All of which should give Roger enough time to lure Captain Cunningham outside, proper men naturally not wanting to hear two herbalists exchanging thoughts on how to make a clyster that would clear the most stubborn case of constipation. After that, it would be up to Roger. He was walking in front of me, shoulders squared in resolution.

We’d passed out of the poplars and were climbing again, into a rocky zone of fir and hemlock, richly resinous in the sun.

“It smells like Christmas,” Roger said, smiling over his shoulder as he held back a large branch for me. “I suppose we’ll do a family Christmas, won’t we? For Jem and Mandy, I mean; it’s what they’re used to, and they’re old enough to remember.” Christmas, as a holiday, was purely religious among the Scots—celebrating was done on Hogmanay.

“That would be wonderful,” I said, a little wistful. The Christmases of my childhood—the ones I remembered—had mostly taken place in non-Christian countries, and had featured Christmas crackers from England, Christmas pudding in a tin, and one year, a crèche festooned with camel bells and inhabited by Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus, and the attendant kings, shepherds, and angels, all constructed from some sort of local seedpods wearing tiny clothes.

Making a proper Christmas for Brianna every year had been wonderful; I’d felt as though the festivity was for me, as well—the joy of doing things I’d read or heard about, but never done or seen. Frank, the only one of us who had truly experienced the traditional British Christmas, was the authority on menus, gift wrapping, carol singing, and other arcane lore. From the decorating of the tree until it came down after New Year’s, the house was full of excited secrets, with an underlying sense of peace. To have that in our new house, with everyone together …

“I tell you what, though,” I said, coming back to myself just in time to duck beneath the overhang of a blue spruce. “Don’t mention Santa Claus while you’re talking to Captain Cunningham.”

“I’ll add that to my list of things to avoid,” he assured me gravely.

“What’s number one on your list?”

“Well, normally, it would be you,” he said frankly. “But in the present circumstances, it’s a tie between the Beardsleys and Jamie’s whisky. I mean, the Cunninghams are bound to find out about both—if they don’t know already—but no reason they should hear it from me.”

“Odds on, they know about the Beardsleys,” I said. “Mrs. Cunningham gave me the Jesuit bark, I mean. Someone had to have told her I needed it—and very likely, what for. And no one could resist telling her about Lizzie and her two husbands, if they did.”