Hiram Crombie and the rest were keeping Cunningham and his men busy, from the sounds of it. But if either Cameron or Sevier had failed him, it was going to be a bloody night.

IT WAS WELL past midnight; I’d sent the girls and Bluebell up to bed two hours ago, and now exhaustion hung over the kitchen like a low veil of chimney smoke. We had exhausted everything: prayer, conversation, industry, food, milk, and chicory coffee. Elspeth didn’t drink alcohol recreationally, pious Christian that she was, and had refused more than the one medicinal cup of whisky tonight. While I longed to obliviate myself, I felt that I had to stay sober, had to be ready. For what, I didn’t want to think—thinking was another thing I had exhausted.

For a time, I had been conscious every moment of what might be happening at the Meeting House. Visualizing the Lodge meeting—or what I knew of it, for Jamie observed the Masonic vows of secrecy, and while he laughed with me over the apron and dagger, he said nothing about their rituals. Wondering where the crisis would come.

“Nothing will happen during the meeting, Sassenach,” he’d said, in an effort to be reassuring. “Cunningham’s an officer and a gentleman, and a Mason of the Thirty-third Degree. He takes an oath seriously.”

“Such men are dangerous,” I’d said, quoting Julius Caesar. I was striving for levity, but Jamie had just nodded soberly and taken the best of his pistols from its place above the mantelpiece.

But now my mind was blank, having room only for a formless dread. I’d stirred up the fire; I stared into the flames, my face hot and my hands cold as ice, lying useless in my lap.

“It’s raining.” Elspeth broke the silence, lifting her head at the sound of the spatter of raindrops against the closed shutters. We were sitting by the kitchen fire again, having left the surgery spick-and-span. Fresh bandages. Linen towels. Surgical instruments recleaned and sterilized, laid out on their own fresh towel on the counter. The brazier cleaned and filled with new hickory chips, a selection of cautery irons ready beside it. Without speaking a word to each other about what we were doing, we had prepared for sudden and dire emergency.

“So it is.” The silence fell again. The sound of the rain had rekindled my thoughts, though. Would it keep them inside the Meeting House?

Nonsense, Beauchamp, my mind replied. When has rain stopped a Highlander from doing anything whatever? Nor yet a naval office, I suppose …

“I’m sorry.” Elspeth spoke abruptly and I glanced at her, startled. Her hands were folded tight in her lap. Her face was pale and her lips pressed together, as though sorry she’d spoken.

“It’s not your fault,” I said automatically, and then more consciously, “Nor mine.”

Her lips relaxed a little at that.

“No,” she said, softly. She was silent for a bit, but I could see her throat working faintly, as though she was arguing with herself about something.