“Jenny’s teachin’ wee Rachel the Gàidhlig,” he said, unnecessarily. “Set it down here, Ian.” He nodded at the pool of shade under a fallen log. “The women will ha’ a fit if we bring flies into the house.”
Someone in the house had heard them, for the singing stopped and a head poked out of the open door.
“Ian!” A tallish, very pretty dark-haired girl popped out and hopped off the porch, grabbing Ian round the middle in exuberant embrace, this instantly returned. “Thy cousins have come! Does thee know?”
“Aye, I do,” he said, kissing her mouth. “Come say hello to my cousin Brianna, mo ghràidh. Oh—and Uncle Jamie, too,” he added, turning round.
Bree was already smiling, moved by the obvious love between the young Murrays, and glancing at her father she saw the same smile on his face. Saw it broaden as he looked beyond them to the open door, where a small woman had come out, a baby wearing nothing but a clout in her arms.
“Who—” she began, and then her eyes fell on Brianna, and her mouth dropped open.
“Blessed Bride protect us,” she said mildly, but her eyes were warm, blue, and slanted like Jamie’s, smiling up at Brianna. “The giants have come. And your husband, too, they say, and him even taller than yourself, lass. And ye’ve bairns, too, they say—all of them springin’ up like weeds, I reckon?”
“Toadstools,” Bree said, laughing, and bent down to hug her diminutive aunt. Jenny smelled of goats, fresh wool, porridge, and toasted yeast bread, and a faint scent in her hair and clothes that Bree had long forgotten but recognized instantly as the soap Jenny had made at Lallybroch, with honey and lavender and a Highland herb that had no name in English.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said, and felt tears well in her eyes, for the soap brought back Lallybroch as she’d first seen it—and with that ghost, another, stronger one behind it: the ghost of her own Lallybroch.
She blinked back the tears and straightened up, a tremulous smile pasted on her face. This vanished at once, though, as she remembered.
“Oh, Auntie! I’m so sorry. About Uncle Ian, I mean.” A new wave of loss washed through her. Even though Ian Murray the elder had been dead all of her life, save for a few brief years, and she had met him only once, the loss seemed fresh and shocking now.
Jenny looked down, patting the baby’s tender back. He had a downy head of brown-blond fuzz, like a guinea hen’s chick.
“Ach,” she said softly. “My Ian’s wi’ me still. I can see him in this wee’un’s face, clear as day.”
She turned the baby deftly so he rested on her hip, looking up at Brianna with big round eyes—eyes the same warm light brown of her cousin Ian—and his father.
“Oh,” Brianna said, charmed and comforted at once. She reached out a tentative hand and offered the baby a finger. “And your name is … Oggy?”
Jenny and Rachel both laughed, one with honest amusement and the other ruefully.
“I’m afraid we haven’t managed to find the proper name for him as yet,” Rachel said, touching him gently on the shoulder. Oggy turned toward his mother’s voice and kept on turning, leaning slowly out of Jenny’s arms like a sloth drawn ineluctably toward sweet fruit.
Rachel gathered him up, gently touching his cheek. He turned his head—again slowly—and started sucking on her knuckle.
“Ian says that Mohawk children find their proper names when they’re older, and have just cradle-names until then.”
Jenny’s shapely black eyebrows rose at this.
“Ye mean to tell me that the bairn’s going to be Oggy until … when?”
“Oh, no,” Rachel assured her. “I’m sure I’ll think of something before ‘when.’” She smiled at her mother-in-law, who rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to Brianna.
“I’m glad ye didna have such trouble wi’ your own bairns, a nighean. Jamie said in his letters that they’re called Jeremiah and Amanda, is that right?”
Brianna coughed, avoiding Rachel’s eye.
“Um … Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie,” she said. “And Amanda Claire Hope MacKenzie.”
Jenny nodded approvingly, whether at the quality or the quantity of the names.
“Jenny!” Bree’s father appeared on the porch, sweaty and disheveled, bloodstained shirt much in evidence. “Ian canna find the beer.”
“We drank it,” Jenny called back, not turning a hair.