A Breath of Snow and Ashes (176 page)

He cupped my chin and tilted my face upward, so that I was obliged to meet his eyes. His own face was worn with tiredness, the lines cut deep by eyes and mouth, but the eyes themselves were clear, cool, and fathomless as the waters of a hidden spring.

“Nor can I,” he said.

“I know.”

“Ye can at least promise me the victory,” he said, but his voice held the whisper of a question.

“Yes,” I said, and touched his face. I sounded choked, and my vision blurred. “Yes, I can promise that. This time.” No mention made of what that promise spared, of the things I could not guarantee. Not life, not safety. Not home, nor family; not law nor legacy. Just the one thing—or maybe two.

“The victory,” I said. “And that I will be with you ’til the end.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. Snowflakes pelted down, melting as they struck his face, sticking for an instant, white on his lashes. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me.

“That is enough,” he said softly. “I ask no more.”

He reached forward then and took me in his arms, held me close for a moment, the breath of snow and ashes cold around us. Then he kissed me, released me, and I took a deep breath of cold air, harsh with the scent of burning. I brushed a floating smut off my arm.

“Well . . . good.
Bloody
good. Er . . .” I hesitated. “What do you suggest we do next?”

He stood looking at the charred ruin, eyes narrowed, then lifted his shoulders and let them fall.

“I think,” he said slowly, “we shall go—” He stopped suddenly, frowning. “What in God’s name . . . ?”

Something was moving at the side of the house. I blinked away the snowflakes, standing on tiptoe to see better.

“Oh, it
can’t
be!” I said—but it was. With a tremendous upheaval of snow, dirt, and charred wood, the white sow thrust her way into daylight. Fully emerged, she shook her massive shoulders, then, pink snout twitching irritably, moved purposefully off toward the wood. A moment later, a smaller version likewise emerged—and another, and another . . . and eight half-grown piglets, some white, some spotted, and one as black as the timbers of the house, trotted off in a line, following their mother.

“Scotland lives,” I said again, giggling uncontrollably. “Er—where did you say we were going?”

“To Scotland,” he said as though this were obvious. “To fetch my printing press.”

He was still looking at the house, but his eyes were fixed somewhere beyond the ashes, far beyond the present moment. An owl hooted deep in the distant wood, startled from its sleep. He stood silent for a bit, then shook off his reverie, and smiled at me, snow melting in his hair.

“And then,” he said simply, “we shall come back to fight.”

He took my hand and turned away from the house, toward the barn where the horses stood waiting, patient in the cold.

EPILOGUE I
LALLYBROCH

T
HE PENLIGHT’S BEAM MOVED SLOWLY across the heavy oak rafter, paused at a suspicious hole, then passed on. The heavyset man wore a frown of scrupulous concentration, lips pursed like one momentarily expecting some unpleasant surprise.

Brianna stood beside him, looking up at the shadowed recesses of the ceiling in the entry hall, wearing a similar frown of concentration. She would not recognize woodworm or termites unless a rafter actually fell on her, she thought, but it seemed polite to behave as though she were paying attention.

In fact, only half her attention was focused on the heavyset gentleman’s murmured remarks to his helot, a small young woman in an overall too big for her, with pink streaks in her hair. The other half was focused on the noises from upstairs, where the children were theoretically playing hide ’n seek among the jumble of packing boxes. Fiona had brought over her brood of three small fiends, and then craftily abandoned them, running off to do an errand of some sort, promising to return by teatime.

Brianna glanced at her wristwatch, still surprised at seeing it there. Half an hour yet to go. If they could avoid bloodshed until—

A piercing scream from upstairs made her grimace. The helot, less hardened, dropped her clipboard with a yelp.

“MAMA!” Jem, in tattling mode.

“WHAT?” she roared in answer. “I’m BUSY!”

“But Mama! Mandy
hit
me!” came an indignant report from the top of the stairs. Looking up, she could see the top of his head, the light from the window glowing on his hair.

“She did? Well—”

“With a
stick
!”

“What sort of—”

“On
purpose
!”

“Well, I don’t think—”

“AND . . .”—a pause before the damning denouement—“SHE DIDN’T SAY SHE WAS SORRY!”

The builder and his helot had given up looking for woodworm, in favor of following this gripping narrative, and now both of them looked at Brianna, doubtless in expectation of some Solomonic decree.

Brianna closed her eyes momentarily.

“MANDY,” she bellowed. “Say you’re sorry!”

“Non’t!” came a high-pitched refusal from above.

“Aye, ye will!” came Jem’s voice, followed by scuffling. Brianna headed for the stair, blood in her eye. Just as she set her foot on the tread, Jem uttered a piercing squeal.

“She BIT me!”

“Jeremiah MacKenzie, don’t you
dare
bite her back!” she shouted. “Both of you stop it this instant!”

Jem thrust a disheveled head through the banister, hair sticking up on end. He was wearing bright blue eye shadow, and someone had applied pink lipstick in a crude mouth-shape from one ear to the other.

“She’s a feisty wee baggage,” he ferociously informed the fascinated spectators below. “My grandda said so.”

Brianna wasn’t sure whether to laugh, cry, or utter a loud shriek, but with a hasty wave at the builder and his assistant, she ran up the stairs to sort them out.

The sorting took rather more time than expected, since she discovered in the process that Fiona’s three little girls, so notably quiet during the latest squabble, had been quiet because—having decorated Jem, Mandy, and themselves—they were busily engaged in painting faces on the bathroom walls with Brianna’s new makeup.

Coming back down a quarter of an hour later, she discovered the builder sitting peaceably on an upturned coal scuttle, having his tea break, while the helot wandered open-mouthed about the entry hall, a half-eaten scone in one hand.

“All those kids yours?” she asked Brianna, with a sympathetic quirk of one pierced brow.

“No, thank God. Does everything look all right down here?”

“Touch o’ damp,” the builder said cheerfully. “Only to be expected, though, old place like this. When’s it built, then, hen, d’ye know?”

“1721, thickie,” the helot said, with comfortable scorn. “Did ye not see it carved in the lintel, there, where we came in?”

“Nah, then, is it?” The builder looked interested, but not enough to get up and look for himself. “Cost a fortune to put back in shape, won’t it?” He nodded at the wall, where one of the oak panels showed the damage of boots and sabers, crisscrossed with slashes whose rawness had darkened with the years, but still showed clear.

“No, we won’t fix that,” Brianna said, a lump in her throat. “That was done right after the ’45. It’ll stay that way.”
We keep it so,
her uncle had told her,
to remember always what the English are.

“Oh, historic-like. Right you are, then,” the builder said, nodding wisely. “Americans don’t often mind about the history so much, do they? Wanting all mod cons, electric cookers, effing automatic thisses and thats. Central heating!”

“I’ll settle for toilets that flush,” she assured him. “That, and hot water. Speaking of which, will you have a look at the boiler? It’s in a shed in the yard, and it’s fifty years old if it’s a day. And we’ll want to replace the geyser in the upstairs bath, too.”

“Oh, aye.” The builder brushed crumbs from his shirt, corked his Thermos flask, and rose ponderously to his feet. “Come on, Angie, let’s have a look, then.”

Brianna hovered suspiciously at the foot of the stair, listening for any sounds of riot before following, but all was well above; she could hear the crash of building blocks, evidently being thrown at the walls, but no yells of outrage. She turned to follow, just in time to see the builder, who had paused to look up at the lintel.

“The ’45, eh? Ever think what it’d be like?” he was saying. “If Bonnie Prince Charlie had won, I mean.”

“Oh, in your dreams, Stan! He’d never a chance, bloody Eyetalian ponce.”

“Naw, naw, he’d have done it, sure, was it no for the effing Campbells. Traitors, aye? To a man. And a woman, too, I expect,” he added, laughing—from which Brianna gathered that the helot’s last name was very likely Campbell.

They passed on toward the shed, their argument growing more heated, but she stopped, not wanting to go after them until she had herself under control.

Oh, God,
she prayed passionately,
oh, God—that they might be safe! Please, please, let them be safe.
It didn’t matter how ridiculous it might be to pray for the safety of people who had been—who had to be—dead for more than two hundred years. It was the only thing she could do, and did it several times each day, whenever she thought of them. Much more often, now that they had come to Lallybroch.

She blinked back tears, and saw Roger’s Mini Cooper come down the winding drive. The backseat was piled high with boxes; he was finally clearing out the last bits of rubbish from the Reverend’s garage, salvaging those items that might have value to someone—a dismayingly high proportion of the contents.

“Just in time,” she said, a little shaky, as he came up the walk smiling, a large box under his arm. She still found him startling with short hair. “Ten minutes more, and I’d kill somebody, for sure. Probably Fiona, for starters.”

“Oh, aye?” He bent and kissed her with particular enthusiasm, indicating that he probably hadn’t heard what she’d said. “I’ve got something.”

“So I see. What—”

“Damned if I know.”

The box he laid on the ancient dining table was wood, as well; a sizable casket made of maple, darkened by years, soot, and handling, but with the workmanship still apparent to her practiced eye. It was beautifully made, the joints perfectly dovetailed, with a sliding top—but the top didn’t slide, having been at some point sealed with a thick bead of what looked like melted beeswax, gone black with age.

The most striking thing about it, though, was the top. Burned into the wood was a name:
Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie.

She felt a clenching in her lower belly at the sight of it, and glanced up at Roger, who was tense with some suppressed feeling; she could feel it vibrating through him.

“What?” she whispered. “Who
is
that?”

Roger shook his head, and pulled a filthy envelope from his pocket.

“This was with it, taped to the side. It’s the Reverend’s handwriting, one of the little notes he’d sometimes put with something to explain its significance, just in case. But I can’t say this is an explanation, exactly.”

The note was brief, stating merely that the box had come from a defunct banking house in Edinburgh. Instructions had been stored with the box, stating that it was not to be opened, save by the person whose name was inscribed thereon. The original instructions had perished, but were passed on verbally by the person from whom he obtained the box.

“And who was
that
?” she asked.

“No idea. Do you have a knife?”

“Do I have a knife,” she muttered, digging in the pocket of her jeans. “Do I ever
not
have a knife?”

“That was a rhetorical question,” he said, kissing her hand and taking the bright red Swiss Army knife she offered him.

The beeswax cracked and split away easily; the lid of the box, though, was unwilling to yield after so many years. It took both of them—one clutching the box, the other pushing and pulling on the lid—but finally, it came free with a small squealing noise.

The ghost of a scent floated out; something indistinguishable, but plantlike in origin.

“Mama,” she said involuntarily. Roger glanced at her, startled, but she gestured at him urgently to go on. He reached carefully into the box and removed its contents: a stack of letters, folded and sealed with wax, two books—and a small snake made of cherrywood, heavily polished by long handling.

She made a small, inarticulate sound and seized the top letter, pressing it so hard against her chest that the paper crackled and the wax seal split and fell away. The thick, soft paper, whose fibers showed the faint stains of what had once been flowers.

Tears were falling down her face, and Roger was saying something, but she didn’t attend the words, and the children were making an uproar upstairs, the builders were still arguing outside, and the only thing in the world she could see were the faded words on the page, written in a sprawling, difficult hand.

December 31, 1776

My dear daughter,

As you will see if ever you receive this, we are alive. . . .

EPILOGUE II
THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

W
HAT’S THIS, THEN?” Amos Crupp squinted at the page laid out in the bed of the press, reading it backward with the ease of long experience.

“It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire . . .
Where’d that come from?”

“Note from a subscriber,” said Sampson, his new printer’s devil, shrugging as he inked the plate. “Good for a bit of filler, there, I thought; General Washington’s address to the troops run short of the page.”

“Hmph. I s’pose. Very old news, though,” Crupp said, glancing at the date. “January?”

“Well, no,” the devil admitted, heaving down on the lever that lowered the page onto the plate of inked type. The press sprang up again, the letters wet and black on the paper, and he picked the sheet off with nimble fingertips, hanging it up to dry. “’Twas December, by the notice. But I’d set the page in Baskerville twelve-point, and the slugs for November and December are missing in that font. Not room to do it in separate letters, and not worth the labor to reset the whole page.”

“To be sure,” said Amos, losing interest in the matter, as he perused the last paragraphs of Washington’s speech. “Scarcely signifies, anyway. After all, they’re all dead, aren’t they?”