Roger turned and went up the stairs two at a time, smiling. Given other inclinations, Fiona’s memory might have made her a scholar. As it was, she was no mean research assistant. So long as a particular document or book could be described on the basis of its appearance, rather than its title or contents, Fiona was bound to know exactly where it was.
“Och, it’s nothing,” she had assured Roger airily, when he had tried to apologize earlier for the mess he was making of the house. “Ye’d think the Reverend was still alive, wi’ such a moil of papers strewn everywhere. It’s just like old times, no?”
Coming down more slowly, with the blue envelope in his hands, he wondered what his late adoptive father might have thought of this present quest.
“In it up to the eyebrows, I shouldn’t wonder,” he murmured to himself. He had a vivid memory of the Reverend, bald head gleaming under the old-fashioned bowl lamps that hung from the hall ceiling, as he pottered from his study to the kitchen, where old Mrs. Graham, Fiona’s grandmother, would have been manning the stove, supplying the old man’s bodily needs during bouts of late-night scholarship, just as Fiona was now doing for him.
It made one wonder, he thought, as he went into the study. In the old days, when a man’s son usually followed his father’s profession, was that only a matter of convenience—wanting to keep the business in the family—or was there some sort of family predisposition for some kinds of work? Were some people actually born to be smiths, or merchants, or cooks—born to an inclination and an aptitude, as well as to the opportunity?
Clearly it didn’t apply to everyone; there were always the people who left their homes, went a-wandering, tried things hitherto unknown in their family circles. If that weren’t so, probably there would be no inventors, no explorers; still, there seemed to be a certain affinity for some careers in some families, even in these restless modern times of widespread education and easy travel.
What he was really wondering about, he thought to himself, was Brianna. He watched Claire, her curly gold-shot head bent over the desk, and found himself wondering how much Brianna would be like her, and how much like the shadowy Scot—warrior, farmer, courtier, laird—who had been her father?
His thoughts were still running on such lines a quarter-hour later, when Claire closed the last folder on her stack and sat back, sighing.
“Penny for your thoughts?” she asked, reaching for her drink.
“Not worth that much,” Roger replied with a smile, coming out of his reverie. “I was only wondering how people come to be what they are. How did you come to be a doctor, for instance?”
“How did I come to be a doctor?” Claire inhaled the steam from her cup of cocoa, decided it was too hot to drink, and set it back on the desk, among the litter of books and journals and pencil-scribbled sheets of paper. She gave Roger a half-smile and rubbed her hands together, dispersing the warmth of the cup.
“How did you come to be a historian?”
“More or less honestly,” he answered, leaning back in the Reverend’s chair and waving at the accumulation of papers and trivia all around them. He patted a small gilt traveling clock that sat on the desk, an elegant bit of eighteenth-century workmanship, with miniature chimes that struck the hour, the quarter, and the half.
“I grew up in the midst of it all; I was ferreting round the Highlands in search of artifacts with my father from the time I could read. I suppose it just seemed natural to keep doing it. But you?”
She nodded and stretched, easing her shoulders from the long hours of stooping over the desk. Brianna, unable to stay awake, had given up and gone to bed an hour before, but Claire and Roger had gone on with their search through the administrative records of British prisons.
“Well, it was something like that for me,” she said. “It wasn’t so much that I suddenly decided I must become a doctor—it was just that I suddenly realized one day that I’d
She spread her hands out on the desk and flexed her fingers, long and supple, the nails buffed into neat, shiny ovals.
“There used to be an old song from the First World War,” she said reflectively. “I used to hear it sometimes when some of Uncle Lamb’s old army friends would come round and stay up late and get drunk. It went, ‘How You Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree?’” She sang the first line, then broke off with a wry smile.
