“It’s me, Miss Bree,” said Lizzie’s voice through the wood. “Can we come in, please?” She sounded excited, but not alarmed. Brianna waited to be sure that Roger was decently covered, then lifted the heavy bolt.
Her first thought was that Lizzie looked excited, too; the little bondmaid’s cheeks were flushed as apples, the color visible even in the darkness of the stoop.
“We” was herself and the two Beardsleys, who bowed and nodded, murmuring apologies for the lateness of the hour.
“Not at all,” Brianna said automatically, glancing around for a shawl. Not only was her linen shift thin and ratty, it had an incriminating stain on the front. “Er, come in!”
Roger came forward to greet the unexpected guests, magnificently disregarding the fact that he was wearing nothing but a shirt, and she scuttled hastily into the dark corner behind her loom, groping for the ancient shawl she kept there as comfort for her legs while working.
Safely wrapped in this, she kicked a log to break the fire, and stooped to light a candle from the fiery coals. In the wavering glow of the candlelight, she could see that the Beardsleys were dressed with unaccustomed neatness, their hair combed and firmly plaited, each with a clean shirt and a leather vest; they didn’t own coats. Lizzie was dressed in her best, too—in fact, she was wearing the pale peach woolen dress they had made for her wedding.
Something was up, and it was fairly obvious what, as Lizzie buzzed earnestly into Roger’s ear.
“Ye want me to marry you?” Roger said, in tones of astonishment. He glanced from one twin to the other. “Er . . . to whom?”
“Aye, sir.” Lizzie bobbed a respectful curtsey. “It’s me and Jo, sir, if ye’d be sae kind. Kezzie’s come to be witness.”
Roger rubbed a hand over his face, looking baffled.
“Well . . . but . . .” He gave Brianna a pleading look.
“Are you in trouble, Lizzie?” Brianna asked directly, lighting a second candle and putting it in the sconce by the door. With more light, she could see that Lizzie’s eyelids were reddened and swollen, as though she had been crying—though her attitude was one of excited determination, rather than fear.
“Not to say trouble, exactly. But I—I’m wi’ child, aye.” Lizzie crossed her hands on her belly, protective. “We—we wanted to be marrit, before I tell anyone.”
“Oh. Well . . .” Roger gave Jo a disapproving look, but appeared no more than half-convinced. “But your father—won’t he—”
“Da would want us to be marrit by a priest,” Lizzie explained earnestly. “And so we will be. But ye ken, sir, it’ll be months—maybe years—before we can find one.” She cast down her eyes, blushing. “I—I should like to be marrit, with proper words, ken, before the babe comes.”
“Yes,” he said, eyes drawn ineluctably to Lizzie’s midsection. “I grasp that. But I dinna quite understand the rush, if ye take my meaning. I mean, ye won’t be noticeably more pregnant tomorrow than ye are tonight. Or next week.”
Jo and Kezzie exchanged glances over Lizzie’s head. Then Jo put his hand on Lizzie’s waist and drew her gently to him.
“Sir. It’s only—we want to do right by each other. But we’d like it to be private, see? Just me and Lizzie, and my brother.”
“Just us,” Kezzie echoed, drawing close. He looked earnestly at Roger. “Please, sir?” He seemed to have injured his hand somehow; there was a handkerchief wound round it.
Brianna found the three of them touching almost beyond bearing; they were so innocent, and so young, the three scrubbed faces turned earnestly up to Roger in supplication. She moved closer and touched Roger’s arm, warm through the cloth of his sleeve.
“Do it for them,” she said softly. “Please? It’s not a marriage, exactly—but you can make them handfast”
“Aye, well, but they ought to be counseled . . . her father . . .” His protests trailed off as he glanced from her toward the trio, and she could see that he was as much touched by their innocence as she was. And, she thought, privately amused, he was also very much drawn by the thought of performing his first wedding, unorthodox as it might be. The circumstances would be romantic and memorable, here in the quiet of the night, vows exchanged by the light of fire and candle, with the memory of their own lovemaking warm in the shadows and the sleeping child a silent witness, both blessing and promise for the new marriage to be made.
Roger sighed deeply, then smiled at her in resignation, and turned away.
“Aye, all right, then. Let me put my breeches on, though; I’m not conducting my first wedding bare-arsed.”
ROGER HELD A SPOON of marmalade over his slice of toast, staring at me.
“They what?” he said, in a strangled tone.
“Oh, she didn’t!” Bree clapped a hand to her mouth, eyes wide above it, removing it at once to ask, “Both of them?”
“Evidently so,” I said, suppressing a most disgraceful urge to laugh. “You really married her to Jo last night?”
“God help me, I did,” Roger muttered. Looking thoroughly rattled, he put the spoon in his coffee cup and stirred mechanically. “But she’s handfast with Kezzie, too?”
“Before witnesses,” I assured him, with a wary glance at Mr. Wemyss, who was sitting across the breakfast table, mouth open and apparently turned to stone.
“Do you think—” Bree said to me, “I mean—both of them at once?”
“Er, she said not,” I replied, cutting my eyes toward Mr. Wemyss as an indication that perhaps this was not a suitable question to be considering in his presence, fascinating as it was.
“Oh, God,” Mr. Wemyss said, in a voice from the sepulchre. “She is damned.”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Mrs. Bug, saucer-eyed, crossed herself. “May Christ have mercy!”
Roger took a gulp of his coffee, choked, and put it down, spluttering. Brianna pounded him helpfully on the back, but he motioned her away, eyes watering, and pulled himself together.
“Now, it’s maybe not so bad as it seems,” he said to Mr. Wemyss, trying to find a bright side to look on. “I mean, one could maybe make a case that the twins are one soul that God’s put into two bodies for purposes of His own.”
“Aye, but—two bodies!” Mrs. Bug said. “Do ye think—both at once?”
“I don’t know,” I said, giving up. “But I imagine—” I glanced at the window, where the snow whispered at the closed shutter. It had begun to snow heavily the night before, a thick, wet snow; by now, there was nearly a foot of it on the ground, and I was reasonably sure that everyone at the table was imagining exactly what I was: a vision of Lizzie and the Beardsley twins, tucked up cozily in a warm bed of furs by a blazing fire, enjoying their honeymoon.
“Well, I don’t suppose there’s actually much anybody can do about it,” Bree said practically. “If we say anything in public, the Presbyterians will probably stone Lizzie as a Papist whore, and—”
Mr. Wemyss made a sound like a stepped-on pig’s bladder.
“Certainly no one will say anything.” Roger fixed Mrs. Bug with a hard look. “Will they?”
“Well, I’ll have to tell Arch, mind, or I’ll burst,” she said frankly. “But no one else. Silent as the grave, I swear it, de’il take me if I lie.” She put both hands over her mouth in illustration, and Roger nodded.
“I suppose,” he said dubiously, “that the marriage I performed isna actually valid as such. But then—”
“It’s certainly as valid as the handfasting Jamie did,” I said. “And besides, I think it’s too late to force her to choose. Once Kezzie’s thumb heals, no one will be able to tell . . .”
“Except Lizzie, probably,” Bree said. She licked a smear of honey from the corner of her mouth, regarding Roger thoughtfully. “I wonder what it would be like if there were two of you?”
“We’d both of us be thoroughly bamboozled,” he assured her. “Mrs. Bug—is there any more coffee?”
“Who’s bamboozled?” The kitchen door opened in a swirl of snow and frigid air, and Jamie came in with Jem, both fresh from a visit to the privy, ruddy-faced, their hair and lashes thick with melting snowflakes.
“You, for one. You’ve just been done in the eye by a nineteen-year-old bigamist,” I informed him.
“What’s a bigamiss?” Jem inquired.
“A very large young lady,” Roger said, taking a piece of buttered toast and thrusting it into Jem’s mouth. “Here. Why don’t ye take that, and . . .” His voice died away as he realized that he couldn’t send Jem outside.
“Lizzie and the twins came round to Roger’s last night, and he married her to Jo,” I told Jamie. He blinked, water from the melting snow on his lashes running down his face.
“I will be damned,” he said. He took a long breath, then realized he was still covered with snow, and went to shake himself at the hearth, bits of snow falling into the fire with a sputter and hiss.
“Well,” he said, coming back to the table and sitting down beside me, “at least your grandson will have a name, Joseph. It’s Beardsley, either way.”
This ridiculous observation seemed actually to comfort Mr. Wemyss a bit; a small bit of color came back to his cheeks, and he allowed Mrs. Bug to put a fresh bannock on his plate.
“Aye, I suppose that’s something,” he said. “And I really cannot see—”
“Come look,” Jemmy was saying, tugging impatiently on Bree’s arm. “Come see, Mama!”
“See what?”
“I wrote my name! Grandda showed me!”
“Oh, you did? Well, good for you!” Brianna beamed at him, then her brow furrowed. “What—just now?”
“Yes! Come see afore it’s covered up!”
She looked at Jamie under lowered brows.
“Da, you didn’t.”
He took a piece of fresh toast from the platter, and spread it neatly with butter.
“Aye, well,” he said, “there’s got to be some advantage still to being a man, even if no one pays a bit of heed to what ye say. Will ye pass the marmalade, Roger Mac?”
75
LICE
JEM PUT HIS ELBOWS on the table, chin on his fists, following the path of the spoon through the batter with the intent expression of a lion watching an appetizing wildebeest on its way to the water hole.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said, with a glance at his grubby fingers. “They’ll be done in a few minutes; you can have one then.”
“But I like ’em raw, Grandma,” he protested. He widened his dark-blue eyes in wordless pleading.
“You oughtn’t to eat raw things,” I said sternly. “They can make you sick.”
“You do, Grandma.” He poked a finger at my mouth, where a smudge of brownish batter remained. I cleared my throat and wiped the incriminating evidence on a towel.