Jamie’s heel pressed down and he leaned back on the handle of the fork. The earth crumbled and cracked around the vine, and with a sudden, rending pop the potato vine lifted up and the earth revealed its bounty.

A collective “Ah!” went up from the spectators, at sight of the myriad brown globules clinging to the roots of the uprooted vine. Ian and I both fell to our knees in the dirt, scrabbling in the loosened soil for potatoes severed from the parent vine.

“It worked!” Ian kept saying as he pulled potato after potato out of the ground. “Look at that! See the size of it?”

“Yes, look at this one!” I exclaimed in delight, brandishing one the size of my two fists held together.

At length, we had the produce of our sample vine laid in a basket; perhaps ten good-sized potatoes, twenty-five or so fist-size specimens, and a number of small things the size of golf balls.

“What d’ye think?” Jamie scrutinized our collection quizzically. “Ought we to leave the rest, so the little ones will grow more? Or take them now, before the cold comes?”

Ian groped absently for his spectacles, then remembered that Sir Walter was over by the fence, and abandoned the effort. He shook his head.

“No, I think this is right,” he said. “The book says ye keep the bittie ones for the seed potatoes for next year. We’ll want a lot of those.” He gave me a grin of relieved delight, his hank of thick, straight brown hair dropping across his forehead. There was a smudge of dirt down the side of his face.

One of the cottars’ wives was bending over the basket, peering at its contents. She reached out a tentative finger and prodded one of the potatoes.

“Ye eat them, ye say?” Her brow creased skeptically. “I dinna see how ye’d ever grind them in a quern for bread or parritch.”

“Well, I dinna believe ye grind them, Mistress Murray,” Jamie explained courteously.

“Och, aye?” The woman squinted censoriously at the basket. “Well, what d’ye do wi’ them, then?”

“Well, you…” Jamie started, and then stopped. It occurred to me, as it no doubt had to him, that while he had eaten potatoes in France, he had never seen one prepared for eating. I hid a smile as he stared helplessly at the dirt-crusted potato in his hand. Ian also stared at it; apparently Sir Walter was mute on the subject of potato cooking.

“You roast them.” Fergus came to the rescue once more, bobbing up under Jamie’s arm. He smacked his lips at the sight of the potatoes. “Put them in the coals of the fire. You eat them with salt. Butter’s good, if you have it.”

“We have it,” said Jamie, with an air of relief. He thrust the potato at Mrs. Murray, as though anxious to be rid of it. “You roast them,” he informed her firmly.

“You can boil them, too,” I contributed. “Or mash them with milk. Or fry them. Or chop them up and put them in soup. A very versatile vegetable, the potato.”

“That’s what the book says,” Ian murmured, with satisfaction.

Jamie looked at me, the corner of his mouth curling in a smile.

“Ye never told me you could cook, Sassenach.”

“I wouldn’t call it cooking, exactly,” I said, “but I probably can boil a potato.”

“Good.” Jamie cast an eye at the group of tenants and their wives, who were passing the potatoes from hand to hand, looking them over rather dubiously. He clapped his hands loudly to attract attention.

“We’ll be having supper here by the field,” he told them. “Let’s be fetching a bit of wood for a fire, Tom and Willie, and Mrs. Willie, if ye’d be so kind as to bring your big kettle? Aye, that’s good, one of the men will help ye to bring it down. You, Kincaid-” He turned to one of the younger men, and waved off in the direction of the small cluster of cottages under the trees. “Go and tell everyone – it’s potatoes for supper!”

And so, with the assistance of Jenny, ten pails of milk from the dairy shed, three chickens caught from the coop, and four dozen large leeks from the kailyard, I presided over the preparation of cock-a-leekie soup and roasted potatoes for the laird and tenants of Lallybroch.

The sun was below the horizon by the time the food was ready, but the sky was still alight, with streaks of red and gold that lanced through the dark branches of the pine grove on the hill. There was a little hesitation when the tenants came face-to-face with the proposed addition to their diet, but the party-like atmosphere – helped along by a judicious keg of home-brewed whisky – overcame any misgivings, and soon the ground near the potato field was littered with the forms of impromptu diners, hunched over bowls held on their knees.

“What d’ye think, Dorcas?” I overheard one woman say to her neighbor. “It’s a wee bit queer-tasting, no?”

Dorcas, so addressed, nodded and swallowed before replying.

“Aye, it is. But the laird’s eaten six o’ the things so far, and they havena kilt him yet.”

The response from the men and children was a good deal more enthusiastic, likely owing to the generous quantities of butter supplied with the potatoes.

“Men would eat horse droppings, if ye served them wi’ butter,” Jenny said, in answer to an observation along these lines. “Men! A full belly, and a place to lie down when they’re drunk, and that’s all they ask o’ life.”

“A wonder ye put up wi’ Jamie and me,” Ian teased, hearing her, “seein’ ye’ve such a low opinion of men.”

Jenny waved her soup ladle dismissively at husband and brother, seated side by side on the ground near the kettle.

“Och, you two aren’t ‘men.’ ”

Ian’s feathery brows shot upward, and Jamie’s thicker red ones matched them.

“Oh, we’re not? Well, what are we, then?” Ian demanded.

Jenny turned toward him with a smile, white teeth flashing in the firelight. She patted Jamie on the head, and dropped a kiss on Ian’s forehead.

“You’re mine,” she said.

After supper, one of the men began to sing. Another brought out a wooden flute and accompanied him, the sound thin but piercing in the cold autumn night. The air was chilly, but there was no wind, and it was cozy enough, wrapped in shawls and blankets, huddled in small family clusters round the fire. The blaze had been built up after the cooking, and now made a substantial dent in the darkness.

It was warm, if a trifle active, in our own family huddle. Ian had gone to fetch another armload of wood, and baby Maggie clung to her mother, forcing her elder brother to seek refuge and body warmth elsewhere.

“I’m going to stick ye upside down in yonder kettle, an’ ye dinna leave off pokin’ me in the balls,” Jamie informed his nephew, who was squirming vigorously on his uncle’s lap. “What’s the matter, then – have ye got ants in your drawers?”

This query was greeted with a gale of giggles and a marked effort to burrow into his host’s midsection. Jamie groped in the dark, making deliberately clumsy grabs at his namesake’s arms and legs, then wrapped his arms around the boy and rolled suddenly over on top of him, forcing a startled whoop of delight from small Jamie.

Jamie pinned his nephew forcibly to the ground and held him there with one hand while he groped blindly on the ground in the dark. Seizing a handful of wet grass with a grunt of satisfaction, he raised himself enough to jam the grass down the neck of small Jamie’s shirt, changing the giggling to a high-pitched squeal, no less delighted.

“There, then,” Jamie said, rolling off the small form. “Go plague your auntie for a bit.”

Small Jamie obligingly scrambled over to me on hands and knees, still giggling, and nestled on my lap among the folds of my cloak. He sat as still as is possible for an almost four-year-old boy – which is not very still, all things considered – and let me remove the bulk of the grass from his shirt.

“You smell nice, Auntie,” he said, buffing my chin affectionately with his mop of black curls. “Like food.”