The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [60]
“Factor?” Roger felt a small jolt at the word, as though someone had punched him just beneath the breastbone.
“Aye, for times when Himself must be abroad or occupied with other business. For it’s true enough—fields and tenants dinna tend themselves.”
Duncan spoke with a certain note of ruefulness; once a simple fisherman from Coigach, he frequently found the responsibilities of running a large plantation onerous, and he glanced now at Mr. Bug with a small gleam of covetousness, as though he thought momentarily of tucking this useful person into his pocket and taking him home to River Run. Of course, Roger reflected, that would have meant taking Mrs. Bug, too.
“And just the thing it is, too, such good fortune, and me telling Arch just yesterday that the best we might hope for was to find work in Edenton or Cross Creek, with Arch maybe takin’ to the boats, but that’s such a perilous living, is it no? Wet to the skin half the time and deadly agues risin’ up from the swamps like ghoulies and the air sae thick wi’ the miasma as it’s not fit to breathe, and me perhaps to be takin’ in laundry in the toon whilst he was gone abroad on the water, though I’m sure I should hate that, for we havena been apart one night since we married, have we, my dearie?”
She cast a glance of devotion upward at her tall husband, who smiled gently down at her. Perhaps Mr. Bug was deaf, Roger thought. Or perhaps they had only been married a week?
Without his needing to inquire, though, he was informed that the Bugs had been husband and wife for more than forty years. Arch Bug had been a minor tacksman to Malcolm Grant of Glenmoriston, but the years after the Rising had been hard. The estate he had held for Grant having been confiscated by the English Crown, Bug had made do for some years as a crofter, but then had been obliged by hardship and starvation to take his wife and their little remaining money and seek a new life in America.
“We had thought to try in Edinburgh—” the old gentleman said, his speech slow and courtly, with a soft Highland lilt. So he wasn’t deaf, Roger thought. Yet.
“—for I had a cousin there as was to do wi’ one of the banking houses, and we thought that perhaps it would be that he could speak a word in someone’s ear—”
“But I was far too ancient and lacked sufficient skill—”
“—and lucky they would have been to have him, too! But nay, such fools as they were, they wouldna think of it, and so we had to come awa and try if we might . . .”
Duncan met Roger’s eye and hid a smile beneath his drooping mustache as the tale of the Bugs’ adventures poured out in this syncopated fashion. Roger returned the smile, trying privately to dismiss a niggling sense of discomfort.
Factor. Someone to oversee matters on the Ridge, to mind the planting, tend the harvest, deal with the concerns of tenants when Jamie Fraser was away or busy. An obvious necessity, with the recent influx of new tenants and the knowledge of what the next few years would bring.
It wasn’t until this moment, though, that Roger realized that he had subconsciously assumed that he would be Jamie’s right hand in such affairs. Or the left, at least.
Fergus assisted Jamie to some extent, riding on errands and fetching back information. Fergus’s lack of a hand limited what he could do physically, though, and he couldn’t be dealing with the paperwork or accounts; Jenny Murray had taught the French orphan her brother had adopted to read—after a fashion—but had failed utterly to give him a grasp of numbers.
Roger stole a glance at Mr. Bug’s hand, resting now in affection on his wife’s plump shoulder. It was broad, work-worn, and strong-looking despite the mutilation, but the remaining fingers were badly twisted with arthritis, the joints knobby and painful in appearance.
So Jamie thought that even an elderly, half-crippled man would be better equipped than Roger to handle the affairs of Fraser’s Ridge? That was an unexpectedly bitter thought.
He knew his father-in-law had doubts of