A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [27]
“I do—and no wonder, after the way they grew up. Did you see the way they were with that whistle? No one’s ever given them a present, or a toy.”
“I suppose not. D’ye think that’s what makes boys civilized? If so, I imagine wee Jem will be a philosopher or an artist or something. Mrs. Bug spoils him rotten.”
“Oh, as if you don’t,” she said tolerantly. “And Da, and Lizzie, and Mama, and everyone else in sight.”
“Oh, well,” Roger said, unembarrassed at the accusation. “Wait ’til he has a bit of competition. Germain’s in no danger of spoiling, is he?” Germain, Fergus and Marsali’s eldest son, was harried by two small sisters, known to one and all as the hell-kittens, who followed their brother constantly, teasing and pestering.
She laughed, but felt a slight sense of uneasiness. The thought of another baby always made her feel as though she were perched at the top of a roller coaster, short of breath and stomach clenched, poised somewhere between excitement and terror. Particularly now, with the memory of their lovemaking still softly heavy, shifting like mercury in her belly.
Roger seemed to sense her ambivalence, for he didn’t pursue the subject, but reached for her hand and held it, his own large and warm. The air was cold, the last vestiges of a winter chill lingering in the hollows.
“What about Fergus, then?” he asked, taking up an earlier thread of the conversation. “From what I hear, he hadn’t much of a childhood, either, but he seems fairly civilized.”
“My aunt Jenny had the raising of him from the time he was ten,” she objected. “You haven’t met my aunt Jenny, but believe me, she could have civilized Adolf Hitler, if she put her mind to it. Besides, Fergus grew up in Paris, not the backwoods—even if it was in a brothel. And it sounds like it was a pretty high-class brothel, too, from what Marsali tells me.”
“Oh, aye? What does she tell you?”
“Oh, just stories that he’s told her, now and then. About the clients, and the wh—the girls.”
“Can ye not say ‘whore,’ then?” he asked, amused. She felt the blood rise in her cheeks, and was pleased that it was dark; he teased her more when she blushed.
“I can’t help it that I went to a Catholic school,” she said, defensive. “Early conditioning.” It was true; she couldn’t say certain words, save when in the grip of fury or when mentally prepared. “Why can you, though? You’d think a preacher’s lad would have the same problem.”
He laughed, a little wryly.
“Not precisely the same problem. It was more a matter of feeling obliged to curse and carry on in front of my friends, to prove I could.”
“What kind of carrying on?” she asked, scenting a story. He didn’t often talk about his early life in Inverness, adopted by his great-uncle, a Presbyterian minister, but she loved hearing the small tidbits he sometimes let fall.
“Och. Smoking, drinking beer, and writing filthy words on the walls in the boys’ toilet,” he said, the smile evident in his voice. “Tipping over dustbins. Letting air out of automobile tires. Stealing sweeties from the Post Office. Quite the wee criminal I was, for a time.”
“The terror of Inverness, huh? Did you have a gang?” she teased.
“I did,” he said, and laughed. “Gerry MacMillan, Bobby Cawdor, and Dougie Buchanan. I was odd man out, not only for being the preacher’s lad, but for having an English father and an English name. So I was always out to show them I was a hard man. Meaning I was usually the one in most trouble.”
“I had no idea you were a juvenile delinquent,” she said, charmed at the thought.
“Well, not for long,” he assured her wryly. “Come the summer I was fifteen, the Reverend signed me up on a fishing boat, and sent me to sea with the herring fleet. Couldna just say whether he did it to improve my character, keep me out of jail, or only because he couldn’t stand me round the house any longer, but it did work. Ye want to meet hard men sometime, go to sea with a bunch of Gaelic fishermen.”
“I’ll remember that,” she said, trying not to giggle and producing a series of small, wet snorts instead. “Did your friends end up in