“Are you all right, Fanny?” Bree whispered back. “Do you want anything to eat?”
Fanny shook her head, neat white cap like a mushroom poking through soil.
“Mrs. Fraser brought me supper. I said Bluey and me would stay with Orrie and Rob,” she said, careful with her r’s. “If they wake up—”
“Not likely,” Bree said, smiling despite her disquiet. “But you can come get me, if they do.”
A little of the sleeping children’s peace stayed with her as she left the surgery, but it vanished the moment she stepped back into the kitchen, hot and teeming with people. Her stays felt suddenly tighter and she lingered by the wall, trying to remember how to breathe from the lower abdomen.
“Does Bobby own his cabin?” Moira Talbert was asking, her eyes fixed speculatively on the little knot of people surrounding Bobby Higgins. “Himself built it, and I ken his lass and her man dwelt there for a time, but Joseph Wemyss told Andrew Baldwin as how Himself had given Bobby and Amy the place, but he didna say was it the house and land by deed, or only the use of it.”
“Dinna ken,” Peggy Chisholm replied, her own eyes narrowing in speculation. She glanced toward the far side of the room, where her two daughters were helping to cut and lay out slices of a vast fruitcake soaked in whisky that Mandaidh MacLeod had brought down. “D’ye think maybe that Himself has it in mind to wed his wee orphan lass to Bobby, though? If it was her, he’d see Bobby right for the cabin, sure …”
“Too young,” said Sophia MacMillan, shaking her head. “She’s but a maid yet.”
“Aye, and he needs a mother for his wee lads,” Annie Babcock put in dismissively. “That one couldn’t say boo to a goose. Now, there’s my cousin Martina, she’s seventeen, and—”
“Even so, the man’s a murderer,” Peggy interrupted. “I dinna think I want him for a son-in-law, even with a good hoose.”
Brianna, stifled by amazement, found her voice at this.
“Bobby’s not a murderer,” she said, and was surprised to hear how hoarse she was. She cleared her throat hard and repeated, “He’s not a murderer. He was a soldier, and he shot someone during a riot. In Boston.”
A small jolt ran through her at the word “Boston.” The Old State House behind her and the smell of traffic, with the big round bronze plaque set into the asphalt at her feet. Her fifth-grade classmates clustered around it, all shivering in the wind off the harbor. The Boston Massacre, the plate read.
“A riot,” she said, more firmly. “A big group of people attacked a small group of soldiers. Bobby shot someone to save the soldiers’ lives.”
“Oh, aye?” said Sarah MacBowen with a skeptical arch of her brow. “So why is it he’s got yon M on his face, then?”
The scar had faded in the ten years since, but was clearly visible now; Bobby sat by the coffin, and the pale glow of the candle showed the mark of the brand, dark against the whiteness of his face. She saw that he was still gripping the edge of the pine coffin, as though he could keep Amy from going from him, refusing to acknowledge that she was already gone.
Brianna had to go to him. Had to look at Amy. Had to apologize.
“Excuse me,” she said abruptly, and pushed past Moira.
A small group of Bobby’s friends were clustered about him, murmuring gruff words and giving him an occasional consoling squeeze of the shoulder. She hung back, awaiting an opening, her heartbeat thumping in her ears.
“Och, Brianna!” A hand clutched her arm, and Ruthie MacLeod leaned in to peer at her. “Are ye all right, a nighean? They’re sayin’ as how ye were with Amy when the wicked beast took her—is it so?”
“Yes,” she said. Her lips felt stiff.
“What happened?” Beathag Moore and another young woman were clustering behind Ruthie, eyes bright with curiosity. “How close were ye to the bear?”
As though the word “bear” had been a signal, heads turned toward Brianna.
“As close as I am to you right now,” she said. She could barely hear her own words; her heart had speeded up and … oh, God. It burst into a violent flutter in her chest, as though a flock of sparrows were trapped inside her, and black spots swam at the edges of her sight. She couldn’t breathe.
“I—I have to—” She made a helpless gesture at the avid faces, turned, and lurched out of the room, half-running for the stairs.
She was pulling at her bodice as she reached the landing, and all but ripped it off as she stumbled into the bedroom and pushed the door closed behind her.