The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [263]
PEOPLE WERE STILL TALKING of it when we adjourned to the house, just before midnight, for stovies, beer, and cider, before the first-footing.
Mrs. Bug brought out a basket of apples, and gathered all the young unmarried girls together in a corner of the kitchen, where—with much giggling and glancing over shoulders toward the young men—each peeled a fruit, keeping the peeling in one piece. Each girl tossed her peel behind her, and the group all whirled round to cluster and exclaim over the fallen strip and see what was the shape of the letter it made.
Apple peelings being by their nature fairly circular, there were a good many “C”s, “G”s, and “O”s discovered—good news for Charley Chisholm, and Young Geordie Sutherland—and much speculation as to whether “Angus Og” might be the meaning of an “O” or not, for Angus Og MacLeod was a canty lad, and much liked, while the only “Owen” was an elderly widower, about five feet tall, and with a large wen on his face.
I had taken Jemmy up to put him to bed, and after depositing him limp and snoring in his cradle, came down in time to see Lizzie cast her peeling.
“‘C’!” chorused two of the Guthrie girls, almost knocking heads as they bent to look.
“No, no, it’s a ‘J’!”
Appealed to as the resident expert, Mrs. Bug bent down, eyeing the strip of red peel with her head on one side, like a robin sizing up a likely worm.
“A ‘J’ it is, to be sure,” she ruled, straightening up, and the group burst out in giggles, turning as one to stare at John Lowry, a young farmer from Woolam’s Mill, who peered over his shoulder at them in total bewilderment.
I caught a flash of red from the corner of my eye, and turned to see Brianna in the doorway to the hall. She tilted her head, beckoning me, and I hurried to join her.
“Roger’s ready to go out, but we couldn’t find the ground salt; it wasn’t in the pantry. Do you have it in your surgery?”
“Oh! Yes, I have,” I said guiltily. “I’d been using it to dry snakeroot, and forgot to put it back.”
Guests packed the porches and lined the wide hallway, spilling out of the kitchen and Jamie’s study, all talking, drinking, and eating, and I threaded my way through the crush after her toward my surgery, exchanging greetings as I ducked brandished cups of cider, stovie crumbs crunching under my feet.
The surgery itself was nearly empty, though; people tended to avoid it, through superstition, painful associations, or simple wariness, and I had not encouraged them to go in, leaving the room dark, with no fire burning. Only one candle was burning in the room now, and the only person present was Roger, who was poking among the bits and pieces I’d left on the counter.
He looked up as we entered, smiling. Still faintly flushed from the dancing, he had put his coat back on and draped a woolen scarf round his neck; his cloak lay over the stool beside him. Custom held that the most fortunate “firstfoot” on a Hogmanay was a tall and handsome dark-haired man; to welcome one as the first visitor across the threshold after midnight brought good fortune to the house for the coming year.
Roger being beyond argument the tallest—and quite the best-looking—dark man available, he had been elected to be firstfoot, not only for the Big House, as folk called it, but for those homes nearby. Fergus and Marsali and the others who lived near had already rushed off to their houses, to be ready to greet their firstfoot when he should come.
A red-haired man, though, was frightful ill luck as a firstfoot, and Jamie had been consigned to his study, under the riotous guard of the Lindsay brothers, who were to keep him safely bottled up ’til after midnight. There were no clocks nearer than Cross Creek, but old Mr. Guthrie had a pocket watch, even older than himself; this instrument would declare the mystic moment when one year yielded to the next. Given the watch’s propensity for stopping, I doubted that this would be more than a symbolic pronouncement, but that was quite enough, after all.
“Eleven-fifty,” Brianna declared,