“When you say ‘evil,’ though …” he began slowly.
“There were only two men in that room,” Fergus said simply. “Besides us, I mean.”
“Jesus.” He tried to think what the tall man had said or done that might have given Fergus the conviction—and it was a conviction, he could see that much in Fergus’s face—that the man was evil. “I can’t even remember what he looked like.”
“In my experience, the Devil seldom walks up and introduces himself to you by name,” Fergus said dryly. “All I can tell you is that I know evil when I see it—and I saw it on that man.”
Fergus stood up and went to the window, pulling back the lace curtain to look out. He drew a large black bandanna out of his pocket and wiped his face with it. “So the ink stains don’t show,” he said briefly, seeing Roger notice.
“So what do you plan to do about … this? If anything?”
Fergus exhaled strongly through his long French nose.
“You tell me that the city will soon fall to the British. These crétins offer me ridiculous daydreams. But”—he raised a monitory hook to stop Roger butting in—“they do have money, and they do mean business. I just don’t know what sort of business, and the guardian angel on my shoulder thinks I don’t want to find out.”
“Wise man, your guardian angel.”
Fergus nodded and was still, staring at the river in the distance as it went about its murky business. After a moment, he glanced at Roger.
“Brianna told Marsali that Lord John Grey had promised her a military escort to see her safely to Savannah.”
“Yes. But we don’t need it. No one’s going to bother a wagon full of children and sauerkraut.”
“Nonetheless.” Fergus stood up and shucked his coat, plucking the soaked linen of his shirt away from his chest. “Will you ask your wife to send a note to Lord John at once, please? Ask him to send his escort as soon as possible. We’re coming with you. I think the printing press might draw notice.”
75
No Smoke without Fire
BRIANNA WOKE SUDDENLY, IN the disoriented state that occurs when you’ve gone to sleep in a strange place and don’t recall immediately where you are. She’d been dreaming—of what? Her heart was racing, and any minute it was going to—
Damn! The wings started fluttering in her chest, like a flock of agitated bats trapped in her shift. She sat up, cursing under her breath, and struck herself hard in the chest, in hopes of startling her heartbeat back into regularity; sometimes that worked. Not this time. She swung her feet out of bed, planted them on the cold, damp floorboards, and took a deep breath, only to cough and let it out with a gasp.
“Roger!” she whispered as loudly as she could, trying to not wake the children to panic, and shook him by the arm. “Roger! Get up—I smell smoke!”
She remembered now where they were. They were sleeping in the loft, and with her eyes no longer clouded by sleep, now she could see the smoke she was smelling, white wisps slipping over the edge of the loft like ghosts, moving silently but with a horrifying speed.
“Jesus Christ!” Roger was up, naked and disheveled; she could see him in the dim cloud-glow from the owl-slits. “Bloody hell—go down and rouse everybody. I’ll grab the kids.” He was moving even as he said it, snatching a shirt off a stack of cheap Bibles.
A scream of pure terror from below split the air, followed by an instant of stunned silence, and then a lot of yelling, in French, English, and Gaelic, plus piercing shrieks from the babies.
“They’re roused,” she said, and pushing past Roger ran to scoop up Mandy, who was sitting up in her nest of quilts, squint-eyed and cross.
“You too noisy,” she said accusingly to her mother. “You woke me up!”
Brianna repressed the urge to say, “You can sleep when you’re dead,” and instead grabbed Esmeralda and shoved her into Mandy’s arms. She could hear Roger, behind her, trying to rouse Jemmy, who was dead to the world and planned to stay that way. “Come on,” she said to Mandy, who was slowly picking some sort of fuzz off her shift. “You can do that later. Hold on!”
With Mandy whining and clinging to her neck like a cranky gibbon and Esmeralda a solid lump mashed between them, she made her way one-handed backward down the ladder, bare toes curling to keep a grip on the foot-worn rungs. The smell of smoke was stronger now, but not choking, not yet … Tendrils rose past her toward the ceiling, coiling in slow-growing clouds under the beams as she looked up.