"You're never thinking to spend a whole day running around after Peter with nothing but toast in your stomach!" She fixed me with a look that made me feel about as old as Robbie, and repeated her offer of porridge or eggs.
Meekly, I opted for a boiled egg.
"Hard or soft?"
"Middling, please." Taking a seat at the kitchen table, I glanced out the window again at the disappearing cluster of men, boy, and bouncing dog. Jeannie dropped bread in the toaster and smiled.
"They won't start the digging without you," she promised me. "Peter and Davy will be busy for a bit yet, organizing things, and with my dad down there it'll be a miracle if they've done so much as break the turf by the time you finish your breakfast. Sausages or bacon?"
"You needn't go to so much trouble ..."
"It's no trouble. This is what I do," she explained patiently, her eyes amused. "I cook the food, and you eat it. Now which will it be, sausages or bacon? Or will I give you both?"
One simply couldn't argue with a woman like that, I decided. And the plate of egg and sausages she finally set in front of me did draw a hungry rumble from my normally spartan stomach. "This is marvelous," I admitted, after the third sausage. "Thanks."
"Oh, any fool can boil an egg." From her tone of voice I knew she honestly believed that, so I chose not to disillusion her by telling her that boiled eggs were quite beyond my own skills. Instead, I speared a piece of fried tomato and watched while she wiped the newly used pans.
"You haven't always worked for Quinnell, then?" I asked her.
"What? Oh, no,'' she replied, with another flash of amusement. "No, I come with the house, like my dad. Afore Peter it was old Mrs. Finlay lived up here, but then she fell ill and had to go into hospital. Her son managed things after that,
but he only came down weekends, from Edinburgh. And then last September Peter came and waved a stack of pound notes under Mr. Finlay's nose, and that was that."
Money, I agreed, could be so wonderfully persuasive, and Peter Quinnell seemed to have money to burn. His family's fortune, no doubt. He had the sort of cultured look that only comes with centuries of privilege.
"Anyway," Jeannie went on, "he's a good man to work for, is Peter. It's a pity that Fabia's learned nothing from him."
I smiled, understanding. "I don't think she likes me much."
"Aye, well, she wouldn't. You're a woman," Jeannie said, matter-of-factly. "Still, I suppose I shouldn't be too unkind. She did lose her father, poor lass.”
“Recently?"
"Just last summer. It must have been fair hard on Peter as well, to lose his only son like that, but at least he's got Davy to lean on. They're almost like family, those two."
I pondered this, spooning the top off my second egg. "Was David a student of Quinnell's, or something?"
"I couldn't tell you," she admitted. "I don't mind where Davy went to university—he was years ahead of me at school. But he's kent Peter all his life. Davy's mum was Peter's secretary, like. Afore she married onto Davy's father."
"Oh. I see."
The relationships, I thought, were rather hard to disentangle. Jeannie, growing up in Eyemouth, had known David, who knew Peter, who had once employed David's mother, who now knew young Robbie . ..
"And Peter was best man at Davy's wedding," she continued. “I do mind that, because he had to come all the way over from—"
"David is married?" I couldn't help the interruption, though it relieved me to hear that my own voice was admirably calm.
And I was even more relieved when Jeannie replied with a shake of her head. "He was, aye, but not anymore. She left him, stupid lass."
Stupid lass, indeed, I thought.
Half an hour later, when I made my way down the gently sloping field to where the men had gathered in the southwest comer and was met by David Fortune's almost welcoming smile, I decided that stupid was an understatement.
"What kind of time d'ye call this, then?" he asked me.
"It's not my fault. Jeannie made me stop and eat a huge cooked breakfast." Something bounced at my knees and I bent to greet the collie. Kip. Scratching his shaggy mane, I took a quick look around. "Where's Fabia? I thought she was with you."
Quinnell glanced up. "What? Oh, she's gone to ring Adrian. He seems to be having a lie-in this morning, and I want to make certain I've positioned this properly."
By "this" he meant the long strip of ground at his feet, staked out with string to make a rectangle.
Every excavation took place within an imaginary grid, an unseen plan of lines and squares created by the survey, drawn over the field like a giant invisible graph. Everything we found at Rosehill, no matter how small, would be carefully mapped in relation to that graph. Quinnell had already plotted the location of what would be his trial trench against Adrian's survey markers, and set his own stakes at the four widely spaced comers, but he obviously didn't want to cut the turf until he'd checked his measurements.
Jeannie's father waited patiently to one side, leaning on his spade. In spite of the bent back he had the tough look of a man who'd done hard work his whole life and had no intention of letting up now. He looked at me with sharp gray eyes that glittered in his creased and weathered face, and raised his eyebrows. "This isnae the lass fae London?"