champagne bottle, maybe.
“He went where?” she asked, though she’d heard Annie MacDonald clearly. Annie lifted both narrow shoulders to the level of her ears, indicating that she understood the rhetorical nature of the question.
“To Oxford,” she said. “To England.” The tone of her voice underlined the sheer outrageousness of Roger’s action. He hadn’t simply gone to look up something in an old book—which would have been strange enough, though to be sure himself was a scholar and they’d do anything—but had abandoned his wife and children without notice and hied away to a foreign country!
“Himself did say as he’d come home tomorrow,” Annie added, with great dubiousness. She picked up the bottle of champagne in its carrier bag, gingerly, as though it might explode. “Ought I put this to the ice, d’ye think?”
“To the—oh, no, don’t put it in the freezer. Just in the fridge. Thank you, Annie.”
Annie disappeared into the kitchen, and Brianna stood in the drafty hall for a moment, trying to get her feelings firmly under control before going to find Jem and Mandy. Kids being kids, they had ultra-sensitive radar concerning their parents. They already knew something was the matter between her and Roger; having their father suddenly disappear was not calculated to give them a feeling of cozy security. Had he even said goodbye to them? Assured them he’d be back? No, of course not.
“Bloody selfish, self-centered …” she muttered. Unable to find a satisfying noun with which to complete this, she said, “rat-fink bastard!” and then snorted with reluctant laughter. Not merely at the silliness of the insult, but with a wry acknowledgment that she’d got what she wanted. Both ways.
Granted, he couldn’t have stopped her going for the job—and once he got past the dislocations involved, she thought he’d be all right with it.
“Men hate things to change,” her mother had once casually told her. “Unless it’s their idea, of course. But you can make them think it is their idea, sometimes.”
Maybe she should have been less direct about it; tried to get Roger to feel that at least he had something to say about her going to work, even if not to think it was his idea—that would have been pushing it. She’d been in no mood to be devious, though. Or even diplomatic.
As for what she’d done to him … well, she’d put up with his immobility for as long as she could, and then she’d pushed him off a cliff. Deliberately.
“And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it!” she said to the coatrack.
She hung up her coat slowly, taking a little extra time to check the pockets for used tissues and crumpled receipts.
So, had he gone off out of pique—to get back at her for going back to work? Or out of anger at her having called him a coward? He hadn’t liked that one bit; his eyes had gone dark and he’d nearly lost his voice—strong emotion choked him, quite literally, freezing his larynx. She’d done it on purpose, though. She knew where Roger’s soft spots were—just as he knew hers.
Her lips tightened at that, just as her fingers closed on something hard in the inner pocket of her jacket. A weathered shell, turreted and smooth, worn white by sun and water. Roger had picked it up on the shingle by Loch Ness and handed it to her.
“To live in,” he’d said, smiling, but given away by the gruffness of his damaged voice. “When ye need a hiding place.”
She closed her fingers gently over the shell, and sighed.
Roger wasn’t petty. Ever. He wouldn’t go off to Oxford—a reluctant bubble of amusement floated up at the thought of Annie’s shocked description: to England!—just to worry her.
So he’d gone for some specific reason, doubtless something jarred loose by their fight—and that worried her a bit.
He’d been wrestling with things since they came back. So had she, of course: Mandy’s illness, decisions about where to live, all the petty details of relocating a family in both space and time—they’d done all that together. But there were things he wrestled with alone.
She’d grown up an only child, just as he had; she knew how it was, how you live in your own head a lot. But damn him, whatever he was living with in his head was eating him up before her eyes, and if he wouldn’t tell her what it was, it was either something he considered too private to share—which bugged her, but she could live with it—or it was something he thought too disturbing or too dangerous to share, and she wasn’t bloody having that.
Her fingers had clenched round the shell, and she deliberately loosened them, trying to calm down.
She could hear the kids upstairs, in Jem’s room. He was reading something to Mandy—The Gingerbread Man, she thought. She couldn’t hear the words, but could tell by the rhythm, counterpointed by Mandy’s excited shouts of “Wun! Wun!”
No point in interrupting them. Time enough later to tell them Daddy’d be away overnight. Maybe they wouldn’t be bothered, if she was matter-of-fact about it; he’d never left them since they’d come back, but when they lived on the Ridge, he was often gone with Jamie or Ian, hunting. Mandy wouldn’t remember that, but Jem …
She’d meant to go into her study, but found herself drifting across the hall, through the open door to Roger’s. It was the old speak-a-word room of the house; the room where her uncle Ian had run the affairs of the estate for years—her father for a short time before that, and her grandfather before him.
And now it was Roger’s. He’d asked if she wanted the room, but she’d said no. She liked the little sitting room across the hall, with its sunny window and the shadows of the ancient yellow rose that flagged that side of the house with its color and scent. Aside from that, though, she just felt that this room was a man’s place, with its clean, scuffed wooden floor and comfortably battered shelves.
Roger had managed to find one of the old farm ledgers, from 1776; it sat on an upper shelf, its worn cloth binding sheltering the patient, careful minutiae of life on a Highland farm: one-quarter pound of silver fir seed, a he-goat for breeding, six rabbits, thirty-weight of seed potatoes … had her uncle written it? She didn’t know, had never seen a sample of his writing.
She wondered, with an odd little quiver of the insides, if her parents had made it back to Scotland—back here. Had seen Ian and Jenny again; if her father had sat—would sit?—here in this room, at home once more, talking over the matters of Lallybroch with Ian. And her mother? From the little Claire had said about it, she hadn’t parted from Jenny on the best of terms, and Brianna knew her mother felt sad about that; once, they had been close friends. Maybe things could be mended—maybe they had been mended.
She glanced at the wooden box, safe on its high shelf beside the ledger, the little cherrywood snake curved in front of it. On impulse, she took the snake down, finding some comfort in the sleek curve of the body and the comical look of its face, peering back over its nonexistent shoulder. She smiled back at it, involuntarily.
“Thanks, Uncle Willie,” she said softly, out loud, and felt an extraordinary shiver run through her. Not fear, or cold—a kind of delight, but a quiet kind. Recognition.
She’d seen that snake so often—on the Ridge, and now here, where it had first been made—that she never thought of its maker, her father’s older brother, dead at the age of eleven. But he was here, too, in the work of his hands, in the rooms that had known him. When she’d visited Lallybroch before—in the eighteenth century—there had been a painting of him on the upstairs landing, a small, sturdy red-haired boy, standing with a hand on the shoulder of his baby brother, blue-eyed and serious.
Where is that now? she wondered. And the other paintings done by her grandmother? There was the one self-portrait, which had made it somehow to the National Portrait Gallery—she must be sure to take the kids down to London to see it, when they were a little older—but the others? There had been one of a very young Jenny Murray feeding a tame pheasant who had her uncle Ian’s soft brown eyes, and she smiled at the memory.
It had been the right thing. Coming here, bringing the kids … home. It didn’t matter if it took a little doing for her and Roger to find their places. Though maybe she shouldn’t speak for Roger, she thought with a grimace.
She looked up at the box again. She wished her parents were here—either of them—so she could tell them about Roger, ask their opinion. Not that she wanted advice, so much…. What she wanted, if she was honest, she thought, was a reassurance that she’d done the right thing.
With a heightened flush in her cheeks, she reached up with both hands and brought down the box, feeling guilty for not waiting to share the next letter with Roger. But … she wanted her mother just now. She took the first letter on top that bore her mother’s writing on the outside.
Offices of L’Oignon, New Bern, North Carolina April 12, 1777
Dear Bree (and Roger and Jem and Mandy, of course),
We’ve made it to New Bern, without major incident. Yes, I hear you thinking, Major? And it is true that we were held up by a pair of would-be bandits on the road south of Boone. Given that they were probably nine and eleven respectively, and armed solely with an ancient wheel-lock musket that would have blown them both to bits had they been able to fire it, though, we weren’t in any marked danger.
Rollo leapt out of the wagon and knocked one of them flat, whereupon his brother dropped the gun and legged it. Your cousin Ian ran him down, though, hauling him back by the scruff of the neck.
It took your father some time to get anything sensible out of them, but a little food worked wonders. They said their names are Herman and—no, really—Vermin. Their parents died during the winter—their father went hunting and didn’t come back, the mother died giving birth, and the baby died a day later, as the two boys had no way to feed it. They know of no people on their father’s side, but they said their mother’s family name was Kuykendall. Luckily, your father knows a Kuykendall family, near Bailey Camp, and so Ian took the little vagabonds off to find the Kuykendalls and see if they could be settled. If not, I suppose he’ll bring them along to New Bern, and we’ll try to apprentice them somewhere, or perhaps take them with us to Wilmington and find them a berth as cabin boys.