“But we do not want to go, Uncle Roger,” Germain said, employing his most effective look of wide-eyed pleading. “We will stay here; we can live in the cave, and hunt for our food.”
“Aye, sir, and me and Jem, we’ll share our dinners wi’ them,” Aidan piped up in anxious support.
“I brought some of Mama’s matches, so they’ve got a fire to keep warm,” Jem chipped in eagerly, “and a loaf of bread, too!”
“So ye see, Uncle—” Germain spread his hands gracefully in demonstration, “we shall be no trouble to anyone!”
“Oh, nay trouble, is it?” Ian said, with no less sympathy. “Tell your mother that, aye?”
Germain put his hands behind him, clutching his bu**ocks protectively by reflex.
“And what were ye thinking, dragging your wee brother up here?” Roger said a little more severely. “He can barely walk yet! Two steps out of there”—he nodded at the cave—“and he’d be tumbling down the burn and his neck broken.”
“Oh, no, sir!” Germain said, shocked. He fumbled in his pocket and drew out a piece of string. “I should tie him up, when I was not there, so he shouldna wander or fall. But I couldna be leaving him; I promised Maman, when he was born, I said I would never leave him.”
Tears were beginning to trickle down Aidan’s thin cheeks. Henri-Christian, totally confused, began to howl in sympathy, which made Jem’s lower lip tremble, as well. He wriggled out of Roger’s grasp, ran to Germain, and clutched him passionately about the middle.
“Germain can’t go, Daddy, please don’t make him go!”
Roger rubbed his nose, exchanged brief looks with Ian, and sighed.
He sat down on a rock, and motioned to Ian, who was having a certain amount of difficulty in deciding which way up to hold Henri-Christian. Ian gave him the baby with a noticeable air of relief, and Henri-Christian, feeling the need of security, seized Roger’s nose with one hand and his hair with the other.
“Look, a bhailach,” he said, detaching Henri-Christian’s grasp with some difficulty. “Wee Henri-Christian needs his mother to feed him. He’s barely got teeth, for God’s sake—he canna be living up here in the wild, eating raw meat wi’ you savages.”
“He has too got teeth!” Aidan said stoutly, extending a bitten forefinger in proof. “Look!”
“He eats pap,” Germain said, but with some uncertainty to his tone. “We would mash up biscuits for him with milk.”
“Henri-Christian needs his mother,” Roger repeated firmly, “and your mother needs you. Ye dinna expect her to manage a wagon and two mules and your sisters, all the way to New Bern alone, do ye?”
“But Papa can help,” Germain protested. “The girls mind him, when they mind no one else!”
“Your papa’s gone already,” Ian informed him. “He’s ridden ahead, to find a place for ye all to live, once ye’ve got there. Your mother’s to follow on, wi’ all your things. Roger Mac’s right, a bhailach—your mother needs ye.”
Germain’s small face paled a little. He looked helplessly down at Jemmy, still clinging to him, then up the hill at Aidan, and gulped. The wind had come up, and blew his blond fringe back from his face, making him look very small and fragile.
“Well, then,” he said, and stopped, swallowing. Very gently, he put his arms round Jemmy’s shoulders and kissed the top of his round red head.
“I’ll come back, cousin,” he said. “And you will come and visit me by the sea. You’ll come, too,” he assured Aidan, looking up. Aidan sniffed, nodding, and made his way slowly down the slope.
Roger reached out a free hand and gently detached Jemmy. “Get on my back, mo chuisle,” he said. “It’s a steep slope; I’ll take ye down pick-a-back.”
Not waiting to be asked, Ian leaned down and picked up Aidan, who wrapped his legs round Ian’s middle, hiding his tear-streaked face in Ian’s buckskin shirt.
“D’ye want to ride, too?” Roger asked Germain, standing up carefully under the weight of his double burden. “Ian can carry ye, if ye like.”
Ian nodded and held out a hand, but Germain shook his head, blond hair flying.
“Non, Uncle Roger,” he said, almost too softly to hear. “I’ll walk.” And turning round, began to make his way gingerly down the precipitous slope.
69
A STAMPEDE OF BEAVERS
October 25, 1774
THEY HAD BEEN WALKING for an hour before Brianna began to realize that they weren’t after game. They’d cut the trail of a small herd of deer, with droppings so fresh that the pellets were still patchy with moisture, but Ian ignored the sign, pushing up the slope in single-minded determination.
Rollo had come with them, but after several fruitless attempts to draw his master’s attention to promising scents, abandoned them in disgust and bounded off through the flurrying leaves to do his own hunting.
The climb was too steep to permit conversation, even had Ian seemed inclined. With a mental shrug, she followed, but kept gun in hand and an eye on the brush, just in case.
They had left the Ridge at dawn; it was well past noon when they paused at last, on the bank of some small and nameless stream. A wild grapevine wrapped itself round the trunk of a persimmon that overhung the bank; animals had taken most of the grapes, but a few bunches still hung out over the water, out of reach for any but the most daring of squirrels—or a tall woman.
She shucked her moccasins and waded into the stream, gasping at the icy shock of the water on her calves. The grapes were ripe to bursting, so purple as to be nearly black, and sticky with juice. The squirrels hadn’t got to them, but the wasps had, and she kept a cautious eye on the dagger-bellied foragers as she twisted the tough stem of a particularly succulent bunch.
“So, do you want to tell me what we’re really looking for?” she asked, back turned to her cousin.
“No,” he said, a smile in his voice.
“Oh, a surprise, is it?” She popped the stem, and turned to toss the grapes to him.
He caught the bunch one-handed, and set them down on the bank beside the ragged knapsack in which he carried provisions.
“Something o’ the sort.”
“As long as we aren’t just out for a walk, then.” She twisted off another bunch, and sloshed ashore, to sit down beside him.
“No, not that.” He flipped two grapes into his mouth, crushed them, and spat the skins and pips with the ease of long custom. She nibbled hers more daintily, biting one in half and flicking the seeds out with a fingernail.
“You ought to eat the skins, Ian; they have vitamins.”
He raised one shoulder in skepticism, but said nothing. Both she and her mother had explained the concept of vitamins—numerous times—to little or no effect. Jamie and Ian had reluctantly been obliged to admit the existence of germs, because Claire could show them teeming seas of microorganisms in her microscope. Vitamins, however, were unfortunately invisible and thus could be safely ignored.
“Is it much farther, this surprise?” The grape skins were, in fact, very bitter. Her mouth puckered involuntarily as she bit into one. Ian, industriously eating and spitting, noticed and grinned at her.
“Aye, a bit farther.”
She cast an eye at the horizon; the sun was coming down the sky. If they were to turn back now, it would be dark before they reached home.
“How much farther?” She spit the mangled grape skin into her palm and flicked it away into the grass.
Ian glanced at the sun, too, and pursed his lips.
“Well . . . I should think we’ll reach it by midday tomorrow.”
“We’ll what? Ian!” He looked abashed, and ducked his head.
“I’m sorry, coz. I ken I should have told ye before—but I thought ye maybe wouldn’t come, if I said how far.”
A wasp lighted on the bunch of grapes in her hand, and she slapped it irritably away.
“You know I wouldn’t. Ian, what were you thinking? Roger will have a fit!”
Her cousin seemed to find the notion funny; his mouth turned up at the corner.
“A fit? Roger Mac? I shouldna think so.”
“Well, all right, he won’t throw a fit—but he’ll be worried. And Jemmy will miss me!”
“No, they’ll be all right,” Ian assured her. “I told Uncle Jamie we’d be gone three days, and he said he’d bring the wean up to the Big House. With your Mam and Lizzie and Mrs. Bug to fuss him, wee Jem won’t even notice you’re gone.”
This was likely true, but did nothing to assuage her annoyance.
“You told Da? And he just said fine, and both of you thought it was perfectly all right to—to—lug me off into the woods for three days, without telling me what was going on? You—you—”
“High-handed, insufferable, beastly Scots,” Ian said, in such a perfect imitation of her mother’s English accent that she burst out laughing, despite her annoyance.
“Yes,” she said, wiping spluttered grape juice off her chin. “Exactly!”
He was still smiling, but his expression had changed; he wasn’t teasing anymore.
“Brianna,” he said softly, with that Highland lilt that made of her name something strange and graceful. “It’s important, aye?”
He wasn’t smiling at all now. His eyes were fixed on hers, warm, but serious. His hazel eyes were the only feature of any beauty about Ian Murray’s face, but they held a gaze of such frank, sweet openness that you felt he had let you look inside his soul, just for an instant. She had had occasion before to wonder whether he was aware of this particular effect—but even if he was, it was difficult to resist.
“All right,” she said, and waved away a circling wasp, still cross but resigned. “All right. But you still should have told me. And you won’t tell me, even now?”
He shook his head, looking down at the grape he was thumbing loose from its stem.
“I can’t,” he said simply. He flipped the grape into his mouth and turned to open his bag—which, now that she noticed, bulged suspiciously. “D’ye want some bread, coz, or a bit of cheese?”
“No. Let’s go.” She stood up and brushed dead leaves from her breeches. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we’ll be back.”
THEY STOPPED AN HOUR before sunset, while enough light remained to gather wood. The bulging knapsack had proved to contain two blankets, as well as food and a jug of beer—welcome, after the day’s walking, which had been mostly uphill.
“Oh, this is a good batch,” she said approvingly, sniffing at the neck of the jug after a long, aromatic, hop-edged swallow. “Who made it?”
“Lizzie. She caught the knack of it from Frau Ute. Before the . . . er . . . mphm.” A delicate Scottish noise encompassed the painful circumstances surrounding the dissolution of Lizzie’s betrothal.
“Mmm. That was too bad, wasn’t it?” She lowered her lashes, watching him covertly to see whether he would say anything further about Lizzie. Lizzie and Ian had seemed fond of each other once—but first he had gone to the Iroquois, and then she had been engaged to Manfred McGillivray when he returned. Now that both of them were free once more . . .