Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [384]
“Duncan Innes came to fetch him, not an hour since,” Mrs. Lindsey said, shading her eyes against the late sun as she stood in the doorway of her house. “I make nay doubt they’ll be to your house the noo. Will ye and your lassie no step in, Mac Dubh, and have a taste of something?”
“Ah, no, I thank ye, Mrs. Kenny. My wife will be having the supper ready for us. But perhaps ye could be tellin’ me whether this wee bawbee is from Kenny’s coat?”
Mrs. Lindsey peered at the button in his hand, then shook her head.
“No, indeed. Have I not just finished sewing on a whole fresh set of buttons for him, that’s he’s carved from the bone of a deer? The bonniest things ye ever saw, too,” she declared, with pride in her husband’s craftsmanship. “Each one has got a wee face on it, grinnin’ like an imp, and each one different!”
Her eye ran speculatively over Brianna.
“There’s Kenny’s brother, now,” she said. “With a fine wee place near Cross Creek—twenty acres in tobacco, and a good creek through it. He’ll be at the Gathering at Mount Helicon; perhaps you’ll be going, Mac Dubh?”
Jamie shook his head, smiling at the bald hint. There were few available women in the colony, and even though Jamie had given it out that Brianna was promised elsewhere, this had not by any means put a stop to the matchmaking attempts.
“I fear not this year, Mrs. Kenny. Perhaps the next, but I canna spare the time just now.”
They took their leave politely, and turned toward home, the sinking sun at their backs casting long shadows on the path ahead of them.
“Do you think the button’s important?” Brianna asked curiously.
Jamie shrugged slightly. A light breeze lifted the hair on the crown of his head, and tugged at the leather thong that held it back.
“I canna say. It could be nothing—but it could be something, too. Your mother told me what Ronnie Sinclair said, about the man in Cross Creek, asking about the whisky.”
“Hodgepile?” Brianna couldn’t help smiling at the name. Jamie returned the smile briefly, then became serious again.
“Aye. If the button belongs to someone on the Ridge—they ken well enough where the still is, and they might stop to look and no harm done. But if it was to be a stranger …” He glanced at her and shrugged again.
“It’s none so easy for a man to pass unnoticed here—unless he should be hiding a-purpose. A man come for any innocent reason would stop at a house for a bit of food and drink, and I’d hear of it the same day. But there’s been nothing of the sort. Nor would it be an Indian; they dinna use such things in their clothing.”
A gust of wind whirred across the path in a swirl of brown and yellow leaves, and they turned uphill, toward the cabin. They walked in near silence, affected by the growing quiet of the woods; the birds were still singing twilight songs, but the shadows were lengthening under the trees. The northern slope of the mountain across the valley had already gone dark and silent, as the sun edged behind it.
The cabin’s clearing was still filled with sunlight, though, filtered through a yellow blaze of chestnut trees. Claire was in the palisaded garden, a basin on one hip, snapping beans from poled vines. Her slender figure was silhouetted dark against the sun, her hair a great aureole of curly gold.
“Innisfree,” Brianna said involuntarily, stopping dead at the sight.
“Innisfree?” Jamie glanced at her, bewildered.
She hesitated, but there was no way out of explaining.
“It’s a poem, or part of one. Daddy always used to say it, when he’d come home and find Mama puttering in her garden—he said she’d live out there if she could. He used to joke that she—that she’d leave us someday, and go find a place where she could live by herself, with nothing but her plants.”
“Ah.” Jamie’s face was calm, its broad planes ruddy in the dying light. “How does the poem go, then?”
She was conscious of a small tightness round her heart as she said it.
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles
made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee.