“Did they have anything interesting to say to ye, Sassenach?” The stroking had edged over into a pleasant massage of my behind, which had the salutary side effect of causing me to arch my back and press my breasts lightly against his chest. I used my free hand to loosen my shift, gather one breast up, and rub my nipple against his, which made him clutch my arse and say something under his breath in Gaelic.
“And, um, how was your day?” I asked, desisting.
“If ye do that again, Sassenach, I’m no going to answer for the results,” he said, scratching his nipple as though it had been bitten by a large mosquito. “As for what I did, I built a new gate for the farrowing sty. Speakin’ o’ pigs.”
“Speaking of pigs …” I repeated, slowly. “Um … did you go into the sty?”
“No. Why?” His hand moved a little farther down, cupping my left buttock.
“I’d forgotten to tell you, because you’d gone to Tennessee to talk to Mr. Sevier and Colonel Shelby and didn’t come back for a week. But I went up there”—the sty was a small cave in the limestone cliff above the house—“a week ago, to fetch a jar of turpentine I’d left there from the worming, and—you know how the cave curves off to the left?”
He nodded, his eyes fixed on my mouth as though reading my lips.
“Well, I went round the corner, and there they were.”
“Who?”
“The White Sow herself, with what I assume were two of her daughters or granddaughters … the others weren’t white, but they had to be related to her because all three of them were the same size—immense.” Your average wild hog stood about three foot at the shoulder and weighed two or three hundred pounds. The White Sow, who was not a wild hog herself but the product of a domestic porcine line bred for poundage, was a good deal older, greedier, and more ferocious than the average, and while I wasn’t as good as Jamie at estimating the weight of livestock, I would have clocked her at six hundred pounds without a moment’s hesitation. Her descendants weren’t much smaller.
The sense of placid malignity had frozen me in place, and my skin rippled into instant gooseflesh at the memory of those small dark-red intelligent eyes, fixed on me from the pale bulk in the shadows of the cave.
“Did she go after ye?” Jamie ran a concerned hand over the curve of my shoulder, feeling the goose bumps. I shook my head.
“I thought she would. Every second I was there, and every second it took me to inch my way back into the light and out of the cave, I thought she was going to heave to her feet—they were all sort of … reclining in the matted straw—and run me down, but they just … looked at me.” I swallowed, and a new wave of horripilation ran down my arms.
“Anyway,” I finished, nudging closer to his warmth, “they didn’t eat me. Maybe she remembers that I used to feed her scraps—but I don’t know that she feels that kindly toward you.”
“I’ll take my rifle when I go up there,” he promised. “If I see them, we’ll have meat for the winter.”
“You bloody be careful,” I said, and nipped the flesh of his shoulder. “I don’t think you could get all three before one of them gets you. And I rather think that killing the White Sow might be bad luck.”
“Bah,” he said comfortably, and rolled over, pinning me to the mattress with a whoosh of down feathers. He lowered his head and nibbled my earlobe, making me squirm and muffle a shriek.
“Tell me about the bees,” he said, breathing warmly into my ear. “It may settle ye enough to fix your mind where it belongs, instead of on pigs.”
“You asked,” I said, with dignity, refusing to address the question of where my mind belonged. “As for the bees … I thought they’d hibernate, but Myers says they don’t, though they do stay inside their hives when it gets cold. But there are still late flowers in the garden, and they’re still at work. Just before I came down tonight—it was starting to get dark—I found two of them, curled up together in the cup of a hollyhock, covered in pollen and holding each other’s feet.”
“Were they dead?”
“No.” He’d moved off me but was still imminent. His hair was loose, soft and tumbled, sparking red and silver in the firelight, and I brushed it behind his ear. “I thought they were, the first time I saw it, but I’ve seen it several times since, and they’re just sleeping in the flowers. They wake up when the sun warms them and fly off.