Carrying a dark green bottle and small glasses, Olive let herself back into the shed. Tight-lipped, she poured them each a drink. “Smuggler’s brandy,” she announced. “Papa said we would use it to toast me and my husband when I married someday. That never happened, and we need a wee dram now.”
They drank, Joe throwing his drink down his throat and breathing a sigh of relief. Olive swirled her little portion around in the glass, a slight smile on her face, so wistful. Maybe she was thinking of events in her life that hadn’t turned out the way she wanted. Douglas tooka small sip and another, thinking of various wardroom toasts through the years, from “Glorious war” to “Beauty ashore.”
“No more,” Olive said. “Let’s save the rest for a happier occasion.”
“Finish the story, Joe,” Douglas ordered. “You were on the docks.”
“Aye, and such a scene that was.” He ran both hands across his face, digging in his nails. “The soldiers just herded people aboard until the captains protested. Some were bound for Canada, and the rest for Timbuktu, for all we knew.” He keened then, a low moan that set the hairs at attention on Douglas’s neck. “A remember one mam, calling and calling for her little boy—he couldna been a day over five—who was left behind on the dock. She pleaded for someone to help her. No one did. The wee fellow jumped in the water, desperate to reach his mam. Sank like a stone, he did.”
Olive sobbed out loud and Douglas gathered her close. He resisted the nearly overpowering urge to gather Joe Tavish close too, the man who had blacked his eye and dented a few ribs. From the look of him, bleakness hovering over him like a foul odor, Joe Tavish was beyond any comfort an English surgeon too proud of his skills could provide.
“They sailed, that ship and two others,” Joe continued in a voice hushed now, almost as if he couldn’t believe the horror of what he had witnessed. “Someone on the ship—heaven only knows how he smuggled’m aboard—unlimbered his bagpipes and played ‘Flowers of the Forest.’ We wept, they wept, and no one helped us.” Joe keened again.
“What … I don’t understand,” Douglas whispered to Olive.
“?’Tis played at funerals alone,” she whispered back, her voice ragged. “Some call it ‘The Lament.’ ” She sang softly into his ear. “?‘The Flooers o’ the Forest, that foughtaye the foremost, the pride o’ oor land lie cauld in the clay.’ ” Her sigh was three parts sob. “We Scots are a tragic lot, Douglas. Remember when Flora said, ‘We needed a little help’?”
“Now’s the time, Olive.”
They sat in silence, listening to Joe Tavish lament the loss of everything, and all for the Countess of Sutherland’s sheep. When he finished, Douglas covered him with a blanket, tucking it around him.
“Sleep now, Joe,” he said. “We’ll sort out what we can in the morning.”
“You’ll make it all better?” Joe asked, his voice so bitter, and with good cause.
“Would that I could.” Douglas squatted beside the blanketed figure. “What I aim to do, and you will help me, is find some sweet revenge.”
“And how are we to do that?” Joe’s sarcasm was unmistakable.
“Ask me tomorrow night, for I intend to have a plan. And you will help me.”
Chapter 24
Dawn was coming, but a fullmoon still lit the sky. They stood in silence together outside the shed. Olive knew it was well past time to drag herself upstairs into her own bedchamber, but she knew she would only stare at the ceiling until she heard Maeve laying a kitchen fire below and another day would begin.
Maybe Douglas had the same idea. He looked at her, his face so serious, and crocked out his arm. She tucked her arm through his and walked with him to the bridge.
“I’ll never sleep tonight,” he said a minute later as they both leaned their arms on the railing and watched the River Dee below.
“I have a feeling that you have seen yourself coming and going on many a morning,” she said.
“Aye. I rather thought those days were done, but here I am.” He stared downriver toward the docks where the fishing boats were neatly tied. She looked where he looked, thinking of their ordinary days in Edgar, one following pretty much the same. She thought of Joe Tavish in GlenHolt, where the sameness of two centuries had ended in eviction, flames, and death.
“It could happen to any of us,” she said. “We think it will not, but what proof do any of us have against people such as the Sutherlands?”
No answer. Douglas stared at the boats. Slowly, he stood upright again, his eyes still on the distant view, as far as she could tell, except that he seemed suddenly alert.
“Let’s go for a walk, Olive Grant,” he said. He crooked out his arm again and she twined her arm through his. “The moon is full and the sun is coming up anyway, so let’s take the path along the river.”
They walked in silence behind the row of houses like his with their back walls to the River Dee and then walked onto the fishing boat dock. He kept walking past shabbier homes now. Somewhere a child cried, which made him stop and listen for a moment and then continue on.
They walked until they reached the outskirts of Edgar, and she suddenly knew what he had in mind.Is this even possible?she thought.Evidently I do not think big enough.
They stood at the abandoned shipyard and dry docks. He tucked her arm closer to him. “Do you remember when the shipyard was active?” he asked.
“I must have been about ten years old,” she replied, after long thought. “I was never allowed to come down here. Papa said it was dangerous, and besides, he didn’t want me hearing such foul language.”
“Like Hadrian’s Wall?” Douglas teased, and she laughed.
