She shook her head, but in indecision rather than negation.
“I really dinna ken,” she admitted. “It’s a good bit easier now, wi’ the British gone—but they’re no so far away, are they? They could come back, and then what?” She glanced uneasily over her shoulder, though the print-shop was empty for the moment. Fergus had had to leave home and live furtively on the outskirts of the city, during the last months of the British occupation.
I opened my mouth to tell her that I doubted this. Hal Grey had told me, under the influence of ganja, that the new British strategy was to sever the southern colonies from the North and suppress the rebellion there, thus starving the North into submission. But I closed it without speaking. Best not to mention that until I found out whether Jamie had told Fergus.
Why didn’t I bloody know what was going to happen? I asked myself in frustration—and not for the first time. Why hadn’t I thought to brush up on American history when I had the chance?
Well, because I hadn’t expected to end up in America, was the answer. Just went to show, I supposed. Pointless to spend too much time in planning, anyway, given the propensity of life to make sudden left-hand turns without warning.
“It would be wonderful, if you were to come,” I said, as mildly as possible, adding craftily, “so nice to have the children nearby.”
Marsali snorted, giving me a sideways glance.
“Aye,” she said dryly. “Never think I dinna appreciate the value of a grannie. And when ye leave, Grannie Janet will go, too.”
“Do you think so?” I hadn’t thought of that. “But Jenny loves you and your children—Fergus is as much a son to her as any of the boys she bore.”
“Well, that’s maybe true,” she admitted, with a brief smile that showed me the radiant fifteen-year-old who had married Fergus on a Caribbean beach twelve years before. “But Young Ian’s her youngest, ken? And she’s had too little of him. Now he’s wed, she’ll want to be nearby, to help wi’ his bairns when they come. And ye ken Rachel will go where Ian does—and Ian will go where Da does.”
That was a shrewd assessment, I thought, and gave her a brief nod of agreement and respect.
She sighed deeply and, sitting down in her nursing chair, took up the topmost item in the brimming mending basket, the threaded needle still sticking up from the garment where she’d last put it down. I had no desire to abandon the conversation and, pulling out a stool, sat down beside her and plucked one of Germain’s stockings out of the basket. The workbasket, with its housewife, thread balls, and darning egg, was set beside the mending, and I deftly threaded my own needle, feeling pleased that I could still do that without putting on my spectacles.
“What about Fergus?” I asked bluntly. Because plainly Fergus was the crux of the matter, where Marsali was concerned.
“Aye, that’s the rub,” she said frankly. “I’d go, and happy, but ye ken how it was for him when we stayed on the Ridge.”
I did, and grimaced slightly, stretching the heel of the stocking over the darning egg.
“It’s been dangerous in the city, this last year,” she said, and swallowed at the memory. “Couldna tell ye how many times the soldiers came to arrest him; they broke up the shop, more than once, when they couldna find him. And the Loyalists would come and paint slogans on the front wall sometimes. But the danger didna trouble him—so long as it didna threaten me and the bairns.”
“And sometimes even if it does,” I muttered. “And I don’t mean just Fergus. Bloody men.”
Marsali sniffed with amusement.
“Aye. But the thing is—he is a man, no? He’s got to feel he’s worth something. He needs to be able to care for us, and that’s a thing he can do—and do well—here. I canna see how he’d make a decent living in the mountains.”
“True,” I admitted reluctantly. It was a hot day, and stifling in the kitchen, with the cauldron simmering over the hearth. Flies or no flies—and there were an ungodly number of flies in Philadelphia—I got up to open the back door. It wasn’t noticeably cooler outside, though at least the fire under the big washtub hadn’t yet been lit; the girls were still filling it, trudging to and fro from the well with their buckets.
Henri-Christian was nowhere in sight, but had presumably been scrubbed; a filthy black cloth lay crumpled on the doorstep. I stooped to pick it up and saw a folded bit of paper lying on the ground beside the step. It had no direction on it but looked purposeful, so I picked it up and took it back inside.
“Still,” Marsali said, barely waiting for me to sit down. “I’m thinkin’ that even if we canna go to the Ridge, it might be as well if we were to go. There must be places in the South that could use a printer, even if they’re none sae big as Philadelphia.”
“Well, there’s Charleston,” I said doubtfully, “and Savannah. They’re just as hot and ghastly in the summer as Philadelphia is, but the winters are milder, I suppose.”
She shot me a brief look over the shift she was mending, then set it down on her lap, as though having come to a decision.
“It’s no the weather that troubles me,” she said quietly. And, bending, she groped under the pile of shirts and stockings, emerging with a handful of grubby notes and frayed letters. Handling these gingerly, as though they carried some disease, she placed them on my knee.
“Any printer in these days gets such things poked under his door,” she said, watching my face as I read through the first few. “Especially if ye take a stand. We didn’t, for as long as we could, but after a time, ye just canna stand in the middle o’ the road any longer.”