ODDLY ENOUGH, the departure of the men seemed to ease things slightly. The talk, of course, went merrily on—but without Jamie or Ian there to serve as a lightning-rod, it merely crackled to and fro like St. Elmo’s fire; spitting, fizzing, and making everyone’s hair stand on end, but essentially a harmless phenomenon, unless touched directly.
The house felt less an embattled fortress, and more the eye of a storm.
Also, with Mr. Wemyss out of the house, Lizzie came to visit, bringing little Rodney Joseph, as the baby was called—Roger having set his face firmly against the young fathers’ enthusiastic suggestions of Tilgath-pileser and Ichabod. Wee Rogerina had come out of it all right, being now commonly known as Rory, but Roger declined entirely to hear of a child being christened anything that might result in his being known to the world at large as Icky.
Rodney seemed a very congenial child, in part because he had never quite lost that air of round-eyed astonishment that made him seem agog to hear what you had to say. Lizzie’s astonishment at his birth had mutated into an enchantment that might have completely eclipsed Jo and Kezzie, were it not for the fact that they shared it.
Either one of them would—unless forcibly stopped—spend half an hour discussing Rodney’s bowel habits with the intensity heretofore reserved for new snares and the peculiar things found inside the stomachs of animals they had killed. Pigs, it seemed, really would eat anything; so would Rodney.
A few days after the men’s departure on their bride-stealing expedition, Brianna had come up from her cabin with Jemmy to visit, and Lizzie likewise had brought Rodney. The two of them joined Amy McCallum and me in the kitchen, where we were spending a pleasant evening sewing by the light of the fire, admiring Rodney, keeping a negligent eye on Jemmy and Aidan—and after a certain amount of cautious exploration, devoting ourselves wholeheartedly to a rundown of the male population of the Ridge, viewed in the light of suspects.
I, of course, had a more personal and painful interest in the topic, but all three of the young women were solidly on the side of justice—i.e., the side that refused even to contemplate the notion that either Jamie or I might have had anything to do with the murder of Malva Christie.
For myself, I found such open speculation rather a comfort. I had, of course, been engaging in private conjecture nonstop—and an exhausting business it was, too. Not only was it unpleasant to visualize every man I knew in the role of cold-blooded murderer—the process obliged me continuously to reimagine the murder itself, and relive the moment when I had found her.
“I’d really hate to think it might have been Bobby,” Bree said, frowning as she pushed a wooden darning egg into the heel of a sock. “He seems just such a nice boy.”
Lizzie drew down her chin at this, pursing her lips.
“Oh, aye, he’s a sweet lad,” she said. “But what ye might call warm-blooded.”
All of us looked at her.
“Well,” she said mildly, “I didna let him, but he tried hard enough. And when I said no, he did go off and kick a tree.”
“My husband would do that sometimes, if I refused him,” Amy said, thoughtful. “But I’m sure he wouldna have cut my throat.”
“Well, but Malva didn’t refuse whoever it was,” Bree pointed out, squinting as she threaded her darning needle. “That was the problem. He killed her because she was pregnant, and he was afraid she’d tell everyone.”
“Ho!” Lizzie said, triumphant. “Well, then—it canna have been Bobby at all, can it? For when my Da turned him awa’—” A brief shadow crossed her face at mention of her father, who still had not spoken a word to her nor acknowledged the birth of little Rodney. “Did he not think of speiring for Malva Christie? Ian said he meant to. And if she were with child by him—well, then, her father would be obliged to agree, would he not?”
Amy nodded, finding this convincing, but Bree had objections.
“Yes—but she was insisting that it wasn’t his baby. And he threw up in the blackberry bushes when he heard that she was”—her lips compressed momentarily—“well, he wasn’t happy at all. So he might have killed her out of jealousy, don’t you think?”
Lizzie and Amy hmm’d dubiously at this—both of them were fond of Bobby—but were obliged to admit the possibility.
“What I wonder about,” I said a little hesitantly, “is the older men. The married ones. Everyone knows about the young men who were interested in her—but I’ve certainly seen more than one married man glance at her in passing.”
“I nominate Hiram Crombie,” Bree said at once, stabbing her needle into the heel of the sock. Everyone laughed, but she shook her head.
“No, I’m serious. It’s always the really religious, very uptight ones that turn out to have secret drawers full of women’s underwear, and slink around molesting choirboys.”
Amy’s jaw dropped.
“Drawers full of women’s underwear?” she said. “What . . . shifts and stays? Whatever would he do wi’ them?”
Brianna flushed at that, having forgotten her audience. She coughed, but there was no good way out.
“Er . . . well. I was thinking more of French women’s underwear,” she said weakly. “Um . . . lacy sorts of things.”
“Oh, French,” Lizzie said, nodding wisely. Everyone knew about the notorious reputation of French ladies—though I doubted that any woman on Fraser’s Ridge save myself had ever seen one. In the interests of covering Bree’s lapse, though, I obligingly told them about La Nestlé, the King of France’s mistress, who had had her nipples pierced and appeared at court with her breasts exposed, sporting gold hoops through them.
“Another few months o’ this,” Lizzie said darkly, looking down at Rodney, who was nursing fiercely at her breast, tiny fists clenched with effort, “and I shall be able to do the same. I’ll tell Jo and Kezzie to fetch me back some hoops when they sell their hides, aye?”
In the midst of the laughter at this, the sound of a knock at the front door passed unnoticed—or would have, if not for Jemmy and Aidan, who had been playing in Jamie’s study, rushing into the kitchen to tell us about it.
“I’ll get it.” Bree set down her darning, but I was already on my feet.
“No, I’ll go.” I waved her back, picked up a candlestick, and went down the dark hallway, heart beating fast. Visitors after dark were almost always an emergency of one kind or another.
So was this one, though not any kind I might have expected. For a moment, I didn’t even recognize the tall woman who stood swaying on the stoop, white-faced and gaunt. Then she whispered, “Frau Fraser? I may—may I komm?” and fell into my arms.
The noise of it brought all the young women rushing to help, and we had Monika Berrisch—for it was indeed Mr. Wemyss’s putative bride—laid on the settle, covered with quilts, and plied with hot toddy in nothing flat.
She recovered quickly—there was nothing wrong with her, really, save exhaustion and hunger—she said she hadn’t eaten in three days—and within a short time, was able to sit up eating soup, and explain her astonishing presence.
“It wass my husband’s sister,” she said, closing her eyes in momentary bliss at the aroma of split-pea soup with ham. “She did not want me, effer, and when her husband had the bad accident and lost his wagon, so there was not so much money to keep us all, she did not want me more.”
She had, she said, yearned for Joseph, but had not had either the strength nor yet the means to withstand her family’s opposition and insist upon returning to him.
“Oh?” Lizzie was examining her in a close, but not unfriendly manner. “What happpened, then?”
Fraulein Berrisch turned large, gentle eyes on her.
“I could not bear it more,” she said simply. “I wish so much to be with Joseph. My husband’s sister, she wish me to be gone, so she will give a small bit of money. So I came,” she concluded, with a shrug, and took another small, greedy spoonful of soup.
“You . . . walked?” Brianna said. “From Halifax?”
Fraulein Berrisch nodded, licking the spoon, and put out a foot from under the quilts. Her shoes had worn entirely through at the sole; she had wrapped them with random scraps of leather and strips of fabric torn from her shift, so her feet looked like bundles of filthy rags.
“Elizabeth,” she said, looking earnestly at Lizzie. “I hope you do not mind I komm. Your father—he is hier? I hope so much he does not mind, too.”
“Umm, no,” I said, exchanging a glance with Lizzie. “He isn’t here—but I’m sure that he’ll be delighted to see you!”
“Oh?” Her gaunt face, which had shown alarm at hearing that Mr. Wemyss was not here, grew radiant when we told her where he was.
“Oh,” she breathed, clasping the spoon to her bosom as though it were Mr. Wemyss’s head. “Oh, mein Kavalier!” Beaming with joy, she looked round at all of us—and for the first time, noticed Rodney, snoozing in his basket at Lizzie’s feet.
“But who is this?” she cried, and leaned forward to look at him. Not quite asleep, Rodney opened round, dark eyes and regarded her with a solemn, sleepy interest.
“This is my wee bairnie. Rodney Joseph, he’s called—for my Da, ken?” Lizzie hoisted him out of his basket, chubby knees pulled up under his chin, and laid him gently in Monika’s arms.
She cooed over him in German, face alight.
“Granny lust,” Bree muttered to me, out of the side of her mouth, and I felt laughter bubble up under my stays. I hadn’t laughed since before Malva’s death, and found it balm to the spirit.
Lizzie was explaining earnestly to Monika the estrangement resulting from her unorthodox marriage, to which Monika was nodding, clicking her tongue in sympathetic understanding—and I did wonder how much of it she grasped—and talking baby-talk to Rodney all at once.
“Fat chance of Mr. Wemyss staying estranged,” I said out of the side of my own mouth. “Keep his new wife from her new grandson? Ha!”
“Yes, what’s a little matter of dual sons-in-law?” Bree agreed.
Amy was regarding the tender scene with a slight sense of wistfulness. She reached out and put an arm round Aidan’s skinny shoulders.
“Well, they do say, the more, the merrier,” she said.
86
PRIORITIES
THREE SHIRTS, AN EXTRA PAIR of decent breeches, two pair of stockings, one lisle, one silk—wait, where were the silk ones?
Brianna stepped to the door and called to her husband, who was industriously laying segments of clay pipe into the trench he had dug, assisted by Jemmy and Aidan.
“Roger! What have you done with your silk stockings?”
He paused, frowning, and rubbed his head. Then, handing the shovel to Aidan, he came across to the house, leaping over the open trench.
“I wore them last Sunday to preach, no?” he asked, reaching her. “What did I . . . oh.”
“Oh?” she said suspiciously, seeing his face change from puzzlement to guilt. “What’s ‘oh’?”
“Ahh . . . well, you’d stayed to home with Jem and his stomachache”—a tactically helpful ailment, greatly exaggerated in order to keep her from having to sit through two hours of staring and whispering—“so when Jocky Abernathy asked me would I care to go fishing with him . . .”
“Roger MacKenzie,” she said, fixing him with a look of wrath, “if you put your good silk stockings in a creel full of smelly fish and forgot them—”
“I’ll just nip up to the house and borrow a pair from your Da, shall I?” he said hurriedly. “I’m sure mine will turn up, somewhere.”
“So will your head,” she said. “Probably under a rock!”
That made him laugh, which was not what she had intended, but which had the effect of easing her temper.
“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her forehead. “It’s probably Freudian.”
“Oh? And what does leaving your stockings wrapped around a dead trout symbolize?” she demanded.
“Generalized guilt and divided loyalties, I imagine,” he said, still joking, but not so much. “Bree—I’ve been thinking. I really don’t think I should go. I don’t need to—”
“Yes, you do,” she said, as firmly as possible. “Da says so, Mama says so, and so do I.”
“Oh, well, then.” He smiled, but she could see the uneasiness under his humor—the more so because she shared it. Malva Christie’s murder had caused an uproar on the Ridge—alarm, hysteria, suspicion, and finger-pointing in every direction. Several young men—Bobby Higgins among them—had simply disappeared from the Ridge, whether from a sense of guilt, or merely from a sense of self-preservation.
There had been accusations enough to go around; even she herself had come in for her share of gossip and suspicion, some of her unguarded remarks about Malva Christie having been repeated. But by far the greatest weight of suspicion rested squarely on her parents.
Both of them were doing their best to go about their daily business, grimly ignoring the gossip and the pointed looks—but it was getting harder; anyone could see that.
Roger had gone at once to visit the Christies—had gone every day since Malva’s death save for his hasty expedition to Halifax—had buried the girl with simplicity and tears—and had since worn himself out with being reasonable and soothing and firm to everyone else on the Ridge. He had immediately put aside his plan to go to Edenton for ordination, but Jamie, hearing of it, had insisted.
“You’ve done everything here you could possibly do,” Brianna said, for the hundredth time. “There’s nothing else you can do to help—and it might be years before you have another chance.”
She knew how urgently he wished to be ordained, and would have done anything to further that wish. For herself, she wished that she could see it; but without a great deal of talk, they had agreed that it was best for her and Jem to go to River Run, and wait there for Roger to make the trip to Edenton and then return. It couldn’t do a candidate for ordination any good to turn up with a Catholic wife and child.
The guilt of leaving, though, with her parents standing in the eye of the whirlwind . . .
“You have to go,” she repeated. “But maybe I—”
He stopped her with a look.
“No, we’ve done that.” His argument was that her presence couldn’t affect public opinion, which was probably true. She realized that his real reason—shared by her parents—was a desire to get her and Jem away from the situation on the Ridge, out of the uproar and safe, preferably before Jem realized that a good many of the neighbors thought that one, if not both, of his grandparents was a cold-blooded murderer.
And, to her private shame, she was eager to go.
Someone had killed Malva—and her baby. Every time she thought of it, the possibilities swam before her, the litany of names. And every time, she was forced to see her cousin’s name among them. Ian had not run away, and she couldn’t—could not—think that it had been him. And yet every day she was obliged to see Ian, and to contemplate the possibility.
She stood staring into the bag she was packing, folding and refolding the shirt in her hands, looking for reasons to go, reasons to stay—and knowing that no reason had any power at all, not now.
A dull thunk! from outside jerked her from her mire of indecision.
“What—” She reached the door in two steps, fast enough to see Jem and Aidan disappearing into the woods like a pair of rabbits. On the edge of the trench lay the cracked pieces of the pipe segment they had just dropped.
“You little snot-rags!” she bellowed, and grabbed for a broom—intending what she didn’t know, but violence seemed the only outlet for the frustration that had just erupted like a volcano, searing through her.
“Bree,” Roger said softly, and put a hand on her back. “It’s not important.”
She jerked away and rounded on him, the blood roaring in her ears.
“Do you have any idea how long it takes to make one of those? How many firings it takes to get one that’s not cracked? How—”
“Yes, I do know,” he said, his voice level. “And it’s still not important.”
She stood trembling, breathing hard. Very gently, he reached out and took the broom from her, standing it neatly back in its place.
“I need—to go,” she said, when she could form words again, and he nodded, his eyes tinged with the sadness he had carried ever since the day of Malva’s death.
“Aye, ye do,” he said quietly.
He came behind her, put his arms around her, his chin resting on her shoulder, and gradually she stopped shaking. Across the clearing, she saw Mrs. Bug come down the path from the garden with an apron full of cabbages and carrots; Claire had not set foot in her garden since . . .
“Will they be all right?”
“We’ll pray that they will,” he said, and tightened his arms around her. She was comforted by his touch, and didn’t notice until later that he had not in fact reassured her that they would.