A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [233]
She opened the door to find one of the fisher-folks’ children dripping on the stoop, small, bony, and feral as a wild cat. There were several of them among the tenant families, so alike that she had trouble telling them apart.
“Aidan?” she guessed. “Aidan McCallum?”
“Good day, mistress,” the little boy said, bobbing his head in nervous acknowledgment of identity. “Is meenister to hame?”
“Mee—oh. Yes, I suppose so. Come in, won’t you?” Suppressing a smile, she swung the door wide, beckoning him in. The boy looked quite shocked to see Roger, crouched on the floor, playing Vroom with Jemmy and Joan and Félicité, all industriously screeching and roaring to such effect that they hadn’t noticed the newcomer.
“You have a visitor,” she said, raising her voice to interrupt the bedlam. “He wants the minister.” Roger broke off in mid-vroom, glancing up in inquiry.
“The what?” he said, sitting up, cross-legged, his own car in hand. Then he spotted the boy, and smiled. “Oh. Aidan, a charaid! What is it, then?”
Aidan screwed up his face in concentration. Obviously, he had been given a specific message, committed to memory.
“Mither says will ye come, please,” he recited, “for to drive out a de’il what’s got intae the milk.”
THE RAIN WAS FALLING more lightly now, but they were still soaked nearly through by the time they reached the McCallum residence. If it could be dignified by such a term, Roger thought, slapping rain from his hat as he followed Aidan up the narrow, slippery path to the cabin, which was perched in a high and inconvenient notch in the side of the mountain.
Orem McCallum had managed to erect the walls of his shakily built cabin, and then had missed his footing and plunged into a rock-strewn ravine, breaking his neck within a month of arrival on the Ridge, and leaving his pregnant wife and young son to its dubious shelter.
The other men had come and hastily put a roof on, but the cabin as a whole reminded Roger of nothing so much as a pile of giant jackstraws, poised precariously on the side of the mountain and obviously only awaiting the next spring flood to slide down the mountain after its builder.
Mrs. McCallum was young and pale, and so thin that her dress flapped round her like an empty flour sack. Christ, he thought, what did they have to eat?
“Oh, sir, I do thank ye for coming.” She bobbed an anxious curtsy to him. “I’m that sorry to bring ye out in the rain and all—but I just didna ken what else I might do!”
“Not a problem,” he assured her. “Er . . . Aidan said, though, that ye wanted a minister. I’m not that, ye know.”
She looked disconcerted at that.
“Oh. Well, maybe not exactly, sir. But they do say as how your faither was a minister, and that ye do ken a great deal about the Bible and all.”
“Some, yes,” he replied guardedly, wondering what sort of emergency might require Bible knowledge. “A . . . um . . . devil in your milk, was it?”
He glanced discreetly from the baby in its cradle to the front of her dress, unsure at first whether she might mean her own breast milk, which would be a problem he was definitely not equipped to deal with. Fortunately, the difficulty seemed to lie with a large wooden pail sitting on the ramshackle table, a muslin cloth draped across it to keep flies out, small stones knotted into the corners as weights.
“Aye, sir.” Mrs. McCallum nodded at it, obviously afraid to go nearer. “Lizzie Wemyss, her from the Big House, she brought that to me last night. She said Herself said as I must give it to Aidan, and drink of it myself.” She looked helplessly at Roger. He understood her reservations; even in his own time, milk was regarded as a beverage only for infants and invalids; coming from a fishing village on the Scottish coast, she had quite possibly never seen a cow before coming to America. He was sure she knew what milk was, and that it technically