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I frowned at the tear in the back of Mandy’s doll, Esmerelda. She’d insisted that the toy be brought to me for doctoring, rather than allowing her mother to repair it, and I was trying to make a proper show of examining her.
The surgery window was open, and Jamie and Jemmy were out in the dooryard talking. It was a comfort to hear them together after our years apart. While the circumstances of the Mackenzie family’s return to the Ridge (and the 18th century) were terrifying in the extreme, the fact that they had returned to us was wonderful.
“And so you met the mouse named Michael, did you?” Jamie asked his grandson.
“Not Michael, Granda. Mickey,” Jemmy corrected in an exasperated voice.
“Aye,” Jamie said, skeptically. “But he’s a mouse the size of a person, is he no?”
“Oh aye, taller than Mam even. We went twice, once right after Mandy got out of hospital, when we were living in the States with Uncle Joe, and then again right before we went back to Scotland to come back.”
“So you did live in Scotland,” Jamie said, sounding far more interested in this than talk of seven-foot-tall mice.
I chuckled to myself as I dabbed water over Esmerelda’s “wound,” and began to stitch her back up, Mandy watching me carefully.
“Aye, at the farm. At Lallybroch.”
“And how is it then?”
“How’s what?” Jemmy asked. He was growing somewhat bored with the conversation, which was being conducted over Jamie’s rifle, which was being cleaned, and Jemmy was far more interested in munitions than 1980s Scotland.
“Scotland. Lallybroch. Are they much changed in 200 years?”
I could not see the two redheads, but I could practically hear Jemmy’s shrug. “Aye, a bit. They dinna speak the Gaelic so much anymore, though my da came to the school to talk about it and why it’s so important.”
“So you havena forgotten all of your Gaelic then,” Jamie said, sounding somewhat annoyed at this revelation. “Your father didna let you forget?”
“Oh no, Granda,” Jemmy said, and there was something odd in his voice that made me look up from my stitching.
Mandy was listening to her brother and grandfather as well and started to giggle at the look on my face.
“Tha mo bhàta-foluaimein loma-làn easgannan,” Jemmy said, his voice very grave and formal.
I blinked at Mandy, who was howling with laughter at this point. I could just about translate that to-
“Your what is full o’ eels?” Jamie asked in shock.
“My hovercraft,” Jemmy translated. “It’s like a wagon that doesna touch the ground as it moves. It’s a joke from a television show. Mam will have told you about television?”
“Aye,” Jamie said, not having been terribly impressed with Brianna’s or my attempts to explain the phenomenon to him.
“Well, it was about a book of useful phrases translated into Hungarian, and they were all funny, but Mandy liked that one the best and would say it all the time, so Da and I translated it into the Gaelic for her, you see? Are we going to go hunting then, Granda?”
“Sorry I asked,” Jamie muttered. “Aye,” he said, louder, “let’s go hunting lad.”
“Tha mo bhàta-foluaimein loma-làn easgannan,” Mandy sang, dancing around me as I finished tying off my repair to her doll.