An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (читать книги TXT) 📗

William

PSALMS, 30

October 6, 1980

Lallybroch

BRIANNA’S ARRANGEMENT with the Hydro Electric Board provided for her working three days a week doing site inspections, overseeing maintenance and repair operations as required, but allowed her to stay at home doing reports, forms, and other paperwork the other two days. She was trying to decipher Rob Cameron’s notes regarding the power feed from the second turbine at Loch Errochty, which appeared to have been written with grease pencil on the remains of the bag that had held his lunch, when she became aware of sounds in the laird’s study across the hall.

She’d been vaguely conscious of a low humming for some time, but insofar as she’d noticed the sound had put it down to a fly trapped by the window. The hum had now acquired words, though, and a fly would not have been singing “The King of Love my Shepherd is,” to the tune of “St. Columba.”

She froze, realizing that she’d recognized the tune. The voice was rough as coarse-grit sandpaper, and it cracked now and then … but it went up and it went down, and it was, it really was, a song.

The song stopped abruptly in a fit of coughing, but after some heavy-duty throat-clearing and cautious humming, the voice started up again, this time using an old Scottish tune she thought was called “Crimond.”“The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want.

He makes me down to lie.

In pastures green; He leadeth me

The quiet waters by.”

“The quiet waters by” was repeated once or twice in different keys, and then, with increased vigor, the hymn went on:“My soul He doth restore again:

And me to walk doth make

Within the paths of righteousness,

Even for His Name’s own sake.”

She sat at her desk, shaking, tears running down her cheeks and a handkerchief pressed to her mouth so he wouldn’t hear. “Thank you,” she whispered into its folds. “Oh, thank you!”

The singing stopped, but the humming resumed, deep and contented. She got herself back under control and wiped the tears hastily away; it was nearly noon—he’d be coming in any time to ask if she was ready for lunch.

Roger had had considerable doubt about the assistant choirmaster’s position—doubt he’d tried not to let her see, and doubt she’d shared until he came home to tell her he’d been given the Children’s Choir as his main responsibility. Her own doubt had flown then; children were at once totally uninhibited about voicing the sorts of remarks regarding social oddity that their elders never would, and entirely accepting of such oddity, once they got used to it.

“How long did it take them to ask about your scar?” she’d asked, when he’d come home smiling from his first solo practice with the kids.

“I didn’t time it, but maybe thirty seconds.” He rubbed two fingers lightly over the ragged mark across his throat, but didn’t stop smiling. “Please, Mr. MacKenzie, what’s happened to your neck? Was ye hangit?”

“And what did you tell them?”

“Told them aye, I was hangit in America, but I lived, praise God. And a couple of them had elder siblings who’d seen High Plains Drifter and told them about it, so that raised my stock a good bit. I think they expect me to wear my six-guns to the next practice, though, now the secret’s out.” He gave her a Clint Eastwood one-eyed squint, which had made her burst out laughing.

She laughed now, remembering it, and just in time, for Roger stuck his head in, saying, “How many different versions of the Twenty-third Psalm would ye say there are, set to music?”

“Twenty-three?” she guessed, rising.

“Only six in the Presbyterian hymnal,” he admitted, “but there are metrical settings for it—in English, I mean—that go back to 1546. There’s one in the Bay Psalm Book and another in the old Scottish Psalter, and any number of others here and there. I’ve seen the Hebrew version, too, but I think I’d best not try that one on the St. Stephen’s congregation. Do the Catholics have a musical setting?”

“Catholics have a musical setting for everything,” she told him, lifting her nose to sniff for indications of lunch from the kitchen. “But psalms we usually sing to a chant setting. I know four different Gregorian chant forms,” she informed him loftily, “but there are lots more.”

“Yeah? Chant it for me,” he demanded, and stopped dead in the corridor, while she hastily tried to recall the words to the Twenty-third Psalm. The simplest chant form came back automatically—she’d sung it so often in childhood that it was part of her bones.

“That’s really something,” he said, appreciative, when she’d finished. “Go through it a time or two with me later? I’d like to do it for the kids, just for them to hear. I think they could do Gregorian chant really well.”

The kitchen door burst open and Mandy scampered out, clutching Mr. Polly, a stuffed creature who had started out life as a bird of some kind, but now resembled a grubby terry-cloth bag with wings.

“Soup, Mama!” she shouted. “Come eat soup!”

And soup they ate, Campbell’s Chicken Noodle made from the can, and cheese sandwiches and pickles to fill the cracks. Annie MacDonald was not a fancy cook, but everything she made was edible, and that was saying a good deal, Brianna thought, with memories of other meals eaten around dying fires on soggy mountaintops or scraped as burnt offerings out of an ashy hearth. She cast a glance of deep affection at the gas-fired Aga cooker that kept the kitchen the coziest room in the house.

“Sing me, Daddy!” Mandy, teeth coated in cheese and mustard round her mouth, gave Roger an entreating grin.

Roger coughed on a crumb and cleared his throat.

“Oh, aye? Sing what?”

“ ‘Free Bly Mice’!”

“All right. Ye’ll need to sing with me, though—keep me from getting off.” He smiled at Mandy and beat time softly on the table with the handle of his spoon.

“Three blind mice…” he sang, and pointed the handle at Mandy, who drew a heroic breath and echoed, “Free, Bly, MICE!” at the top of her lungs—but with perfect rhythm. Roger raised his eyebrows at Bree and continued the song, in the same counterpoint fashion. After five or six rousing repetitions, Mandy tired of it, and, with a brief “M’scuse me,” rose from the table and took off like a lowflying bumblebee, caroming off the doorjamb on her way out.

“Well, she’s got a definite sense of rhythm,” Roger said, wincing as a loud thud echoed back from the corridor, “if not of coordination. Be a little while before we know if she’s got any pitch, though. Your da had a great sense of rhythm, but he couldn’t hit the same note twice.”

“That reminded me a bit of what you used to do on the Ridge,” she said, on impulse. “Singing a line of a psalm and having the people answer it back.”

His face changed a little at mention of that time. He’d come newly to his vocation then, and the certainty of it had transformed him. She’d never seen him so happy before—or since, and her heart turned over at the flash of longing she saw in his eyes.

He smiled, though, and, reaching out a napkin-covered finger, wiped a smear of mustard from beside her own mouth.

“Old-fashioned,” he said. “Though they still do it that way—the line-singing in kirk—on the Isles, and maybe in the remoter bits of the Gaeltacht. The American Presbyterians won’t have it, though.”

“They won’t?”

“It is proper to sing without parceling out the psalm line by line,” he quoted. “The practice of reading the psalm, line by line, was introduced in times of ignorance, when many in the congregation could not read; therefore, it is recommended that it be laid aside, so far as convenient. That’s from the Constitution of the American Presbyterian Church.”

Oh, so you did think about being ordained while we were in Boston, she thought but didn’t say aloud.

“Times of ignorance,” she repeated, instead. “I’d like to know what Hiram Crombie would have had to say to that!”