The past, Mary thought, was itself a great predator, chasing you always behind in a tireless pursuit so you ran from it, or lying ever in wait for you, ready to sink its sharp teeth in the spots where it knew you were weakest.
She tried to stay sociable out of regard for their host and his wife, who were both lovely people with kind and good hearts and seemed honestly glad to have been thus imposed upon, having four new mouths to feed and their household disrupted, because it had brought them new company.
Indeed they were so generous and so keen to please that Thomson had to do no more than mention his enjoyment of warmed wine for them to hang a pot upon the hearth and start to heat some. But when all the cups were handed round and their host ladled out one more and said, “I will just take this to your man, for it is cold outside and he is doing all my work,” then Mary without thinking set her own cup down and rose and said, “I’ll take it to him.”
It was cold outside, and clear, the waxing moon just past its quarter in the starry bowl of black night sky. She’d heard the ax fall when she stepped outside, but now she only heard the murmur of the dark wind through the trees that rose around the edges of this little patch of field and farmland. She could see the stump, and all the chips of wood around it, but she could not see MacPherson.
When the furtive sound came close behind her, Mary reacted as anyone might who had just been attacked by a wolf, and wheeled suddenly round.
“Do not strike me.” MacPherson gave the warning in a calm tone not unlike the one he’d used to tell her those same words the morning he’d first said them to her, when he had surprised her in the kitchen of the house in Paris. Now, as then, she let her raised hand fall, dismayed to find that in her sudden movement she had spilled a good part of the wine upon the ground.
Carrying on past her, he set the short section of log he was carrying on its cut end on the stump, and adjusting his grip on the ax handle swung the ax round in a sure, measured blow. He had taken off his coat and was in shirt and waistcoat, and his white sleeves had a ghostly appearance. He glanced at the cup in her hand and asked, “Was that for me?”
“It was.” Mary looked down. “I can fill it again.”
But he held out his hand for it as it was, acknowledging her action with the curt nod that was also, so she’d learned, how he expressed his thanks. Which nudged her to remember her own manners.
“I’ve not thanked you yet for what you did. For saving me and Frisque,” she told him. “Thank you.”
He drained the cup. Handed it back to her. “Do it again and I’m shooting the dog,” he advised her. “I telt ye that he would be trouble.”
“You did.” Crossing her arms to keep off the chill wind she confided, “I’m thinking of leaving him here.”
She knew that MacPherson, who did not speak French, would have not heard Frisque’s story on either occasion she told it, and so she repeated it now for him, adding, “He loves being here with the children. He thinks he’s come home.”
He said nothing. Another log splintered and split on the stump underneath the strong force of his ax.
“Anyway,” Mary said, “he’s an old dog, I’ve no right to drag him around for my own sake. He will be much safer and happier here. And these people are good. They will care for him.”
“And if he pines for ye?”
“No fear of that. I am easy to leave.” Mary looked skyward, at all the innumerable stars in the blackness. “And easier still to forget.” She wasn’t sure why she had said that. It sounded so small and so sad, and she hastened to hide what it might have revealed by diverting his focus. “Which way is your home from here?”
“What?”
She said, “Scotland. Where is it?”
He stopped work a moment and holding the ax at his side turned his own head up, searching the stars with the eyes of a man long accustomed to finding his way by them. “There.” With his free arm he pointed and Mary looked too, to the land that her father had left long ago, long before he’d left her for the same cause—to follow his king.
“Do you miss it?” she asked.
It was so long before he replied that she thought he was simply ignoring the question, as he often did, but at last in a level voice he said, “There’s nothing to miss.” Then he turned. “You are cold. Go inside.”
Mary knew he was cold as well, cold to the core, and whatever he’d seen in his youth was the cause of it, and in that moment she wanted to tell him how sorry she was for whatever he’d lost. That she knew what it was to be lonely. But nothing in his face or stance was inviting compassion, and Mary well knew there were some things so broken they could not be mended with words.
So she nodded and turned and went in.
She did not know when he came in, for she was in her bed already and asleep, but in the night she woke and turned and felt the blankets cold beside her feet where Frisque was wont to sleep, and realized that the dog was with the children once again, and as she lay there feeling empty at the knowledge she had lost the one companion she had thought would never leave her, and yet trying to be happy for his happiness, she heard the fall of footsteps in the kitchen and the now familiar sound MacPherson’s swords made when he took them from their belts and laid them to the side.
Next morning when she woke she found MacPherson sleeping upright in a chair, his head leaned back against the kitchen wall, his legs outstretched in front of him. A stump of candle sat within a small dish on the table, and on the kitchen mantel sat the clock, now ticking rhythmically. And on the hour, to the delight of all the children and their mother, it began to chime.