And you’d be left entirely alone, Rachel thought. Wanting to die, too, and not knowing how. It does seem much easier for men; I wonder why? Do they not think anyone needs them?

“Thee managed, though,” she said, and Jenny shrugged.

“I put on her apron and made their supper. That was all I kent to do. Feed them.”

“I’d suppose that was the most important thing.” She bent her head and brushed the top of Oggy’s cap with her lips. His mere presence made her breasts tingle and ache. Jenny saw that, and smiled, in a rueful sort of way.

“Aye. When ye ha’ bairns, there’s that wee time when ye really are all they need. And then they leave your arms and ye’re scairt all over again, because now ye ken all the things that could harm them, and you not able to keep them from it.”

Rachel nodded, and they made their way in silence—though a close, listening sort of silence—through the little oak wood and round the edge of the smaller hayfield, to the growth of aspens where the cabin stood.

She had thought she’d leave it to Ian to tell his mother, but the mood between them was one of love, and the spirit moved her to speak now.

“Ian means to go to New York,” she said. Oggy was stirring, and she hoisted him to her shoulder, patting his firm little back. “To satisfy himself regarding the welfare of—the … er … his …”

“The Indian woman he was wed to?” Jenny said bluntly. “Aye, I thought he’d want to, when I heard about the massacre.”

Rachel didn’t waste time asking how Jenny had heard about it. The Mohawks had stayed three days, and news of any kind seeped through the Ridge like indigo dye through a wet cloth.

“I will go with him,” she said.

Jenny made a noise that might be spelled glarmph, but nodded.

“Aye. I thought ye might.”

“You did?” Rachel was surprised—and perhaps a little affronted. She had expected shock and argument, attempted dissuasion.

“He’s told ye about his dead bairns by her, I expect?”

“He did, yes, before we wed.” Oggy’s live weight in her arms was a double blessing; she knew how much Ian had feared never being able to sire a live child.

Jenny nodded.

“He’s an honest man. And kind, to boot, but I doubt he’ll ever make a decent Friend.”

“Well, so do I,” Rachel admitted. “And yet miracles happen.”

That made Jenny laugh. She stopped at the edge of the porch and put down her basket in order to scrape the mud from the soles of her shoes, then held Rachel’s elbow to balance her while she did the same.

“Fearless, ye said,” Jenny said, meditatively. “Friends are fearless, are they?”

“We don’t fear death, because we think our lives are lived only in preparation for eternal life with God,” Rachel explained.