Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [379]
“I was afraid you’d feel …” My voice trailed off. I had been afraid he would feel guilty, worry that I blamed him—I once had—for the loss. We were newly reunited, then; I had no wish to jeopardize the tender link between us.
“So was I.”
“I’m sorry that you never saw her,” I said at last, and felt him sigh. He turned toward me and put his arms around me, his lips brushing my forehead.
“It doesna matter, does it? Aye, it’s true, what ye say, Sassenach. She was—and we will have her, always. And Brianna. If—when she goes—she will still be with us.”
“Yes. It doesn’t matter what happens; no matter where a child goes—how far or how long. Even if it’s forever. You never lose them. You can’t.”
He didn’t answer, but his arms tightened round me, and he sighed once more. The breeze stirred the air above us with the sound of angels’ wings, and we fell slowly asleep together, as the moonlight bathed us in its ageless peace.
43
WHISKY IN THE JAR
I didn’t like Ronnie Sinclair. I never had liked him. I didn’t like his half-handsome face, his foxy smile, or the way his eyes met mine: so direct, so openly honest, that you knew he was hiding something even when he wasn’t. I particularly didn’t like the way he was looking at my daughter.
I cleared my throat loudly, making him jump. He turned a sharp-toothed smile on me, idly turning a truss ring in his hands.
“Jamie says he’ll need a dozen more of the small whisky casks by the end of the month, and I’ll need a large barrel of hickory wood for the smoked meat, as soon as you can manage.”
He nodded and made a number of cryptic marks on a slab of pine that hung on the wall. Oddly for a Scot, Sinclair couldn’t write but had some sort of private shorthand that enabled him to keep track of orders and accounts.
“Right, Missus Fraser. Anything else?”
I paused, trying to reckon up all the possible necessities for cooperage that might spring up before snowfall. There would be fish and meat to salt down, but those did better in stoneware jars; wooden casks left them tasting of turpentine. I had a good seasoned barrel for apples and another for squash already; the potatoes would be stored on shelves to keep from rotting.
“No,” I decided. “That will be all.”
“Aye, missus.” He hesitated, twirling the cask band faster. “Will Himself be coming down before the casks are ready?”
“No; he has the barley to get in, and the slaughtering to do, as well as the distilling. Everything’s late, because of the trial.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Why, though? Do you have a message for him?”
Sited at the foot of the cove nearest the wagon road, the cooper’s shop was the first building most visitors encountered, and thus a reception point for most gossip that came from outside Fraser’s Ridge.
Sinclair tilted his gingery head, considering.
“Och, likely it’s nothing. Only that I’ve heard of a stranger in the district, asking questions about Jamie Fraser.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Brianna’s head snap round, distracted at once from her inspection of the spokeshavers, mallets, saws, and axes on the wall. She turned, skirt rustling in the wood shavings that littered the shop, ankle-deep.
“Do you know the stranger’s name?” she asked anxiously. “Or what he looks like?”
Sinclair shot her a look of surprise. He was oddly proportioned, with slender shoulders but muscular arms, and hands so huge that they might have belonged to a man twice his height. He looked at her, and his broad thumb unconsciously stroked the metal of the ring, slowly, over and over again.
“Why, I couldna speak to his appearance, mistress,” he said, politely enough, but with a hungry look in his eyes that made me want to take the truss ring away from him and wrap it around his neck. “He gave his name as Hodgepile, though.”
Brianna’s face lost its look of hope, though the muscle at the edge of her mouth curved slightly at the name.
“I don’t suppose that could be Roger,” she murmured to me.
“Likely not,” I agreed. “He wouldn’t have any reason to use a false name, anyway.” I turned back to