“You’re—”
“We are.” He motioned the boys firmly away and dropped his voice. “I need to tell Bobby, but I dinna want him to come. Will ye help me talk him round?”
“Of course. But—” He glanced toward Aidan and Jemmy, slouched at the side of the cabin. “Ye’re not taking them?”
“I willna take Jem if ye say no—that’s yours to say. But I think Aidan must come.”
Roger gave him a look of intense skepticism, and Jamie shrugged.
“He must,” he repeated stubbornly. All the reasons why not were clustering like flies round his head, but the remembered sense of an orphaned boy’s helpless despair was an iron splinter in his heart—and that weighed heavier than the rest.
THE FIRE HAD gone out. In the cabin, and in Bobby, too. He sat hunched and sagging in the corner of the settle by his cold hearth, head bent over his open hands as though he sought some meaning in the lines on his palms. He didn’t look up when they came in.
Jamie sank down on one knee and laid his hand over Bobby’s; it was cold and flaccid, but the fingers twitched a little.
“Robert, a charaid,” he said quietly. “I am going now to hunt the bear. With God’s help, we will find it and kill it. Aidan wishes to come with us, and I think it is right that he should.”
Bobby’s head rose with a jerk.
“Aidan? You want to take Aidan after the bear that—that—”
“I do.” Jamie took hold of Bobby’s other hand and squeezed them. “I swear on my own grandson’s head that I willna let any harm come to him.”
“Your—you mean Jem? You’re taking him as well?” Confusion showed briefly through the deadness in Bobby’s eyes, and he looked over Jamie’s shoulder at Roger Mac. “He is?”
“Aye.” Roger’s Mac’s voice broke on the word, but he said it, bless him. Inspiration blossomed in Jamie’s mind, and with an inward prayer, he rolled his dice.
“Roger Mac will come as well,” he said, hoping he sounded completely sure of it. “He’ll mind both lads and see them safe.” He could feel Roger Mac’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his head, but he was sure it was the right thing. Blessed Michael, guide my tongue …
“My nephew Ian and Gillebride MacMillan will be with me, with dogs. The three of us—and three dogs—will have the upper hand of a bear, no matter how fierce. Roger Mac and the lads will be there only to bear witness for your wife. At a safe distance,” he added.
Bobby sat up, pulling his hands free, and looked to and fro, agitated.
“But—but I should go with you, then. Shouldn’t I?”
Roger, recognizing his cue, cleared his throat.
“Your wee lads need ye, Bobby,” he said gently. “Ye’ve got to mind them, aye? Ye’re all they’ve got left.”
Jamie felt those words strike suddenly and without warning, deep in his own wame. Felt again a bundle of cloth clutched hard against his breast, feeling the tiny pushings of the hours-old babe inside, himself shaking with terror at what he’d just done to save the boy—his son.
That’s what he’d thought. The only thought that came through the haze of fear and shock: His mother’s dead. I’m all he has.
And he saw it happen for Bobby, as it had for him. Saw the life fight its way back into his eyes, the bones of his body, melted with grief, begin to stiffen and form again. Bobby nodded, lips pressed tight together. Tears still ran down his face, but he rose from the settle, slow as an auld man but moving.
“Where are they?” he asked hoarsely. “Orrie and Rob?”
“With my daughter,” Jamie said. “At the house.” He lifted a brow at Roger Mac, who gave him an old-fashioned look but nodded.
“I’ll go up with ye, Bobby,” Roger Mac said, and to Jamie, “I’ll catch ye up. You and the lads.”
THE WOMEN WERE coming. I could hear their voices, faint in the distance, coming up from the creek. That would be Gillebride’s wife, with her eldest daughter, Kirsty, and Peggy Chisholm, who lived nearby, with her two eldest, Mairi and Agnes, and Peggy’s ancient mother-in-law, Auld Mam, who was Not Right in the Head and therefore couldn’t be left alone. Then there were nearer female voices and steps in the hall, and Fanny came in, solemn-faced, with Rachel and Jenny. She glanced at the quilt-hung doorway and then averted her eyes.
I let out my breath at sight of them, and with it, the sense of being keyed up to meet something dreadful that had been with me since Jem had stumbled breathless into the surgery to tell me what had happened.