I said a quick prayer that our own busy bees would survive their adventures unscathed and make it back to our hive in the spring. Then I recalled Agnes.
“Oh, we’ve someone new. She’s called Agnes and at the moment she smells pretty strongly of lye soap and hyssop, because I had to nit-comb her hair, but I’m sure that’s only temporary—the smell, I mean; the nits are gone. I’ll bring her up tomorrow and introduce her to you.”
It was comforting to think that Fanny wasn’t rattling around in the big house by herself. She and Agnes had quite hit it off, after a brief initial wariness. When I’d left to come up to the garden, they’d been sitting on the porch braiding onions and garlic and speculating about Bobby Higgins’s marital prospects, since they could see the cabin below and Bobby repairing a rotted plank in the stoop, Aidan helping him, and the two little boys chasing each other round and round the cabin, shrieking.
“Would you have him?” Fanny had asked Agnes. “You had—I mean, have,” she corrected herself hastily, “little brothers, so maybe you could deal with the boys.”
“I could,” Agnes said doubtfully, laying a fresh braid of onions on the trug. “But I don’t know about him. Mr. Higgins, I mean. Judith MacCutcheon says the scar on his cheek is an M, and that stands for ‘Murderer.’ I think I’d be afraid to lie with a man who’s killed someone.”
“It’s easier than you think, child,” I said under my breath, recalling this.
Still, it was true that while the competition to be the next Mrs. Higgins continued, some of the young women—and some of their families—on the Ridge viewed Bobby with a slightly jaundiced eye, now that he was a widower and in the market for a wife. When he’d married Amy McCallum, taken on her sons Aidan and Orrie, and quickly produced little Rob, the community had come slowly to accept him. But now, when he might be marrying one of their daughters, they were seeing him again as a Sassenach and remembering that he had been a soldier—and a redcoat. And a murderer, with a brand on his face to testify to his crime.
I pushed aside the small pile of weeds—I had a row of such piles along the edge of the turnip patch, each more wilted and decaying than the one beside it. I kept them to prove to myself that I was, in fact, accomplishing something, though if I looked over my shoulder, it was apparent that the weeds were gaining on me. Jamie referred to the little heaps as my scalps—which, while he meant it to be funny, was actually not wrong.
There were other things to do today, though, so I rose, knees creaking, and rolled up my mat.
I picked up the basket of tomatoes, turnips, and herb cuttings and paused at the garden gate, looking down at the house. The girls had vanished from the porch, and the trug was gone, too—likely they’d gone to the root cellar with the onions.
Fanny was—we thought—thirteen now; Agnes fourteen. Girls did marry at such ages, but they weren’t going to if I—and Jamie—had anything to say about it, and we did.
A flicker of movement caught my eye through the trees. A woman … a young woman, in a blue-checked blouse and a gray skirt with an embroidered petticoat just showing beneath. Her head came into view and I recognized Caitriona McCaskill. She also carried a basket, and was headed downhill with a sense of purpose. Not everyone had reservations regarding Bobby Higgins.
“And what do you think of her?” I asked the bees, but if they had an opinion, they kept it to themselves.
67
Réunion
Charles Town, South Carolina
MANDY WAS BUG-EYED WITH excitement and incoherent—but by no means silent—about everything she saw, from the clouds of mosquitoes drifting around them, and flocks of birds that were presumably eating the mosquitoes, to black slaves at work in the rice fields.
“Uncle Joe!” she shouted, hanging half out of the wagon and waving madly. “Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe!”
“That’s not Uncle Joe,” Jem told her, grabbing the back of her pinafore. “He’s in Boston.” He glanced quickly at his mother, who nodded, thankful for the intervention. She and Roger had had a private talk with both Jem and Germain about slavery—and a slightly more private talk with Jem.
“Look, Mandy!” Germain had grabbed Mandy’s arm, turning her to see a huge blue heron looking disapprovingly at them from an undrained paddy, and no more was said about the men and women working with tiny hand scythes on the other side of the road, bending and stooping in the thick, hot air, harvesting the knee-deep yellowing grain.