“I have written to Mr. Rizzo this morning. I do not know what inspired me but I am glad. I have told him he must expect me within the month. And I have asked him to assist in finding a reputable tooth surgeon for Cornelius. We need something better than a mere puller. Such people must exist.”

He saw now that she had a square of paper in her hand, a little package.

“Is Ranald not with you?” she asked.

“He went down to the peat diggers.”

“The Mackinnons.”

“Yes,” he said. “And here is the child coming up to us.”

Half a minute later and she was there, wee Annie. A tangle of black hair, eyes as black as a gypsy child. She had carried something up with her. She glanced at Lacroix but held it out to Emily. Emily took it, spoke to the girl, and gave her the letter. The child ran down the hill with it. She tumbled twice—perhaps for the joy of it—then reached Ranald, held up the letter and put it in the bag he carried over his shoulder.

“Safely delivered,” said Lacroix. “What was it she gave to you?”

Emily was holding it up to her face. She shrugged and passed it over the trench to Lacroix.

“Flint,” he said. “And definitely shaped. You can see where the edge has been worked. A tool of some kind . . . A dagger? It could be. Your brother will be cock-a-hoop. Or will he be piqued that others found it?”

She reached out a hand for it and he gave it back to her. For a few seconds she explored it with her fingertips—the chipped and rippled edge—then dropped it into the trench half a yard from Cornelius’s sleeping head.

“We will let him find it,” she said. “When he wakes.”

Lacroix laughed quietly. He was looking up at her from under the brim of his hat. She had arranged her face into an expression he had not seen there before. What was it? It seemed to challenge him, or challenge her brother, or challenge them all. “Were you speaking to the child in Gaelic?” he asked.

“I was,” she said. “Ranald has taught me some and we have a grammar at the house. One must find something to do on winter evenings. You cannot forever be playing spillikins.”

“Or music,” he said.

“In the winter,” she said, “my fingers were raw with the cold. They bled.”

He grimaced to show his sympathy—a fellow string player—though it was impossible to imagine the cold on such a day, to imagine it feelingly. What came instead was a scene from last winter, the high passes around Nogales, men like scarecrows huddled over smouldering fires of green wood. When she spoke again he missed it entirely. He raised his chin and she repeated it.

“A bheil thu ’g iarraidh a dhanns?”

“Ah,” he said. “You are trying it out on me.”