Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [67]
Fergus was standing in the prow, arms crossed, giving a splendid impression of a noble figurehead, with his sternly handsome profile pointed upriver, thick, dark hair flowing back from his brow.
“Ah, milady!” He greeted me with a sudden dazzle of white teeth. “Is this not a splendid country?”
What I could see at the moment was not particularly splendid, the landscape consisting of an extensive mudflat, reeking in the sun, and a large collection of gulls and seabirds, all raucously excited about something smelly they had found near the water’s edge.
“Milord tells me that any man may enter a claim for fifty acres of land, so long as he builds a house upon it, and promises to work it for a period of ten years. Imagine—fifty acres!” He rolled the words around in his mouth, savoring them with a kind of awe. A French peasant might think himself well blessed with five.
“Well, yes,” I said, a little doubtfully. “I think you ought to pick your fifty acres carefully, though. Some parts of this place aren’t much good for farming.” I didn’t hazard a guess as to how difficult Fergus might find it to carve a farm and homestead out of a howling wilderness with one hand, no matter how fertile the ground.
He wasn’t paying attention in any case, his eyes shiny with dreams.
“I might perhaps have a small house built by Hogmanay,” he murmured to himself. “Then I could send for Marsali and the child in the spring.” His hand went automatically to the vacant spot on his chest, where the greenish medal of St. Dismas had hung since his childhood.
He had come to join us in Georgia, leaving his young and pregnant wife behind in Jamaica, under the care of friends. He assured me that he had no fear for her safety, however, for he had left her also under the protection of his patron saint, with strict instructions not to remove the battered medal from around her neck until she was safely delivered.
I wouldn’t myself have thought that mothers and babies fell into the sphere of influence of the patron saint of thieves, but Fergus had lived as a pickpocket for all his early life, and his trust in Dismas was absolute.
“Will you call the baby Dismas, if it’s a boy?” I asked, joking.
“No,” he said in all seriousness. “I shall call him Germaine. Germaine James Ian Aloysius Fraser—James Ian for Milord and Monsieur,” he explained, for so he always referred to Jamie and his brother-in-law, Ian Murray.
“Marsali liked Aloysius,” he added dismissively, making it clear that he had had nothing to do with the choice of so undistinguished a name.
“And what if it’s a girl?” I asked, with a sudden vivid memory. Twenty-odd years before, Jamie had sent me back through the stones, pregnant. And the last thing he had said to me, convinced the child I carried was a boy, was, “Name him Brian, for my father.”
“Oh.” Fergus had clearly not considered this possibility, either, for he looked vaguely disconcerted. Then his features cleared.
“Genevieve,” he said firmly. “For Madame,” by this meaning Jenny Murray, Jamie’s sister. “Genevieve Claire, I think,” he added, with another dazzling smile.
“Oh,” I said, flustered and oddly flattered. “Well. Thank you. Are you sure that you ought not to go back to Jamaica to be with Marsali, Fergus?” I asked, changing the subject.
He shook his head decidedly.
“Milord may have need of me,” he said. “And I am of more use here than I should be there. Babies are women’s work, and who knows what dangers we may encounter in this strange place?”
As though in answer to this rhetorical question, the gulls rose in a squawking cloud, wheeling out over the river and mudflats, revealing the object of their appetite.
A stout pine stake had been driven into the mud of the bank, the top of it a foot below the dark, weedy line that marked the upper reaches of the incoming tide. The tide was still low; it had reached no higher than halfway up the stake. Above the lapping waves of silty water hung the figure of a man, fastened to the stake by a chain