“So if it should happen that the British were already coming south, D’Estaing—he’s the French admiral,” he explained, “D’Estaing will sail at once to the south. And if what he told me is correct, the French ships will come here.”
Roger swallowed and wished he’d listened to his baser urges and had that drink first. “Actually,” he said, “they’re going to Savannah. The Americans are going to attack Savannah. Quite soon.”
Both of Fergus’s dark brows quirked up at that. Roger coughed.
“So that’s where the French are going,” Roger said. “To support General Lincoln’s troops at—”
“But General Lincoln is here!”
Roger waved a hand, still coughing.
“For the moment,” he agreed. “And he’ll leave a garrison here, of course. But he’s taking a lot of men to Savannah. They won’t succeed, though,” he finished, feeling apologetic. “But then they’ll come back here. And then General Cornwallis—I think it’s Cornwallis—will be coming down from New York. Clinton and Cornwallis will besiege the city and take it. And … erm … I’m thinking that perhaps you and Marsali might think of not being here when that happens?”
Fergus’s eyes were as close to round as they could possibly get.
“I mean,” Roger said. “It’s not like you can easily hide.”
That made Fergus smile, just a little.
“I have not forgotten how to become invisible,” he assured Roger. “But it’s much more difficult to make a wife and five children disappear. And I cannot leave Marsali to run the newspaper alone, not with two infants to feed and the town alive with soldiers.” He wiped a sleeve across his sweat-shiny face, blew out his cheeks, and sat down on a stack of white-dusted crates crudely labeled Guano with a slapdash brush.
“So.” He gave Roger a sidelong glance. “You are telling me that the British will possess both Savannah and Charles Town?”
“For a while. Not permanently—I mean, you, er, we will in fact win the war. But not for another two years.”
He saw Fergus’s throat move as he swallowed and the hairs rise on his lean forearms, bared by turned-back sleeves.
“You … um … Bree said she thought you … er … knew,” he said carefully. “About—Claire, I mean. And, um, us.” He sat down beside Fergus on the crate, careful to lift the skirts of his black coat away from the white dust.
Fergus shook his head—not in negation, but as one trying to shake its contents into some pattern resembling sense.
“As I said,” he replied, the smile returning briefly to his eyes, “I know a lot of things I don’t publish in the newspaper.” He straightened up, hand—and hook—on his knees.
“I was with milord and milady during the Rising, and you know”—he raised a brow in question—“that milord hired me in Paris, to steal letters for him? I read them—and I heard milord and milady talk. In private.” A brief smile twitched his mouth and disappeared.
“I didn’t truly believe it, of course. Not until the morning before the battle, when milord gave me the Deed of Sasine to Lallybroch and bade me take it to his sister. And then, of course … milady vanished.” His voice was soft, and Roger could see what he hadn’t realized before—the depth of Fergus’s feeling for Claire, the first mother he remembered. “But milord would never say that she was dead. He didn’t talk about her—but when someone pushed him—”
“His sister?” Thought of Jenny made Roger smile. So did Fergus.
“Yes. He would never say that she was dead. Only … that she was gone.”
“And then she came back,” Roger said quietly.
“Oui.” Fergus looked at him, thoughtfully examining his face, as though to make sure of the man he was talking to. “And plainly, Brianna and you are … what milady is.” A thought struck him, and his eyes widened. “Les enfants. Are they …？”
“Yes. Both of them.”
Fergus said something in French that was well beyond Roger’s ability to translate, and then fell silent, thinking. He reached absently between the buttons of his shirt, and Roger realized that he was touching the small medal of St. Dismas that he always wore. The patron saint of thieves.
Roger turned away, to give him some privacy, and looked out across the river, then farther, to the harbor itself and the invisible sea beyond. Oddly enough, the sense of peace with which he’d left the Reverend Selverson’s house was still with him, immanent in the drifting clouds of a mackerel sky, just going pink round the edges, and the quiet lapping of the water against the pilings beneath them.