Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [320]
“Yourself and the boys, aye, that’ll do,” the captain said. He frowned at the woman, who didn’t look up. “No one will buy a woman with so many young ones—she might keep one, perhaps. You’ll have to sell the girls, though.”
The man glanced back at his family. His wife kept her head down, unmoving, not looking at anything. One of the girls twitched and jerked, though, complaining in an undertone that her hand was being crushed. The man turned back.
“All right,” he said, low-voiced. “Can they—might they—go together?”
The captain rubbed a hand across his mouth, and nodded indifferently.
“Likely enough.”
Roger didn’t wait to witness the details of the transaction. He got up abruptly and left the pub; the dark beer had lost its taste.
He paused in the street outside, fingering the coins in his pocket. It was all he had been able to collect of suitable money, in the time he’d had. He had thought that it would be enough, though; he was good-sized and had a fair amount of confidence in his own abilities. Still, the little scene he had witnessed in the pub had shaken him.
He had grown up with the history of the Highlands. He knew well enough the sorts of things that drove families to such a pitch of desperation that they would accept permanent separation and semislavery as the price of survival.
He knew all about the sale of lands that forced small crofters off the lands their families had tended for hundreds of years, all about the dreadful conditions of penury and starvation in the cities, the simple insupportable-ness of life in Scotland in these days. And not all his years of reading and study had prepared him for the look of that woman’s face, her eyes fixed on the fresh-sanded floor, her daughters’ hands clutched hard in her own.
Ten pounds, eight shillings. Or four pounds, two. Plus whatever it might cost for food. He had exactly fourteen shillings, threepence in his pocket, together with a handful of copper doits and a couple of farthings.
He walked slowly down the lane that led along the seaside, glancing at the collection of ships that lay moored by the wooden docks. Fishing ketches, for the most part, small galleys and brigs that plied their trade up and down the Firth, or at most ran across the Channel, carrying cargo and passengers to France. Only three large ships lay at anchor in the Firth, those of a size to brave the winds of the Atlantic crossing.
He could cross to France, of course, and take ship from there. Or travel overland to Edinburgh, a much larger port than Inverness. But it would be late in the year then, for sailing. Brianna was six weeks before him already; he could waste no time in finding her—God knew what could happen to a woman alone here.
Four pounds, two shillings. Well, he could work, certainly. With neither children nor wife to support, he could save most of his earnings. But given that the average clerk earned something like twelve pounds per year, and that he was much more likely to find work shoveling stables than keeping accounts, the chances of his saving up passage money in any reasonable time were fairly slim.
“First things first,” he muttered. “Be sure where she’s gone, before you trouble about getting there yourself.”
Taking his hand out of his pocket, he turned right between two warehouses, and into a narrow lane. His high spirits of the morning had largely evaporated, but they lifted slightly, nonetheless, when he saw that he had been right in his guess; the harbormaster’s office was where he had known it must be—in the same squat stone building where it still would be, two hundred years hence. Roger smiled with wry humor; Scots were not inclined to make changes purely for the sake of change.
It was crowded and busy inside, with four harried clerks behind a battered wooden counter, scribbling and stamping, carrying bundles of paper to and fro, taking money