By unspoken consent, the four adults gathered together around the table, with four cups and a bottle of decent red wine—the gift of Michael Lindsay for my help in stitching up a couple of long wounds in the flank of his horse, these the result of a run-in with a bear.
“Your dulcimer sounds bonnie, Roger Mac,” Jamie said, raising his cup toward the instrument, this now laid on top of the simples cupboard for safety. Roger raised his eyebrows, surprised.
“You … can make it out?” he said. “I mean—ye ken it’s a song?”
“No,” Jamie said, surprised in turn. “Was it a song? The sound it makes is nice, though. Like wee bells ringing.”
“It’s a song from … our time,” Brianna said, a little hesitant, and glanced at the children.
“It’s all right,” Roger assured her. “The lyrics to that one could have come from any time from the Middle Ages on.”
“That’s good. We have to be careful,” Bree said, with a half smile at me. “We’d just as soon not have Mandy singing ‘Twist and Shout’ in church.”
“Well, not in our church,” Roger said, “though there are certainly more … um … athletic churches now in which that would be more or less appropriate. I wonder if there are any snake-handling churches in the area,” he added, suddenly interested. “I don’t know when that started.”
“Snakes in church … on purpose?” Jamie said dubiously. “Why the devil would anyone do that?”
“Mark 16:17,” Roger said. “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. They do it—or will do it—to prove their faith,” he explained. “Pick up rattlesnakes and cottonmouths with their bare hands. In church.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jamie said, and crossed himself.
“Exactly,” Roger said, nodding. “Anything in the Bible’s safe,” he said to Bree, “but we maybe don’t want to dwell on things that might suggest more modern things.”
I had glanced involuntarily at my hands when Roger had quoted the Bible verse, but looked up at this. Jamie looked blank.
Bree took a deep breath, looking once more at the children.
“It’s not that we want them to forget,” she said quietly. “There were—are, will be—people and things they loved from … our time. And we don’t know whether they might sometime … eventually … go back. But we have to be careful which memories from that time we keep among us, talk about. Remember.” I saw her long throat bob slightly as she swallowed. “It probably wouldn’t cause any trouble if Mandy told people about toilets, for instance—especially not if I build one,” she added, breaking into a brief smile. “But there are other things.”
“Aye,” said Jamie, softly. “I suppose there are.” He laid a hand on my thigh, and I covered it. He could see what I saw: the look on their faces, Roger and Brianna both. I’d seen it in the days near the end of World War II; he’d seen it in the months and years after Culloden. The look of exiles, necessity covering mourning, bravery turning away from memories that would never be left behind, no matter how deeply they were buried.
There was a long moment of silence. Jamie cleared his throat.
“I ken why ye came back,” he said. “But how?”
The sheer practicality of the question broke the brief spell of regret. Bree and Roger looked at each other, then at us.
“Is there more wine?” Roger asked.
“WE DIDN’T KNOW whether you can move through both time and space,” Bree explained, over a fresh glass. “We don’t know anyone who’s done that, and this didn’t seem like a good time to experiment.”
“I expect not,” I said, rather faintly. Most of the time, I managed not to remember what stepping into … that … was like, but the memory was there, all right. Like seeing something big and dark cruising just under the water, and you in a small, small boat on an endless sea.
“So, that decision was easy enough,” Roger said, with a grimace indicating that “easy” was a relative term. “We’d have to make the voyage from Scotland to America, regardless. It was partly a matter of whether the passage through the stones might be better from the stone circle near Inverness, or the one on Ocracoke.”