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She took great care to make her footsteps quick, light, and silent, her cloak billowing behind her. The nuns wouldn’t notice one more hooded figure lurking around L'Hôpital. But she knew Madame Fraser, even in a delirious state, to be more than observant. Much like herself. And due to their complex history, the woman would recognize her easily.

She had been the obvious choice for the errand, in any case. The Comte would have no way to pass through the doorway undetected, nor an explanation for his presence if he was caught. Of course, he was also ignorant of the true reasoning that she had suggested this plan. He desired revenge against Claire for reasons purely related to business. The situation was much deeper, more personal than that for her.

It almost gave her pause to see Claire collapsed on the bed and numb with pain. Almost. But she had suffered enough to ease the woman’s hardships, had she not?

Slipping the vial out of her robe, she placed it with nearby tools and other herbs ready for use. She carried the whole tray to the bedside, where Claire was surrounded by nearly the entire staff of the hospital, then opened the freshly concocted ointment and drew her finger across the slick surface.

“Thank you, sister,” one of the nuns muttered as she passed, the former not even glancing in her direction as she devoted her attention to working on the apparently beloved patient in front of her.

She smiled saccharinely in return. At the last moment, she stroked Claire’s cheek carefully under the cover of her billowing sleeve before turning in a whirl of fabric and sweeping out the door and down the stone corridor.

Claire’s dazed eyes had wandered over her face, unseeing. The resignation behind them betrayed what she knew to be true. Her child wouldn’t survive, and she didn’t expect to make it through herself.

She ran home along the back streets of Paris as night fell. It wouldn’t be long now.

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More than 24 hours later, she snuck back into the darkened halls of L'Hôpital des Anges. The corridors were silent barring a tremendous, ongoing wail echoing from the chamber she had visited not long ago. She knew the despair behind Claire’s cries. She had felt the same way herself, once. But she had moved on, just as the other woman would have to. She had quickly refocused on her greater aspirations after her life changed in Scotland. And nothing – nothing would stand in her way this time.

She crept into the darkened room and spotted a box so devastatingly small it could have but one purpose. She withdrew the hammer from under her cloak and pried the nails out of the lid, one by one. Sweeping her palm below the surface, she could already feel the warmth returning to the infant’s fragile flesh. The poor wee thing. Still and stone cold for hours as its mother wept over its body.

It was a simple concoction, of course. If Claire had been in her right mind and operating at full capacity, she herself would have recognized the nightshade extract swept across her clammy skin, incapacitating mother and babe long enough for the nuns to reach an inevitable conclusion.

As soon as the Comte had informed her of Fraser’s arrest and Claire’s compromised condition, she had leapt into action. If money and clans wouldn’t be enough to enliven the Jacobite uprising, she had the next phase of the plan in her hands. A child from the Fraser line.

“Faith” had been delicately carved into the wee box she had broken. She settled a sandbag in the center of it and forced the nails back into the wood. No one would be the wiser as to its contents as they carried the box out to the cemetery in the morning.

Melisande Robicheaux tucked the wean into her cape before it could rouse and make a sound to alert anyone. With the future of Scotland under her arm, she crept through the alleyways of Paris once again.

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There was little to be done about the yawn that skimmed the surface of my coffee mug as the broad page of the Globe fluttered to the playmat under the lazy direction of my thumb. I rubbed Bree’s back with my free hand, though she continued gumming her rubber key without attention to her old mummy’s lack of wakefulness.

Brianna seemed little affected by the wee hours her teething pains had forced her (and her parents) to greet that morning. A touch of whisky on those same gums had done the trick for the time being, and I knew it would be only a matter of time before she wound down for her nap, all so we could begin the cycle over again that evening.

The only question to mind was how I would busy myself during that short window of unoccupied time.  My bleary eyes had already muddled through all but the human interest pages of the previous weekend’s newspaper, and little on the radio held my attention anymore. Frank, who had bustled out that morning with circles below his eyes and an extra canteen of coffee cuddled to his chest, would be occupied with office hours until just before dinner time. 

I turned the page again, seeing little of interest printed in the Sports section. And, there. My thumb smoothed over the slight crinkle of the paper. It was hardly the first photograph to give me pause, but the blown-out image in front of me left plenty of room for imagination. Yes, perhaps that bonnet covered cinnamon curls complemented by dark blue cat eyes. The shot could have been captured in a rare motionless moment as the subject anxiously urged her mum and da to catch up with her, bogged down by precious cargo and the accompanying baby things as they were. Perhaps…

The sound of the teether hitting the hardwood several feet away shook me out of my reverie. Bree’s grunt called me back to my living baby, who knew only this cold flat, however dappled with sunlight it may be.

I huffed into a small smile, letting the tears burn into the corners of my eyes. I had learned they were a guarantee in this uncharted phase of my life. “Never fear, Lovey.” I extended my arm just far enough to reach the offending toy, then stretched into a standing posture to sanitize it. “Mummy will get it sorted.”

The open floor plan allowed Bree to remain in my sight until I turned to face the sink. A few suds later, I faced the great room once again to a sight that set my heart racing: Bree’s palm braced on the armchair my own weary back had been leaning against, and her dimpled knees wobbling as they tentatively held her upright. 

Keyring forgotten, I was on her in a moment, my hands bracketing her elbows as her bum hit the mat again with a gentle thump. “Bree!” I swung my daughter high in the air, eliciting a giggle that lifted my battered heart. We spun in just a semi-circle as I dropped into the chair behind me. “Aren’t you my big girl?” I cooed tremulously, her legs kicking out beneath her as if to replicate the feat in my lap. 

Pride turning me practically buoyant, I looked around the room to see who else might have witnessed the milestone.

I blinked, and it was so effortless to imagine a lithe tyke clutching her baby sister’s hands as first toddling strides were accomplished across stone floors, myself squatted nearby to capture a full canister of film so their father could experience it later, dirt-smudged fingernails gripping the edges of printed photos… but no, that wasn’t quite right…

Curly wisps against my chin brought me back to awareness, Brianna’s little fist clutching my neckline as she relaxed bodily against my shoulder. The day had finally caught up to her, while reality pursued me just as hotly. 

In a world where I had no choice but to face an underwhelming future, Bree and my little imaginings of lost things were all I had to hold onto to keep me afloat.

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People tended to keep their distance from Geillis and her daughter.

Mistress MacKenzie Duncan, no… Abernathy, now, didn’t mind. Much, anyway. She and her mother had done well enough on their own. They did not exactly get along, but they got by. Usually.

MacKenzie could never quite escape the feeling that their life, and perhaps especially she, herself, were not quite what Geillis had imagined. Her mother’s eye always held a yearning for something just out of her reach, another layer of the mystery that surrounded Geillis Abernathy.

Just the same, MacKenzie had never felt settled, welcome in her own life, even in childhood. The rooms of all the houses she had briefly inhabited had felt cold, empty. Countless schoolmarms, features indistinguishable now in her memory, had instructed their pupils to write about their homes, their families. While the other children wrote of gentle fingers twisting soft plaits and stories told by toasty fireplaces, MacKenzie’s pages had always come up blank. The concepts were little but imaginings, more elusive the older she grew. 

Truly, MacKenzie dreamed of being on her own. She had a portrait in her mind’s eye of a little family, who did more than exist around each other in the same household. There would be love. There would be children — more than just one. There would be no bone-deep ache of loneliness. The father’s face was blurred in her imagination, but the warmth she felt toward him… them was tangible.

A few times, MacKenzie thought she had attracted positive attention from some of the local lads at the stops in their nomadic lifestyle. They would bring her lightly rumpled posies, or offer to accompany her home.

One meeting with Geillis was usually enough to redirect their attentions.

“Och, he didna mean it that way, wee’un.” Her mother would always soothe. “It doesna matter, though, Pet. We will always have each other,” Mother would say, patting MacKenzie’s dark curls down. 

MacKenzie tried to ignore the inescapable whispers of the locals wherever they lived. Mother was a bit intense for their tastes. MacKenzie held no ill will toward them for that; she herself could not understand Geillis’s devotion to Scotland and finding its “rightful” heir. But then, she had been just a baby when her mother fled Scotland. It wasn’t her home to dream of and defend.

In truth, MacKenzie had never had a real home. She and Mother had moved villages, countries, so often that no place ever felt permanent. As for her own father, Mother’s lips were sealed. If MacKenzie didn’t know better, the cold murmurs that her mother was a witch, and she, the devil’s own spawn, might have seemed as good an explanation as any.

Few of the aging eligible suitors had ever seemed to mind Mother’s strangeness. MacKenzie had nearly lost track of how many stepfathers she’d had now, grandfatherly figures who thought themselves heroic, willing to protect the outcast widow and her awkward progeny. Perhaps one of them might have become familiar eventually, quality time spent making him like a father to MacKenzie, one day.

Except each ultimately succumbed to some malady or another. Nothing she could ever quite procure a remedy for in time, despite the healing methods she had studied and adapted as second nature for as long as she could remember. 

MacKenzie had often wondered if using her medicinal knowledge to benefit others would have led them be more accepting. But Mother wouldn’t let her. Geillis had prevented her from collecting the herbs she found along the roadside. She confiscated the well-worn notebooks in which MacKenzie recorded the medicinal uses that became clear through a little trial and error, but mostly her own instincts.

Mother insisted that such things would only draw more attention to them. She had to be inconspicuous, she said. It never seemed sincere, considering how much Geillis seemed to enjoy attention herself. Even the harshest whispers, she basked in. 

But discreet they must be, as Mother said, until they met a Fraser connection in their travels. For it was the Frasers that would set Scotland free as it was intended.

Right. Scotland. Again. MacKenzie wondered why Geillis never even spoke of returning to Scotland. Is that not where she would be most likely to find Frasers?