“Well …” I said slowly. “Maybe … perhaps … for us?” I nodded toward the distant creek, where Jem and Germain and Mandy and Fanny were evidently catching leeches, with a good deal of shrieking. My lips felt dry, and I licked them briefly.

“I mean—we think, don’t we, that he found out? About you not dying, I mean. And maybe that he knew or guessed that Bree would come back looking for you. Maybe he … found me, too. In history, I mean.” Speaking the words made me feel quite hollow. The thought of Frank discovering something—God knew what—about me in the maelstrom of scattered documents. And making up his mind—while I was still right there with him, dammit!—not to tell me—and to find out more.

“He hasn’t—mentioned me, has he? In the book?” I forced the words out, just above the sound of the wind. A cold drop struck my cheek, and four large dark spots appeared instantly on my apron.

“No,” Jamie said, and rose to his feet, reaching down a hand to me. “Come inside, a nighean, it’s starting to rain.”

We barely made it into the house with the basin, the bowl, and our peanut crop—followed in short order by Germain, Jemmy, Fanny, Mandy, Aidan McCallum, and Aodh MacLennan, splattered with rain and with arms full of wet vegetables from the garden.

What with one thing and another—grinding the peanuts, putting the risen bread to bake, washing dirt from the young turnips, saving the greens in a bowl of cold water to keep them from wilting, handing fresh small knobby carrots out to the children, who ate them like candy, then slicing the fresh bread and assembling sandwiches, while roasting sweet potatoes in the ashes and making a warm bacon dressing for the cooked greens—there was no further conversation between me and Jamie about Frank’s book. And if anyone stood behind me, he was considerate enough to give me elbow room.

IT WENT ON raining through supper, and after ascertaining that the McCallums and the MacLennans wouldn’t be worrying where their boys were, Jamie brought down the mattresses and all of the children bedded down together in a damp, warm heap before the hearth.

Jamie had made a fire in our bedroom, and the scent of dried fir kindling and hickory wood overlaid the lingering turpentine scent of the fresh timbers. He was lying on the bed, clad in his nightshirt and smelling pleasantly of warm animals, cold hay, and peanut butter, and thumbing idly through my Merck Manual, which I’d left on the bedside table.

“Trying the Sortes Virgilianae, are you?” I asked, sitting down beside him and shaking my hair loose from its knot. “Most people use the Bible for that, but I suppose Merck might do just as well.”

“Hadna thought of that,” he said, smiling, and closing the book, handed it to me. “Why not? You choose, then.”