“You’re just trying to get out of the lunges,” I said. “I know it hurts. Do it anyway, if you ever expect to walk without a stick again.” He gave me a long, level look, then shook his head.

“When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou,” he muttered.

I laughed.

“O, Woman, in our hours of ease,” I quoted back, “uncertain, coy, and hard to please. Where the devil did you get that one?”

“Roger Mac,” he said, gingerly bending his bad knee while easing his weight onto it. “Ifrinn!”

“Someone—or several someones—shoot you full of holes and fracture your sternum and you don’t make a peep,” I observed. “Ask you to stretch a few muscles …”

“I was busy dying,” he said through gritted teeth. “And if ye think it’s simple to talk wi’ a fractured sternum … Oh, God …”

“Just three more,” I coaxed. “If you promise to do your arm rotations and push-ups next, I’ll go and talk to Fanny. Germain’s spent a lot of time with her since he came back; if he’s told anyone, it will be her.”

He made a noise that I took for agreement, and I sponged his face with a damp towel and went to find Fanny. She was luckily in the root cellar, and alone.

“Oh,” she said, when I explained my curiosity. “Yes, he did. I asked him,” she added honestly. “He said he didn’t mind telling me, but he didn’t want his little sisters or the other girls to find out. I’m sure he didn’t mean you, though,” she assured me.

War was everywhere, and so it was no surprise to hear that Fergus’s new printshop in Wilmington had suffered the same sort of petty vandalism and anonymous threats shoved under the door as had happened in Charles Town. Nothing worse had happened, though, and the town as a whole was fairly quiet.

The family took good care to bolt their doors at night and latch their shutters, but they felt safe in the daytime.

“Germain and Mr. Fergus were working the press, he said, and his mam and the girls had gone out. Two men came in, and Germain went to the counter to see what they wanted.”

One man had said he wanted to see the proprietor, well enough. But the other had a short fowling piece under his coat and Germain saw it. He didn’t know what to do, but stuttered out that he’d fetch his father. He’d turned to go back to the press, when the first man quickly opened the hatch in the counter and pushed Germain to the floor. Both men ran through toward the back room where Fergus was working, but Germain managed to cling to the leg of the second man and shriek at the top of his lungs.