“Helping you,” he said, taking another handful. “You’ll be about that all day, Sassenach, doing it one at a time.” He crushed the second handful and dropped it, debris and all, into the basin.
“But picking all the shells out of there will—”
“We’ll winnow them,” he interrupted, turning and pointing with his chin toward the distant flank of Roan Mountain. “See the wind walkin’ down through the trees? There’s a storm a-boil.”
He was right: clouds were gathering behind the peak; the patches of pale aspen on the slope flickered as the rising wind touched their leaves, and the pines rippled in deep-green waves. I nodded and picked up several nuts to crush between my palms.
“Frank,” Jamie said abruptly, and I stopped dead. “Speakin’ of books …”
“What?” I said, not at all sure I’d just heard him say “Frank.” He had, though, and a small sense of unease coiled up at the base of my spine.
“I need ye to tell me something about him.” His attention was fixed on the basin of peanuts, but he wasn’t being casual about it.
“What?” I said again, but in an entirely different tone. I brushed peanut skins slowly off my skirts, my eyes on his face. He still wasn’t looking at me, but his mouth compressed briefly as he crushed a fresh handful.
“The picture of him on his book—the photograph. I was only wondering, how old was he when that likeness was made?”
I was surprised, but considered.
“Let me see … he was sixty when he died …” Younger than I am now … My lower lip tucked in for a moment, quite involuntarily, and Jamie looked at me sharply. I looked down and brushed away more peanut fragments.
“Fifty-nine. He had that photograph taken for that particular book cover; I remember, because he’d used the same photograph—a different, older one, I mean—for at least six books before that, and he joked that he didn’t want people meeting him for the first time to be looking over his shoulder for a man half his age.” I smiled a little, remembering, but met Jamie’s eyes, feeling slightly wary. “Why do you ask?”
“I used to wonder—sometimes—what he looked like.” He looked down and reached into the basin, but with the air of a man looking for something distracting to do. “When I’d pray for him.”
“You prayed for him?” I didn’t try to hide the amazement in my voice, and he glanced at me, then away.
“Aye. I—well, what else could I do for anybody then, but pray?” There was a tinge of bitterness to this; he heard it himself and cleared his throat. “‘God bless you, ye bloody Englishman!’ is what I’d say. At night, ken, when I thought of you and the bairn.” His mouth tightened for an instant, then relaxed. “I’d wonder what the bairn looked like, too.”
I reached out and closed my hand on his wrist, big and bony, his skin cold from the wind. He stopped crushing nuts and I squeezed his wrist, gently. He let out his breath and his shoulders relaxed a little.
“Does Frank look like you thought he did?” I asked curiously. I took my hand off his wrist and he picked up another handful of peanuts.
“No. Ye never told me what he looked like …” For bloody good reason. And you never asked, I thought. Why now?
He shrugged, and the twitch returned to his mouth, but now with a hint of humor.
“I liked thinkin’ of him as a short-arsed wee man, maybe losing his hair and soft round the middle.” He glanced at me and shrugged. The twitch had returned again. “I thought he was intelligent, though—ye wouldna have loved a stupid man. And I got the spectacles right. Though I thought they’d have gold rims, not black. Horn, are they? Or dark tortoiseshell?”
I gave a small, amused snort. Still, the sense of unease was back.
“Plastic. And no, he wasn’t stupid.” Not at all. And gooseflesh rippled briefly across my shoulders.
“Was he an honest man?” A soft crunch, the patter of peanuts and broken shells into the tin basin. The air was beginning to smell of oncoming rain and the rich, oily sweetness of peanuts.
“In most ways,” I said slowly, watching Jamie. His head was bent over the basin, intent on his work. “He kept secrets. But so did I.” Love has room for secrets—you said that to me once. I didn’t think there was room between us now for anything but the truth.
He made a small Scottish sound in the back of his throat; I couldn’t tell what he meant by it. He dropped the last handful of mangled shell into the basin and looked up to meet my eyes.