“For a while. Not permanently—I mean, you, er, we will in fact win the war. But not for another two years.”

He saw Fergus’s throat move as he swallowed and the hairs rise on his lean forearms, bared by turned-back sleeves.

“You … um … Bree said she thought you … er … knew,” he said carefully. “About—Claire, I mean. And, um, us.” He sat down beside Fergus on the crate, careful to lift the skirts of his black coat away from the white dust.

Fergus shook his head—not in negation, but as one trying to shake its contents into some pattern resembling sense.

“As I said,” he replied, the smile returning briefly to his eyes, “I know a lot of things I don’t publish in the newspaper.” He straightened up, hand—and hook—on his knees.

“I was with milord and milady during the Rising, and you know”—he raised a brow in question—“that milord hired me in Paris, to steal letters for him? I read them—and I heard milord and milady talk. In private.” A brief smile twitched his mouth and disappeared.

“I didn’t truly believe it, of course. Not until the morning before the battle, when milord gave me the Deed of Sasine to Lallybroch and bade me take it to his sister. And then, of course … milady vanished.” His voice was soft, and Roger could see what he hadn’t realized before—the depth of Fergus’s feeling for Claire, the first mother he remembered. “But milord would never say that she was dead. He didn’t talk about her—but when someone pushed him—”

“His sister?” Thought of Jenny made Roger smile. So did Fergus.

“Yes. He would never say that she was dead. Only … that she was gone.”

“And then she came back,” Roger said quietly.

“Oui.” Fergus looked at him, thoughtfully examining his face, as though to make sure of the man he was talking to. “And plainly, Brianna and you are … what milady is.” A thought struck him, and his eyes widened. “Les enfants. Are they …?”

“Yes. Both of them.”

Fergus said something in French that was well beyond Roger’s ability to translate, and then fell silent, thinking. He reached absently between the buttons of his shirt, and Roger realized that he was touching the small medal of St. Dismas that he always wore. The patron saint of thieves.

Roger turned away, to give him some privacy, and looked out across the river, then farther, to the harbor itself and the invisible sea beyond. Oddly enough, the sense of peace with which he’d left the Reverend Selverson’s house was still with him, immanent in the drifting clouds of a mackerel sky, just going pink round the edges, and the quiet lapping of the water against the pilings beneath them.