“No, it doesn’t,” Jamie agreed, and I laughed. I’d told him—briefly—about the Titanic.

“From your point of view, a floating plank on the trout pond would be just as bad as the Queen Mary—that’s a really big ship.”

“Aye, well, I expect the food would be better on the latter,” he said, unperturbed by my teasing. “And as long as I had your wee stabbers in my face, I could choose on that basis. So, did ye ken the weather changed a great deal in forty years?” he asked, returning the conversation to Bree, who shook her head.

“Not the storms and wind-type weather—I mean, it might have, but we’d have no way of knowing that. What we did know, though, was the political weather.”

“The war,” Roger said, correctly interpreting my blank look. “The British were—I mean, they are—blockading and interrupting trade and seizing American ships right and left these days. What if we chose the wrong ship and ended up being sunk or captured, or me being pressed into the British navy, leaving Bree and the kids to decide whether to go through the stones by themselves, or stay in Jamaica or wherever and try to find me?”

“That’s sensible,” Jamie said. “So ye took ship in 1739, then. How was it?”

“Horrible,” Bree said promptly, just as Roger said, “Terrible!” They looked at each other and laughed, though with an undertone that belied their mirth; it was the slightly nervous laughter of survivors who weren’t yet entirely sure they’d made it.

They’d traveled on a brig called the Kermanagh, out of Inverness, to Edinburgh, where they’d found passage on the Constance, a small merchant ship, headed for Charles Town.

“No staterooms,” Roger said. “Just a wee nook in the hold, between the water barrels and stacks of chests full of cloth: linen, muslin, woolens, and silks. The smell was pretty strong—fuller’s earth and sizing and dyes and urine, ken?—but it could have been worse. The people at the other end of the hold were squashed between crates of salt fish and barrels of gin. With the fumes, they were mostly comatose, so far as we could tell in the dark.”

“They were lucky, if so,” Brianna said ruefully. “We hit four—not one, not two, not three, but four—storms along the way. Between being sure we were going to the bottom any minute and caroming off the cargo every other minute—except for Mandy, we were all bruised everywhere. I kept her in my lap pretty much the whole trip, with my cloak wrapped around us both, for warmth.”

Jamie looked slightly green, merely listening to this, and I had to admit to feeling a sympathetic lurch of the insides myself.

“What did you eat?” I asked, in hopes of stabilizing myself and the conversation.