“Well, I don’t get a fancy hat or a shepherd’s crook,” Roger said, still grinning, “but otherwise … aye. Just as good. Slàinte!” He toasted Joanie and then the rest of them, and downed the sherry.

“Mind,” he said, his voice hoarse and eyes watering slightly, “it was a near thing for a bit.” He coughed and waved away the proffered sherry bottle. “Thanks, no, that’s enough. Everything went down well, all through the Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, knowledge of Scripture, and evidence of good character—even having a Catholic wife didn’t give them more than a moment’s pause.” He grinned at Brianna. “As long as I could swear in good conscience that I should never allow ye to persuade me into Romish practices.”

Brianna laughed. She was still trembling inwardly from the experience on the riverbank, but that seemed trivial, drowned by her joy in Roger’s happiness. Firelight gleamed in his black hair and gave his eyes a green spark. He glowed, she thought, he really did. Like a firefly dancing under the trees.

“What Romish practices did they have in mind?” she asked. She’d been sipping brandy, and now handed him her glass. “Slaughtering infants on the altar and drinking their blood?”

“No, just conspiring with the Pope, mostly.”

“To do what?”

“Ye’d have to ask the Pope,” he said, and laughed. “No, really,” he said, “the only thing that was a serious problem to them was the singing.”

“The singing?” she asked, puzzled. “Granted, Catholics sing—but so do you.”

“Aye, that was the problem.” His amusement came down a notch, but it was still there. “I dinna ken how they found out, but they’d heard that I sang hymns during services in church on the Ridge.”

“And they thought ye shouldna?” Marsali said, frowning. “Presbyterians dinna sing?”

“Not in kirk, they don’t. Not now.”

There was the briefest disturbance in the air at the words “not now.” Brianna saw Fergus and Marsali look at each other and neither one changed their expressions of tolerant amusement, but she’d felt it, like the prick of a thorn.

They know. She and Roger had never discussed it, but of course they did. Fergus had lived with her parents before the Rising and at Lallybroch after Culloden—when her mother had gone. And of course Young Ian and Jenny knew. Did Rachel? she wondered.

Roger didn’t act as though anything had happened; he was going on to tell what the various ministers had said about the sinful practice of singing on a Sunday, let alone in kirk! With imitations of each of the ministers’ pronouncements.

“So how did you answer these remarks?” Fergus asked. His face was flushed with laughter, and his hair had lost its ribbon and come mostly out of its plait, streaming over his shoulder in dark waves streaked with silver. Sharp-featured, and with deep-set eyes, he looked to Brianna like a wizard of some sort—maybe a young Gandalf, prior to turning gray.