A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [512]
“Aye, sir,” he said, looking terrified at his own boldness. “I do. Very much!” he blurted.
“Good.” Jamie nodded, pleased. “We’ll go and get her, then.”
Mr. Wemyss was open-mouthed with astonishment; so was I. Jamie swung round to me, issuing orders with the confidence and joie de vivre of a sea-captain with a fat prize in view.
“Go and find Young Ian for me, will ye, Sassenach? And tell Mrs. Bug to put up food, enough for a week’s travel for four men. And then fetch Roger Mac; we’ll need a minister.”
He rubbed his hands together in satisfaction, then clapped Mr. Wemyss on the shoulder, causing a small puff of soot to rise from his clothes.
“Go fettle yourself, Joseph,” he said. “And comb your hair. We’re going to go and steal ye a bride.”
“. . . AND PUT A PISTOL TO his breest, his breest,” Young Ian chanted, “Marry me, marry me, minister, or else I’ll be your priest, your priest—or else I’ll be your priest!”
“Of course,” Roger said, dropping the song, in which a bold young man named Willie rides with his friends to abduct and forcibly marry a young woman who proves bolder yet, “we’ll hope ye prove a wee bit more capable than Willie upon the night, aye, Joseph?”
Mr. Wemyss, scrubbed, dressed, and fairly vibrating with excitement, gave him a glance of complete incomprehension. Roger grinned, tightening the strap of his saddlebag.
“Young Willie obliges a minister to marry him to the young woman at gunpoint,” he explained to Mr. Wemyss, “but then, when he takes his stolen bride to bed, she’ll have none of him—and his best efforts will not avail to force her.”
“And so return me, Willie, to my hame, as virgin as I came, I came—as virgin as I came!” Ian caroled.
“Now, mind,” Roger said warningly to Jamie, who was heaving his own saddlebags over Gideon’s back. “If the Fraulein is at all unwilling . . .”
“What, unwilling to be wed to Joseph?” Jamie clapped Mr. Wemyss on the back, then bent to give him a foot up and fairly heaved the smaller man into the saddle. “I canna see any woman of sense turning from such an opportunity, can you, a charaid?”
He took a quick look round the clearing, to see all was well, then ran up the steps and kissed me in quick farewell, before running down again to mount Gideon, who for once seemed amenable and made no effort to bite him.
“Keep well, mo nighean donn,” he said, smiling into my eyes. And then they were gone, thundering out of the clearing like a gang of Highland raiders, Ian’s ear-splitting whoops ringing from the trees.
ODDLY ENOUGH, the departure of the men seemed to ease things slightly. The talk, of course, went merrily on—but without Jamie or Ian there to serve as a lightning-rod, it merely crackled to and fro like St. Elmo’s fire; spitting, fizzing, and making everyone’s hair stand on end, but essentially a harmless phenomenon, unless touched directly.
The house felt less an embattled fortress, and more the eye of a storm.
Also, with Mr. Wemyss out of the house, Lizzie came to visit, bringing little Rodney Joseph, as the baby was called—Roger having set his face firmly against the young fathers’ enthusiastic suggestions of Tilgath-pileser and Ichabod. Wee Rogerina had come out of it all right, being now commonly known as Rory, but Roger declined entirely to hear of a child being christened anything that might result in his being known to the world at large as Icky.
Rodney seemed a very congenial child, in part because he had never quite lost that air of round-eyed astonishment that made him seem agog to hear what you had to say. Lizzie’s astonishment at his birth had mutated into an enchantment that might have completely eclipsed Jo and Kezzie, were it not for the fact that they shared it.
Either one of them would—unless forcibly stopped—spend half an hour discussing Rodney’s bowel habits with the intensity heretofore reserved for new snares and the peculiar things found inside the stomachs of animals they had killed. Pigs, it seemed, really would eat anything; so would Rodney.
A few days after the men’s departure on their bride-stealing expedition,