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“Is it me?” she’d asked seriously. “Being a Catholic, I mean. I know—I know that makes it more complicated.” Her lips twitched. “Jem told me about Mrs. Ogilvy.”
He hadn’t felt at all like laughing, but couldn’t help a brief smile at the memory. He’d been out by the barn, shoveling well-rotted manure into a wheelbarrow to spread on the kailyard, Jem assisting with his own small spade.
“Sixteen tons and what do you get?” Roger had sung—if the sort of hoarse croaking he produced could be called that.
“Another day older and deeper in shit!” Jem bellowed, doing his best to pitch his voice down into Te
It was at this unfortunate moment that he’d turned round to find that they had visitors: Mrs. Ogilvy and Mrs. MacNeil, pillars of the Ladies’ Altar and Tea Society at the Free North Church in Inverness. He knew them—and he knew just what they were doing here, too.
“We’ve come to call upon your good wife, Mr. MacKenzie,” Mrs. MacNeil said, smiling with pursed lips. He wasn’t sure whether the expression was meant to indicate i
“Ah. She’ll be away to the town just now, I’m afraid.” He’d wiped his hand on his jeans, thinking to offer it, but looked at it, thought better of it, and nodded to them instead. “But please to come in. Will I have the girl make tea?”
They shook their heads in unison.
“We havena seen your wife in kirk as yet, Mr. MacKenzie.” Mrs. Ogilvy fixed him with a fishy eye.
Well, he’d been expecting that one. He could buy a little time by saying, ach, the baby’d been ailing—but no point; the nettle would have to be grasped sooner or later.
“No,” he said pleasantly, though his shoulders stiffened by reflex. “She’s a Catholic. She’ll be to the Mass at St. Mary’s of a Sunday.”
Mrs. Ogilvy’s square face sagged into a momentary oval of astonishment.
“Your wife’s a Papist?” she said, giving him a chance to correct the clearly insane thing he’d just said.
“She is, aye. Born one.” He shrugged lightly.
There had been relatively little conversation following this revelation. Just a glance at Jem, a sharp question about whether he went to Sunday school, an intake of breath at the answer, and a gimlet-eyed stare at Roger before they took their leave.
Do you want me to convert? Bree had demanded, in the course of the argument. And it had been a demand, not an offer.
He’d wanted suddenly and fiercely to ask her to do just that—only to see if she would, for love of him. But religious conscience would never let him do such a thing; still less, his conscience as her lover. Her husband.
Huntly Street turned suddenly into Bank Street, and the foot traffic of the shopping precinct disappeared. He passed the small memorial garden, put up to commemorate the service of nurses during World War II, and thought—as he always did—of Claire, though this time with less than the usual admiration he had for her.
And what would you say? he thought. He knew damned well what she’d say—or at least, whose side she’d be on, in this. She hadn’t hung about being a full-time mum, had she? She’d gone to medical school when Bree was seven. And Bree’s dad, Frank Randall, had taken up the slack, whether he wanted to or not. He slowed his step briefly, realizing. No wonder, then, if Bree was thinking …
He passed the Free North Church and half-smiled at it, thinking of Mrs. Ogilvy and Mrs. MacNeil. They’d be back, he knew, if he didn’t do something about it. He knew their brand of determined kindliness. Dear God, if they heard that Bree had gone to work and—to their way of thinking—abandoned him with two small children, they’d be ru
“Catholics don’t believe in divorce,” Bree had informed him once. “We do believe in murder. There’s always Confession, after all.”
On the far shore was the only Anglican church in Inverness, St. Andrew’s. One Catholic church, one Anglican church—and no fewer than six Presbyterian churches, all standing foursquare by the river, in the space of less than a quarter mile. Tell you all you needed to know, he thought, about the basic character of Inverness. And he had told Bree—though without, he admitted, mentioning his own crisis of faith.
She hadn’t asked. He’d give her that. He’d come within a hair of ordination in North Carolina—and in the traumatic aftermath of that interruption, with Mandy’s birth, the disintegration of the Ridge’s community, the decision to risk the passage through the stones … no one had mentioned it. Likewise, when they’d come back, the immediate demands of taking care of Mandy’s heart and then assembling some kind of life … the question of his ministry had been ignored.
He thought Bria
The upshot was that neither of them had talked about it when working out the details of their return.
They’d worked out the practicalities as best they could. He couldn’t go back to Oxford—not without a truly elaborate cover story.
“You just can’t drop in and out of academia,” he’d explained to Bree and to Joe Abernathy, the doctor who had been Claire’s longtime friend before her own departure to the past. “You can go on a sabbatical, true—or even an extended leave. But you have to have a stated purpose and something to show for your absence when you come back, in terms of published research.”
“You could write a killer book about the Regulation, though,” Joe Abernathy had observed. “Or the run-up to the Revolution in the South.”
“I could,” he admitted. “But not a respectable scholarly one.” He’d smiled wryly, feeling a slight itch in the joints of his fingers. He could write a book—one that no one else could write. But not as a historian.
“No sources,” he’d explained, with a nod at the shelves in Joe’s study, where they were holding the first of several councils of war. “If I wrote a book as a historian, I’d need to provide sources for all the information—and for most of the unique situations I could describe, I’m sure nothing was ever recorded. ‘Eyewitness testimony of author’ wouldn’t go over well with a university press, I assure you. I’d have to do it as a novel.” That idea actually held some small appeal—but wouldn’t impress the colleges of Oxford.
Scotland, though …
People didn’t appear in Inverness—or anywhere else in the Highlands—unremarked. But Roger wasn’t an “incomer.” He’d grown up in the manse in Inverness, and there were still a good many people who had known him as an adult. And with an American wife and children to explain his absence …
“See, folk there don’t really care what it is you were doing when you were away,” he explained. “They only care about what you do when you’re there.”
He’d reached the Islands of the Ness by now. A small, quiet park set on small islets that lay only a few feet off the river’s bank, it had packed-dirt paths, big trees, and little traffic at this time of day. He wandered the paths, trying to empty his mind, let it be filled only with the sound of the rushing water, the quietness of the overcast sky.