“Not in kirk, they don’t. Not now.”
There was the briefest disturbance in the air at the words “not now.” Brianna saw Fergus and Marsali look at each other and neither one changed their expressions of tolerant amusement, but she’d felt it, like the prick of a thorn.
They know. She and Roger had never discussed it, but of course they did. Fergus had lived with her parents before the Rising and at Lallybroch after Culloden—when her mother had gone. And of course Young Ian and Jenny knew. Did Rachel? she wondered.
Roger didn’t act as though anything had happened; he was going on to tell what the various ministers had said about the sinful practice of singing on a Sunday, let alone in kirk! With imitations of each of the ministers’ pronouncements.
“So how did you answer these remarks?” Fergus asked. His face was flushed with laughter, and his hair had lost its ribbon and come mostly out of its plait, streaming over his shoulder in dark waves streaked with silver. Sharp-featured, and with deep-set eyes, he looked to Brianna like a wizard of some sort—maybe a young Gandalf, prior to turning gray.
“Well, I said that given the condition of my voice—and I told them how that happened …” He touched the white rope scar, still visible across his throat. “… I admitted to error, but said I didna think anything I’d done in church could possibly qualify as song. And I admitted to doing lined singing, the call and response—but that’s a legitimate thing to do in a Presbyterian kirk. And in the end, it was really only the Reverend Selverson who was truly concerned about it, and the others overbore him. Oddly enough,” he added, holding out his glass for whatever was being poured at the moment, “it was your da who made the difference.”
“As he often does,” Brianna said dryly. “What on earth did he do this time?”
“Just being who he is.” Roger leaned back, relaxed, and his eyes met hers, still amused but quieter, with a softness in their depths that said he’d like to be alone with her. “The Reverend Thomas made the point that as I was Colonel Fraser’s son-in-law, my being a fully ordained minister was bound to have a beneficial influence on the colonel and thus indirectly on a great many other souls, your da being their landlord. And the Reverend Selverson, as it turns out, actually knows your da and thinks well of him, despite him being a Papist, so …” He held out a hand, flat, and tilted it to show the turning of opinion in his favor.
“Well, Da’s a man that could use a priest, more than most,” Marsali said. Everyone laughed, and so did Brianna, but she couldn’t help wondering what her mother might have to say about that.
“IT’S ONLY TWO dozen guns,” Roger said, shucking his black coat in the loft before dinner. “But they’re rifles, not muskets. I’ve no notion of their quality, because they’re coated with grease and wrapped in canvas and buried under two hundred or so pounds of Jamaican bat guano, but—don’t laugh, I’m not joking.”
“I’m not,” she said, laughing. “Where on earth did they come from? Here, give me that, I’ll take it down and hang it in the airing cupboard—it smells like …”
“Bat guano,” he said, nodding as he handed her the limp, damp coat. “And sweat. A lot of sweat.”
She eyed his torso, and the white shirt now pasted to it, and turned to fetch a fresh—well, dry at least—shirt from the trunk.
“The guns?” she prompted, handing it to him.
“Ah.” He pulled the wet shirt off with a sigh of relief and stood for a moment, arms outstretched, letting the faint breeze off the river wash his naked flesh with coolness. “Oh, God. Guns … Well. Ye recall Fergus telling us about your Mr. Brumby importing half his molasses and smuggling the other half?”
“I do.”
“Well, it appears that molasses isn’t the only thing Mr. Brumby smuggles.”
“You’re kidding!” She stared at him, halfway between delight and dismay. “He’s running guns?”
“And likely anything else that will make him a profit,” he assured her, worming his way into the folds of the fresh shirt. “Your potential employer appears to be one of the biggest smugglers in the Carolinas, according to one Monsieur Faucette, who dabbles himself.”
“But Lord John thinks he’s a loyal Tory—Brumby, I mean.”
“He may actually be a Tory,” Roger said, turning back a cuff. “Though his loyalty is quite possibly open to question. We don’t know what he was planning to do with the guns, once he got them—but it isn’t likely that the British army is depending on Brumby to get them arms.”