A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [28]
“Dougie joined the army,” he said, a tinge of wistfulness in his voice. “Gerry took over his dad’s shop—his dad was a tobacconist. Bobby . . . aye, well, Bobby’s dead. Drowned, that same summer, out lobstering with his cousin off Oban.”
She leaned closer to him and squeezed his hand, her shoulder brushing his in sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” she said, then paused. “Only . . . he isn’t dead, is he? Not yet. Not now.”
Roger shook his head, and made a small sound of mingled humor and dismay.
“Is that a comfort?” she asked. “Or is it horrible to think about?”
She wanted to keep him talking; he hadn’t talked so much in one go since the hanging that had taken his singing voice. Being forced to speak in public made him self-conscious, and his throat tightened. His voice was still rasping, but relaxed as he was now, he wasn’t choking or coughing.
“Both,” he said, and made the sound again. “I’ll never see him again, either way.” He shrugged slightly, pushing the thought away. “D’ye think of your old friends much?”
“No, not much,” she said softly. The trail narrowed here, and she linked her arm in his, drawing close as they approached the last turn, which would bring them in sight of the McGillivrays’. “There’s too much here.” But she didn’t want to talk about what wasn’t here.
“Do you think Jo and Kezzie are just playing?” she asked. “Or are they up to something?”
“What should they be up to?” he asked, accepting her change of subject without comment. “I canna think they’re lying in wait to commit highway robbery—not at this time of night.”
“Oh, I believe them about standing guard,” she said. “They’d do anything to protect Lizzie. Only—” She paused. They had come out of the forest onto the wagon road; the far verge fell away in a steep bank, looking at night like a bottomless pool of black velvet—by daylight, it would be a tangled mass of fallen snags, clumps of rhododendron, redbud, and dogwood, overgrown with the snarls of ancient grapevines and creepers. The road made a switchback further on and curved back on itself, arriving gently at the McGillivrays’ place, a hundred feet below.
“The lights are still on,” she said with some surprise. The small group of buildings—the Old Place, the New Place, Ronnie Sinclair’s cooper’s shop, Dai Jones’s blacksmith’s forge and cabin—were mostly dark, but the lower windows of the McGillivrays’ New Place were striped with light, leaking through the cracks of the shutters, and a bonfire in front of the house made a brilliant blot of light against the dark.
“Kenny Lindsay,” Roger said matter-of-factly. “The Beardsleys said they’d met him. He’ll have stopped to share the news.”
“Mm. We’d better be careful, then; if they’re looking out for brigands, too, they might shoot at anything that moves.”
“Not tonight; it’s a party, remember? What were ye saying, though, about the Beardsley boys protecting Lizzie?”
“Oh.” Her toe stubbed against some hidden obstacle, and she clutched his arm to keep from falling. “Oof! Only that I wasn’t sure who they thought they were protecting her from.”
Roger tightened his grip on her arm in reflex.
“Whatever d’ye mean by that?”
“Just that if I were Manfred McGillivray, I’d take good care to be nice to Lizzie. Mama says the Beardsleys follow her around like dogs, but they don’t. They follow her like tame wolves.”
“I thought Ian said it wasn’t possible to tame wolves.”
“It isn’t,” she said tersely. “Come on, let’s hurry, before they smoor the fire.”
THE BIG LOG HOUSE was literally overflowing with people. Light spilled from the open door and glowed in the row of tiny arrow-slit windows that marched across the front of the house, and dark forms wove in and out of the bonfire’s light. The sounds of a fiddle came to them, thin and sweet through the dark, borne on the wind with the scent of roasting meat.
“I suppose Senga’s truly made her choice, then,” Roger said, taking her arm for the final steep descent to the crossroad. “Who d’ye bet it is? Ronnie Sinclair or the German lad?”
“Oh, a bet?