The Fiery Cross (84 page)

I had to say something.

“I am sorry, sweetheart,” I said. “I tried to stop him—Jamie, I mean. I know he didn’t mean you to know about it. To worry about it.”

“That’s okay. I already knew.” Reaching across one-handed, she slid one of the ledgers out of the stack Jamie kept on his desk, and holding it by the spine, shook out a folded letter. She nodded over Jemmy’s head at it.

“Look at that. I found it while you were gone with the militia.”

I read Lord John’s account of the duel between Bonnet and Captain Marsden, feeling a coldness gather beneath my breastbone. I hadn’t been under any illusions regarding Bonnet’s character, but I hadn’t known that he had that much skill. I greatly preferred dangerous criminals to be incompetent.

“I thought maybe Lord John was just answering a casual question for Da—but I guess not. What do you think?” Bree asked. Her tone was cool, almost detached, as though she were inquiring my opinion of a hair-ribbon or a shoe-buckle. I looked up at her sharply.

“What do
you
think?” It was Brianna who was important in this—or that was
my
opinion.

“About what?” Her eyes slid away from mine, glancing off the letter, then fastening themselves on the curve of Jemmy’s head.

“Oh, the price of tea in China, for starters,” I said, with some irritation. “Going on promptly to the topic of Stephen Bonnet, if you like.” It felt oddly shocking to say the name out loud; we had all avoided it for months, by unspoken consent.

Her teeth were fastened in her lower lip. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor for a moment, then shook her head, very slightly.

“I don’t want to hear about him, or think about him,” she said, very evenly. “And if I ever see him again, I might just . . . just . . .” She shuddered violently, then looked up at me, eyes fierce and sudden.

“What’s
wrong
with him?” she cried. “How could he do this?” Her clenched fist struck her thigh, and Jemmy, startled, lost his grip and began to wail.

“Your father, you mean—not Bonnet.”

She nodded, pressing Jemmy back toward her breast, but he had picked up her agitation, and was squirming and howling. I reached down and took him, hoisting him to my shoulder and patting his back in automatic comfort. Bree’s hands, left empty, fastened on her knees, crumpled the cloth of her skirt.

“Why couldn’t he leave Bonnet alone?” She had to raise her voice to be heard above the baby’s wailing, and the bones of her face seemed to have shifted, so that the skin looked tight-drawn over them.

“Because he’s a man—and a bloody Highlander,” I said. “‘Live and let live’ is not in their vocabulary.” Milk was dripping slowly from her nipple onto the fabric of her shift; I reached out one-handed and tweaked the cloth up to cover her. She put a hand over her breast and pressed hard to stop the milk.

“What does he mean to do, though? If he finds him.”

“
When
he finds him, I’m afraid,” I said reluctantly. “Because I don’t believe he’s going to stop looking until he does. As to what he’ll do then . . . well . . . then he’ll kill him, I suppose.” It sounded oddly offhand, put that way, and yet I didn’t see any other way of putting it, really.

“You mean he’ll
try
to kill him.” She glanced at the letter from Lord John, then away, swallowing. “What if he . . .”

“Your father has a great deal of experience in killing people,” I said bleakly. “In fact, he’s awfully good at it—though he hasn’t done it for some time.”

This didn’t seem to reassure her to any great extent. It hadn’t reassured me, either.

“It’s such a big place,” she murmured, shaking her head. “America, I mean. Why couldn’t he just—go away? Far away?” An excellent question. Jemmy was snorting, rubbing his face furiously in my shoulder, but no longer screaming.

“I was rather hoping that Stephen Bonnet would have the good sense to go and pursue his smuggling in China or the West Indies, but I suppose he has local connections that he didn’t want to abandon.” I shrugged, patting Jemmy.

Brianna let go of her skirt and reached for the baby, who was still twisting like an eel.

“Well, he doesn’t know he has Sherlock Fraser and his sidekick Lord John Watson on his trail, after all.” It was a brave try, but her lip trembled as she said it, and she bit the lower one again. I hated to cause her more worry, but there was no point now in avoiding things.

“No, but he very likely will, before too long,” I said reluctantly. “Lord John is very discreet—Private Ogilvie isn’t. If Jamie goes on asking questions—and he will, I’m afraid—his interest is going to be rather widely known before long.” I wasn’t sure whether Jamie had hoped to discover Bonnet quickly and take him unawares—or whether his plan was to smoke Bonnet out into the open by means of his inquiries. Or whether he meant in fact to draw Bonnet’s attention deliberately, and cause him to come to
us
. The last possibility made me a little weak in the knees, and I sat down heavily on the stool.

Brianna drew a slow, deep breath and let it out through her nose, settling the baby back at her breast.

“Does Roger know? I mean, is he in on this—this—bloody
vendetta
?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t think so. I mean, I’m sure not. He would have told you—wouldn’t he?”

Her expression eased a little, though a shadow of doubt still darkened her eyes.

“I’d hate to think he’d keep something like that from me. On the other hand,” she added, voice sharpening a little in accusation, “
you
did.”

I felt the sting of it, and pressed my lips tight together.

“You said that you didn’t want to think of Stephen Bonnet,” I said, looking away from the turbulence of feeling in her face. “Naturally not. I—we—didn’t want you to have to.” With a certain feeling of inevitability, I realized that I was being drawn into the vortex of Jamie’s intentions, through no consent of my own.

“Now, look,” I said briskly, sitting up straight and giving Brianna a sharp look. “
I
don’t think it’s a good idea to look for Bonnet, and I’ve done all I could to discourage Jamie from doing it. In fact,” I added ruefully, with a nod toward Lord John’s letter, “I thought I
had
discouraged him. But apparently not.”

A look of determination was hardening Brianna’s mouth, and she settled herself more solidly in the chair.

“
I’ll
bloody discourage him,” she said.

I gave her a look, considering. If anyone had the necessary stubbornness and force of character to sway Jamie from his chosen path, it would be his daughter. That was, however, a very large “if.”

“You can try,” I said, a little dubiously.

“Don’t I have the right?” Her initial shock had vanished, and her features were back under control, her expression cold and hard. “Isn’t it for me to say whether I want . . . what I want?”

“Yes,” I agreed, a twinge of uneasiness rippling down my back. Fathers were inclined to think they had rights, too. So were husbands. But perhaps that was better left unsaid.

A momentary silence fell between us, broken only by Jemmy’s noises, and the calling of crows outside. Almost by impulse, I asked the question that had risen to the surface of my mind.

“Brianna. What do you want? Do you want Stephen Bonnet dead?”

She glanced at me, then away, looking out the window while she patted Jemmy’s back. She didn’t blink. Finally, her eyes closed briefly, then opened to meet mine.

“I can’t,” she said, low-voiced. “I’m afraid if I ever let that thought in my mind . . . I’d never be able to think about anything else, I’d want it so much. And I will be
damned
if I’ll let . . . him . . . ruin my life that way.”

Jemmy gave a resounding belch, and spit up a little milk. Bree had an old linen towel across her shoulder, and deftly wiped his chin with it. Calmer now, he had lost his look of vexed incomprehension, and was concentrating intently on something over his mother’s shoulder. Following the direction of his clear blue gaze, I saw the shadow of a spiderweb, high up in the corner of the window. A gust of wind shook the window frame, and a tiny spot moved in the center of the web, very slightly.

“Yeah,” Brianna said, very softly. “I do want him dead. But I want Da and Roger alive, more.”

R
OGER HAD GONE to sing for Joel MacLeod’s nephew’s wedding, as arranged at the Gathering, and come home with a new prize, which he was anxious to commit to paper before it should escape.

He left his muddy boots in the kitchen, accepted a cup of tea and a raisin tart from Mrs. Bug, and went directly to the study. Jamie was there, writing letters; he glanced up with an absent murmur of acknowledgment, but then returned to his composition, a slight frown between his heavy brows as he formed the letters, hand cramped and awkward on the quill.

There was a small, three-shelf bookcase in Jamie’s study, which held the entire library of Fraser’s Ridge. The serious works occupied the top shelf: a volume of Latin poetry, Caesar’s
Commentaries
, the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius, a few other classic works, Dr. Brickell’s
Natural History of North Carolina
, lent by the Governor and never returned, and a schoolbook on mathematics, much abused, with
Ian Murray the Younger
written on the flyleaf in a staggering hand.

The middle shelf was given over to more light-minded reading: a small selection of romances, slightly ragged with much reading, featuring
Robinson Crusoe
;
Tom Jones
, in a set of seven small, leather-covered volumes;
Roderick Random
, in four volumes; and Sir Henry Richardson’s monstrous
Pamela
, done in two gigantic octavo bindings—the first of these decorated with multiple bookmarks, ranging from a ragged dried maple leaf to a folded penwiper, these indicating the points which various readers had reached before giving up, either temporarily or permanently. A copy of
Don Quixote
in Spanish, ratty, but much less worn, since only Jamie could read it.

The bottom shelf held a copy of
Dr. Sam. Johnson’s Dictionary
, Jamie’s ledgers and account books, several of Brianna’s sketchbooks, and the slender buckram-bound journal in which Roger recorded the words of unfamiliar songs and poems acquired at ceilidhs and hearthsides.

He took a stool on the other side of the table Jamie used as a desk, and cut a new quill for the job, taking care with it; he wanted these records to be readable. He didn’t know precisely what use the collection might be put to, but he had been ingrained with the scholar’s instinctive value for the written word. Perhaps this was only for his own pleasure and use—but he liked the feeling that he might be leaving something to posterity as well, and took pains both to write clearly and to document the circumstances under which he had acquired each song.

The study was peaceful, with no more than Jamie’s occasional sigh as he stopped to rub the kinks from his cramped hand. After a while, Mr. Bug came to the door, and after a brief colloquy, Jamie put away his quill and went out with the factor. Roger nodded vaguely as they bade him farewell, mind occupied with the effort of recall and recording.

When he finished, a quarter of an hour later, his mind was pleasantly empty, and he sat back, stretching the ache from his shoulders. He waited a few moments for the ink to be thoroughly dry before he put the book away, and while waiting, went to pull out one of Brianna’s sketchbooks from the bottom shelf.

She wouldn’t mind if he looked; she had told him he was welcome to look at them. At the same time, she showed him only the occasional drawing, those she was pleased with, or had done especially for him.

He turned over the pages of the notebook, feeling the sense of curiosity and respect that attends the prying into mystery, searching for small glimpses of the workings of her mind.

There were lots of portrait sketches of the baby in this one, a study in circles.

He paused at one small sketch, caught by memory. It was a sketch of Jemmy sleeping, back turned, his small sturdy body curled up in a comma. Adso the cat was curled up beside him, in precisely similar fashion, his chin perched on Jemmy’s fat little foot, eyes slits of comatose bliss. He remembered that one.

She drew Jemmy often—nearly every day, in fact—but seldom fullface.

“Babies don’t really have faces,” she had told him, frowning critically at her offspring, who was industriously gnawing on the leather strap of Jamie’s powder horn.

“Oh, aye? And what’s that on the front of his head, then?” He had lain flat on the floor with the baby and the cat, grinning up at her, which made it easier for her to look down her nose at him.

“I mean, strictly speaking. Naturally they have faces, but they all look alike.”

“It’s a wise father that kens his own child, eh?” he joked, regretting it instantly, as he saw the shadow cloud her eyes. It passed, quick as a summer cloud, but it had been there, nonetheless.

“Well, not from an artist’s point of view.” She drew the blade of her penknife at an angle across the tip of the charcoal stick, sharpening the point. “They don’t have any bones—that you can see, I mean. And it’s the bones that you use to show the shape of a face; without bones, there isn’t much there.”