“So pleased to meet you, Mr. Myers,” she shouted.
“Oh, no need to be ceremonious, ma’am—John Quincy’ll do fine.”
“John Quincy it is. I’m Brianna Fraser MacKenzie.” She smiled at him, then nodded delicately at his living waistcoat. “Can we offer your bees some … er … hospitality, as well as yourself?”
“Got any beer, have ye?” Myers lowered his basket and I saw that it was a stained and ragged bee skep, upside down, with a chunk of dripping honeycomb inside it. This also was crawling with bees, not surprisingly.
“Well … yes,” I said, exchanging glances with Bree. “Of course. Um … do bring them up to the house site. We’ll get them … settled,” I said, watching the swarm warily. They didn’t seem hostile at all; I saw several of them lighting on Bree’s shoulders and hair. She saw them, too, and tensed a little but didn’t swat at them. One sailed lazily past Oggy’s nose; he followed it in a cross-eyed sort of way and made a grab at it, but luckily only got a handful of my hair.
The children had grouped together on the trail above, goggling, but Jem and Mandy had come down to join their mother. Mandy was clinging to Brianna’s leg, but Jem was pressing close, fascinated by the swarm.
“Do the bees drink beer?” he called up at their proprietor.
“That they do, son, that they do,” Myers replied, beaming down at him out of a cloud of bees. “Bees is the smartest kind of bug they is.”
“So they are,” I said, disentangling Oggy’s chubby fingers and taking a deep breath of the honeyed air. “Jem, go find Grandda, will you?”
IN THE END, I found Jamie myself, spotting him coming down through the trees with four rabbits he’d snared.
“Very timely,” I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. He smelled of fresh game and damp fir trees. “We’ve company for dinner, and as it’s John Quincy …”
His face lighted.
“Myers?” he said, handing me the bag of rabbits. “Did ye inquire after his balls?”
“I did not,” I said. “But he told me, anyway. Apparently everything is still where I put it. And functioning well, he assures me. He’s brought us a swarm of bees, among other things.”
“Has he? How did he carry them?”
“He wore them,” I said with a shrug.
“Oh, aye,” he said. “What other things did he bring?”
“Letters. He says one is for you.”
Jamie didn’t break his stride, but I caught the faint hesitation as he turned his head to look at me.
“From whom?”
“I don’t know. He was busy divesting himself of the bees, and Jem couldn’t find you, so I came to look for you.” I nearly added, “Perhaps it’s from Lord John,” because for several years it might have been, and a welcome letter, too, reinforcing the bonds of a long friendship between Jamie and John Grey. Fortunately, I bit my lip in time. While the two of them were on speaking terms—just barely—they were no longer friends. And while I would, if pushed, deny absolutely that it was my fault, it was undeniably on my account.
I kept my eyes on the trail, just in case Jamie might catch a wayward expression on my face and draw uncomfortable conclusions. He wasn’t the only person who could read minds, and I’d been looking at his face. I had a very strong impression that when I had said “letter,” Lord John’s name had leapt to his mind, just as it had to mine.
“I’ll have a bit of a wash at the creek before I come in, Sassenach,” he said, touching my back lightly. “Shall I bring ye some cress for the supper?”
“Please,” I said, and rose on tiptoe to kiss him.
As the house came in sight a moment later, I saw Brianna coming up the slope from the Higgins cabin with several loaves of bread in her arms, and I pushed all thoughts of Jamie and John Grey hastily out of my mind.
“I’ll do that, Mama,” she said, nodding at the bag of rabbits. “Mr. Myers says the sun is coming down and you should go and bless your new bees before they go to sleep.”
“Oh,” I said, uncertainly. I’d kept bees now and then, but the relationship hadn’t been in any way ceremonial. “Did he happen to say what sort of blessing the bees might have in mind?”
“Not to me,” she said cheerfully, taking the bloodstained bag from my hand. “But he probably knows. He says he’ll meet you in the garden.”