An Echo in the Bone (57 page)

“Lionel Menzies,” the headmaster said, smiling. He had a solid handshake and a friendly air, and Roger found himself revising his strategy.

“Roger MacKenzie.” He let go and took the proffered seat, across the desk from Menzies.

“Jem’s—Jeremiah’s—dad.”

“Oh, aye, of course. I rather thought I might see you or your wife, when Jem didn’t turn up at school this morning.” Menzies leaned back a little, folding his hands. “Before we go very far…

could I just ask exactly what Jem told ye about what happened?”

Roger’s opinion of the man rose a grudging notch.

“He said that his teacher heard him say something to another lad in the Gaelic, whereupon she grabbed him by the ear and shook him. That made him mad and he called her names—also in Gaelic—for which you belted him.” He’d spotted the strap itself, hung up inconspicuously—but still quite visible—on the wall beside a filing cabinet.

Menzies’s eyebrows rose behind his spectacles.

“Is that not what happened?” Roger asked, wondering for the first time whether Jem had lied or omitted something even more horrible from his account.

“No, that’s what happened,” Menzies said. “I’ve just never heard a parent give such a concise account. Generally speaking, it’s a half hour of prologue, dissociated trivia, contumely, and contradiction—that’s if both parents come—and personal attacks before I can make out precisely what the trouble is. Thank you.” He smiled, and quite involuntarily, Roger smiled back.

“I was sorry to have to do it,” Menzies went on, not pausing for reply. “I like Jem. He’s clever, hardworking—and really funny.”

“He is that,” Roger said. “But—”

“But I hadn’t a choice, really,” Menzies interrupted firmly. “If none of the other students had known what he was saying, we might have done with a simple apology. But—did he tell ye what it was he said?”

“Not in detail, no.” Roger hadn’t inquired; he’d heard Jamie Fraser curse someone in Gaelic only three or four times—but it was a memorable experience, and Jem had an excellent memory.

“Well, I won’t, either, then, unless you insist. But the thing is, while only a few of the kids on the play yard likely understood him, they would tell—well, they have told, in fact—all their friends exactly what he said. And they know I understood it, too. I’ve got to support the authority of my teachers; if there’s no respect for the staff, the whole place goes to hell…. Did your wife tell me ye’d taught yourself? At Oxford, I think she said? That’s very impressive.”

“That was some years ago, and I was only a junior don, but yes. And I hear what you’re saying, though I unfortunately had to keep order and respect without the threat of physical force.” Not that he wouldn’t have loved to be able to punch one or two of his Oxford second-year students in the nose…

Menzies eyed him with a slight twinkle.

“I’d say your presence was likely adequate,” he said. “And given that you’re twice my size, I’m pleased to hear that you’re not inclined to use force.”

“Some of your other parents are?” Roger asked, raising his own brows.

“Well, none of the fathers has actually struck me, no, though it’s been threatened once or twice.

Did have one mother come in with the family shotgun, though.” Menzies inclined his head at the wall behind him, and looking up, Roger saw a spray of black pockmarks in the plaster, mostly—but not entirely—covered by a framed map of Africa.

“Fired over your head, at least,” Roger said dryly, and Menzies laughed.

“Well, no,” he said, deprecating. “I asked her please to set it down carefully, and she did, but not carefully enough. Caught the trigger somehow and
blam!
The poor woman was really unnerved—though not quite as much as I was.”

“You’re bloody good, mate,” Roger said, smiling in acknowledgment of Menzies’s skill in handling difficult parents—including Roger—but leaning forward a little to indicate that he meant to take control of the conversation. “But I’m not—not yet, anyway—complaining about your belting Jem. It’s what led to that.”

Menzies drew breath and nodded, setting his elbows on the desk and steepling his hands.

“Aye, right.”

“I understand the need to support your teachers,” Roger said, and set his own hands on the desk.

“But that woman nearly tore my son’s ear off, and evidently for no crime greater than saying a few words—not cursing, just words—in the
Gàidhlig
.”

Menzies eyes sharpened, catching the accent.

“Ah, you’ve got it, then. Wondered, ken, was it you or your wife had it.”

“You make it sound like a disease. My wife’s an American—surely ye noticed?”

Menzies gave him an amused look—no one failed to notice Brianna—but said only, “Aye, I noticed. She told me her da was Scots, though, and a Highlander. You speak it at home?”

“No, not much. Jem got it from his grandda. He’s … no longer with us,” he added.

Menzies nodded.

“Ah,” he said softly. “Aye, I had it from my grandparents, as well—my mam’s folk. Dead, too, now. They were from Skye.” The usual implied question hovered, and Roger answered it.

“I was born in Kyle of Lochalsh, but I grew up mostly in Inverness. Picked up most of my own Gaelic on the fishing boats in the Minch.” And in the mountains of North Carolina.

Menzies nodded again, for the first time looking down at his hands rather than at Roger.

“Been on a fishing boat in the last twenty years?”

“No, thank God.”

Menzies smiled briefly, but didn’t look up.

“No. You won’t find much of the Gaelic there these days. Spanish, Polish, Estonian… quite a bit of those, but not the Gaelic. Your wife said ye’d spent a number of years in America, so you’ll maybe not have noticed, but it’s not much spoken in public anymore.”

“To be honest, I hadn’t paid it much mind—not ’til now.”

Menzies nodded again, as though to himself, then took off his spectacles and rubbed at the marks they’d left on the bridge of his nose. His eyes were pale blue and seemed suddenly vulnerable, without the protection of his glasses.

“It’s been on the decline for a number of years. Much more so for the last ten, fifteen years. The Highlands are suddenly part of the UK—or at least the rest of the UK says so—in a way they’ve never been before, and keeping a separate language is seen as not only old-fashioned but outright destructive.

“It’s no what you’d call a written policy, to stamp it out, but the use of Gaelic is strongly…

discouraged… in schools. Mind”—he raised a hand to forestall Roger’s response—“they couldn’t get away with that if the parents protested, but they don’t. Most of them are eager for their kids to be part of the modern world, speak good English, get good jobs, fit in elsewhere, be able to leave the Highlands… Not so much for them here, is there, save the North Sea?”

“The parents…”

“If they’ve learnt the Gaelic from their own parents, they deliberately don’t teach it to their kids.

And if they haven’t got it, they certainly make no effort to learn. It’s seen as backward, ignorant.

Very much a mark of the lower classes.”

“Barbarous, in fact,” Roger said, with an edge. “The barbarous Erse?”

Menzies recognized Samuel Johnson’s dismissive description of the tongue spoken by his eighteenth-century Highland hosts, and the brief, rueful smile lit his face again.

“Exactly. There’s a great deal of prejudice—much of it outspoken—against…”

“Teuchters?” “Teuchter” was a Lowland Scots term for someone in the Gaeltacht, the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, and in cultural terms the general equivalent of “hillbilly” or “trailer trash.”

“Oh, ye do know, then.”

“Something.” It was true; even as recently as the sixties, Gaelic speakers had been viewed with a certain derision and public dismissiveness, but this… Roger cleared his throat.

“Regardless, Mr. Menzies,” he said, coming down a bit on the “Mr.,” “I object very much to my son’s teacher not only disciplining him for speaking Gaelic but actually assaulting him for doing so.”

“I share your concern, Mr. MacKenzie,” Menzies said, looking up and meeting his eyes in a way that made it seem as though he truly did. “I’ve had a wee word with Miss Glendenning, and I think it won’t happen again.”

Roger held his gaze for moment, wanting to say all sorts of things but realizing that Menzies was not responsible for most of them.

“If it does,” he said evenly, “I won’t come back with a shotgun—but I will come back with the sheriff. And a newspaper photographer, to document Miss Glendenning being taken off in handcuffs.”

Menzies blinked once and put his spectacles back on.

“You’re sure ye wouldn’t rather send your wife round with the family shotgun?” he asked wistfully, and Roger laughed, despite himself.

“Fine, then.” Menzies pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’ll see ye out; I’ve got to lock up.

We’ll see Jem on the Monday, then, will we?”

“He’ll be here. With or without handcuffs.”

Menzies laughed.

“Well, he needn’t worry about his reception. Since the Gaelic-speaking kids
did
tell their friends what it was he said, and he took his belting without a squeak, I think his entire form now regards him as Robin Hood or Billy Jack.”

“Oh, God.”

SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT

May 19, 1777

THE SHARK WAS EASILY twelve feet long, a dark, sinuous shape keeping pace with the ship, barely visible through the storm-stirred gray waters. It had appeared abruptly just before noon, startling me badly when I looked over the rail and saw its fin cut the surface.

“What’s amiss with its head?” Jamie, appearing in response to my startled cry, frowned into the dark water. “It has a growth of some sort.”

“I think it’s what they call a hammerhead.” I clung tight to the railing, slippery with spray. The head
did look
misshapen: a queer, clumsy, blunt thing at the end of such a sinisterly graceful body. As we watched, though, the shark came closer to the surface and rolled, bringing one fleshy stalk and its distant cold eye momentarily clear of the water.

Jamie made a sound of horrified disgust.

“They normally look like that,” I informed him.

“Why?”

“I suppose God was feeling bored one day.” That made him laugh, and I viewed him with approval. His color was high and healthy, and he’d eaten breakfast with such appetite that I’d felt I could dispense with the acupuncture needles.

“What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen? An animal, I mean. A non-human animal,” I added, thinking of Dr. Fentiman’s ghastly collection of pickled deformities and “natural curiosities.”

“Strange by itself? Not deformed, I mean, but as God meant it to be?” He squinted into the sea, thinking, then grinned. “The mandrill in Louis of France’s zoo. Or … well, no. Maybe a rhinoceros, though I havena seen one of those in the flesh. Does that count?”

“Let’s say something you’ve seen in the flesh,” I said, thinking of a few pictorial animals I’d seen in this time that appeared to have been deeply affected by the artist’s imagination. “You thought the mandrill was stranger than the orangutan?” I recalled his fascination with the orangutan, a solemn-faced young animal who had seemed equally fascinated by
him
, this leading to a number of jokes regarding the origins of red hair on the part of the Duc d’Orleans, who’d been present.

“Nay, I’ve seen a good many people who looked stranger than the orangutan,” he said. The wind had shifted, yanking auburn lashings of hair out of his ribbon. He turned to face into the breeze and smoothed them back, sobering a little. “I felt sorry for the creature; it seemed to ken it was alone and might never see another of its kind again.”

“Maybe it
did think
you were one of its kind,” I suggested. “It seemed to like you.”

“It was a sweet wee thing,” he agreed. “When I gave it an orange, it took the fruit from my hand like a Christian, verra mannerly. Do ye suppose…” His voice died away, his eyes going vague.

“Do I suppose … ?”

“Oh. I was only thinking”—he glanced quickly over his shoulder, but we were out of earshot of the sailors—“what Roger Mac said about France being important to the Revolution. I thought I should ask about, when we’re in Edinburgh. See whether there might be any of the folk I knew who had fingers in France…” He lifted one shoulder.

“You aren’t actually thinking of
going
to France, are you?” I asked, suddenly wary.

“No, no,” he said hurriedly. “I only happened to think—if by some chance we did, might the orangutan still be there? It’s been a great while, but I dinna ken how long they live.”

“Not quite as long as people, I don’t think, but they
can
live to a great age, if they’re well cared for,” I said dubiously. The doubt was not all on the orangutan’s account. Go back to the French court? The mere thought made my stomach flip-flop.

“He’s dead, ken,” Jamie said quietly. He turned his head to look at me, eyes steady. “Louis.”

“Is he?” I said blankly. “I… when?”

He ducked his head and made a small noise that might have been a laugh.

“He died three years ago, Sassenach,” he said dryly. “It
was
in the papers. Though I grant ye, the
Wilmington Gazette
didna make a great deal of the matter.”

“I didn’t notice.” I glanced down at the shark, still patiently keeping company with the ship. My heart, after the initial leap of surprise, had relaxed. My general reaction, in fact, was thankfulness—and that in itself surprised me, rather.

I’d come to terms with my memory of sharing Louis’s bed—for the ten minutes it had taken—long since, and Jamie and I had long since come to terms with each other, turning to each other in the wake of the loss of our first daughter, Faith, and all the terrible things that had happened in France before the Rising.

It wasn’t that hearing of Louis’s death made any real difference at all—but still, I had a feeling of relief, as though some tiresome bit of music that had been playing in the far distance had finally come to a graceful end, and now the silence of peace sang to me in the wind.

“God rest his soul,” I said, rather belatedly. Jamie smiled, and laid his hand over mine.