“No, no! Not at all,” Roger said, with only slight mendacity. “Glad to do it.”
Roger’s hand hovered uncertainly amid the largesse of the tea cart, then snaked down to grasp the crystal decanter of twelve-year-old Muir Breame whisky. After the skirmish with Fiona, he felt he owed it to himself.
“Will you have a bit of this?” he asked his guests politely. Catching the look of distaste on Brianna’s face, he quickly added, “Or maybe some tea?”
“Tea,” Brianna said with relief.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Claire told her daughter, inhaling the whisky fumes with rapture.
“Oh yes I do,” Brianna replied. “That’s why I’m missing it.” She shrugged and quirked an eyebrow at Roger.
“You have to be twenty-one before you can drink legally in Massachusetts,” Claire explained to Roger. “Bree has another eight months to go, so she really isn’t used to whisky.”
“You act as though not liking whisky was a crime,” Brianna protested, smiling at Roger above her teacup.
He raised his own brows in response. “My dear woman,” he said severely. “This is Scotland. Of course not liking whisky is a crime!”
“Oh, aye?” said Brianna sweetly, in a perfect imitation of his own slight Scots burr. “Well, we’ll hope it’s no a capital offense like murrderrr, shall we?”
Taken by surprise, he swallowed a laugh with his whisky and choked. Coughing and pounding himself on the chest, he glanced at Claire to share the joke. A forced smile hung on her lips, but her face had gone quite pale. Then she blinked, the smile came back more naturally, and the moment passed.
Roger was surprised at how easily conversation flowed among them—both about trivialities, and about Claire’s project. Brianna clearly had been interested in her father’s work, and knew a great deal more about the Jacobites than did her mother.
“It’s amazing they ever made it as far as Culloden,” she said. “Did you know the Highlanders won the battle of Prestonpans with barely two thousand men? Against an English army of eight thousand? Incredible!”
“Well, and the Battle of Falkirk was nearly that way as well,” Roger chimed in. “Outnumbered, outarmed, marching on foot…they should never have been able to do what they did…but they did!”
“Um-hm,” said Claire, taking a deep gulp of her whisky. “They did!”
“I was thinking,” Roger said to Brianna, with an assumed air of casualness. “Perhaps you’d like to come with me to some of the places—the battle sites and other places? They’re interesting, and I’m sure you’d be a tremendous help with the research.”
Brianna laughed and smoothed back her hair, which had a tendency to drop into her tea. “I don’t know about the help, but I’d love to come.”
“Terrific!” Surprised and elated with her agreement, he fumbled for the decanter and nearly dropped it. Claire fielded it neatly, and filled his glass with precision.
“The least I can do, after spilling it the last time,” she said, smiling in answer to his thanks.
Seeing her now, poised and relaxed, Roger was inclined to doubt his earlier suspicions. Maybe it had been an accident after all? That lovely cool face told him nothing.
A half-hour later, the tea table lay in shambles, the decanter stood empty, and the three of them sat in a shared stupor of content. Brianna shifted once or twice, glanced at Roger, and finally asked if she might use his “rest room.”
“Oh, the W.C.? Of course.” He heaved himself to his feet, ponderous with Dundee cake and almond sponge. If he didn’t get away from Fiona soon, he’d weigh three hundred pounds before he got back to Oxford.
“It’s one of the old-fashioned kind,” he explained, pointing down the hall in the direction of the bathroom. “With a tank on the ceiling and a pull-chain.”
“I saw some of those in the British Museum,” Brianna said, nodding. “Only they weren’t in with the exhibits, they were in the ladies’ room.” She hesitated, then asked, “You haven’t got the same sort of toilet paper they have in the British Museum, do you? Because if you do, I’ve got some Kleenex in my purse.”
Roger closed one eye and looked at her with the other. “Either that’s a very odd non sequitur,” he said, “or I’ve drunk a good deal more than I thought.” In fact, he and Claire had accounted very satisfactorily for the Muir Breame, though Brianna had confined herself to tea.
Claire laughed, overhearing the exchange, and got up to hand Brianna several folded facial tissues from her own bag. “It won’t be waxed paper stamped with ‘Property of H.M. Government,’ like the Museum’s, but it likely won’t be much better,” she told her daughter. “British toilet paper is commonly rather a stiff article.”